Notes

Pioneering black South African artist, Gerard Bhengu, was born in 1910 at the Centocow Mission near Creighton in KwaZulu-Natal. Largely self-taught, Bhengu began an artistic career of almost sixty years under the patronage of Dr Max Kohler, a medical doctor and keen ethnologist stationed at the Centocow Mission. Kohler mentored Bhengu, providing him with quality art materials and images by European old masters to copy. Once Bhengu was competent in handling the watercolour medium, Kohler encouraged him to paint his own surroundings. Painting largely from memory, and realistically representational in style, Bhengu documented people, the landscape, and cultural, ethnographic and narrative scenes. Bhengu was subsequently supported by a number of different patrons, enabling him to survive as a full-time artist and to record the people and events of his time. The present lot, a finely observed South African landscape, painted in a European-influenced style, shows Bhengu’s mastery of the watercolour medium and positions him in the South African art historical archive as one of the country’s finest modernist painters of his era. In 1995 a retrospective exhibition of Gerard Bhengu’s work, followed by a major retrospective exhibition Gerard Bhengu: Tradition and Modernity in 2022, were exhibited at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg, and in 2013 The Gerard Bhengu Museum was officially opened at Centocow Mission.