Gerard Sekoto

N. Chabani Manganyi

Description

Gerard Sekoto is without doubt one of South Africa’s major painters of the twentieth century. Considered increasingly as one of the earliest South African modernists and social realists, he completed his most memorable work during the early and middle years of the 1940s. When he left for Paris in 1947, he was at the height of his creative powers. He spent forty-five years as an exile in France, and during these often difficult times his talent, dedication, belief in the equality of all people and, most of all, his identity as an African sustained him. Chabani Manganyi’s biography is informed by the discovery, after Sekoto’s death, of a ‘suitcase of treasures’, which contained previously unknown musical compositions, letters and a large quantity of notes, writings and private documents. Photographs and full colour plates of previously unpublished and significant paintings are included.

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Wonder and Joy at Wonderhoek

Sophiatown: Buttons, Helmets and Guns

Journey into the Unknown

Saint-Germain-des-Prés

A Death of One’s Own

Room 105

Old Man Sekoto

End of an Odyssey

Postscripts: Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture

Sources

Index

Sujets

• Photographers
• Monographs
• Artists
• Architects
• George Pemba
• Monograph
• List of photographers
• Artist
• Architect
• Art

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776145157
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 21 Mo

Extrait

‘I am an African’
‘I am an African’
A Biography by N Chabani Manganyi
Foreword by Es’kia Mphahlele
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
South Africa
978-1-86814-400-6 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-517-1 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-514-0 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-515-7 (EPUB)
Text © N Chabani Manganyi, 2004
Artwork © The Gerard Sekoto Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
The publishers wish to acknowledge the Gerard Sekoto Foundation for permission to reproduce the artwork, and Iziko South African National Gallery and the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries for making the artwork available for reproduction.
Cover art: The Cigarette Smoker, Undated. Oil on canvas, 65x80.5cm. Presented by the Department of Arts and Culture, Iziko South African National Gallery Collection.
Cover design and layout by Crazy Cat Designs, Johannesburg
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Wonder and Joy at Wonderhoek
Sophiatown: Buttons, Helmets and Guns
Journey into the Unknown
Saint- Germain-des-Prés
A Death of One’s Own
Room 105
Old Man Sekoto
End of an Odyssey
Postscript: Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture
Sources
Index
List of coloured plates from Private Collections and Iziko
South African National Gallery Collection
Yellow Houses, A Street in Sophiatown Undated
The Artist’s Mother and Stepfather, Undated
3rd Class Carriage, 1940
District Six Dancer, Undated
The Wine Drinker, Undated
Couple Dancing, 1963
Woman’s Head, 1963
Country: Township: City, 1964
Three Senegalese Women, 1968
Song of the Pick, 1978
Homage to Steve Biko, 1978
Building across the Seine, 1978
The Bull, 1979
The Professor, Undated
Nu de Jeune Fille Africaine, 1979
The Red Turban, 1986
The Cigarette Smoker, Undated
List of drawings from The Sowetan Collection of Sekoto drawings housed at the
University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries
Dozing on the Road, 1941
Lippy Lipschitz’s Sister, 1945
Cigarette, 1949
Relaxed/Untitled, 1949
Standing by the Wall, 1949
Three Figures Resting, 1949
The Band, 1955
Song of the Pick, 1960
Prisoner before the Horse, c1960-65
A Group by the Market Side, 1966
Rue des Grands Augustins, 1969
Marthe, 1975
The Daily Struggle, 1976
Children on Bicycles, 1987
Cigarette by the Glass, 1987
Dance with an Umbrella, 1987
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An undertaking of this kind is not only time consuming. Much depends on the goodwill of people and institutions at different places and different times. An earlier version of this book was published in 1996 under the title A Black Man Called Sekoto. A full acknowledgement of people and institutions that contributed to the successful completion of the book was given at that time. The present book is much more than an expanded version of the earlier one. Large sections of the text have been rewritten. There has been greater reliance on Sekoto’s private documents, currently housed in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. I want to thank Barbara Lindop of the Gerard Sekoto Foundation for having drawn my attention to Sekoto’s suitcase, the repository of a substantial collection of the painter’s private papers. Marie Farrel-Descours contributed significantly to the success of the research visit which I undertook to Paris in 2003. Not only was she willing to be interviewed, but she was kind enough to arrange interviews at the Maison Nationale des Artistes with Raymond Laboute and Anne Gasper. Subsequent to my research visit to Paris and Nogent-sur-Marne, correspondence with Marie Farrel-Descours provided illuminating insights into Sekoto the Parisian, the painter amongst painters during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The research visit was made possible by a grant from the National Research Foundation. It was this kind of institutional support, coupled with the generous research time made available to me by my university, which made the completion of this book possible. Since the foundations of the present book were laid during the 1980s and early 1990s, it is still appropriate to convey my sincere appreciation to a number of individuals. In this regard, I would like to single out individuals who participated at different times in formal interviews in London, Paris, South Africa and New York, namely: Lorna de Smidt, Abdou Berrada, Bokwe Mafuna, Es’kia Mphahlele, Phyllis Lewsen, Mary Dikeledi Sekoto, John Guenther and the late Nimrod Ndebele and Paul Koston. On a more personal level, my greatest thanks are reserved for my wife, Peggy Sekele-Manganyi, who did more than provide me with needed support and encouragement, and the lady in charge of my office at the university, Johanna Loubser. Veronica Klipp and her staff at Wits University Press went beyond the call of duty to ensure that this book was produced in accordance with the highest editorial and production standards.
FOREWORD
Chabani Manganyi began his series of interviews with Gerard Sekoto in Paris in 1984, through to 1992, a short while before the artist died. The rapport between them came to transcend the banal, prosaic, journalistic relationship that one often sees in serialised investigative reporting.
This is not what one writer once termed ‘a mahogany-desk biography’ – a deadpan, stilted narrative about a person that lacks blood and warmth. Manganyi gives us a vivid portrait of Sekoto on a large canvas as it were, and in a scholarly yet elegant style that he sustains to the end. He engages our emotions and intellect as we follow his story of the artist’s fascinating life. We observe Gerard the country boy toying with drawings, improvising materials along the way, working with the barest minimum that his simple rural environment could offer. He grows up and takes the conventional paths from the few that were available to black male children and adults: teacher or church minister or, with luck, a clerk of the lowest level in a government office. Sekoto never eases up from his efforts at creating with pencil and crayon and other colours; he improvised even while employed as a teacher. As he moves from country to city lights – Sophiatown, to District Six in Cape Town, to Eastwood in Pretoria, we realise how heavily such an artist must rely on his senses: seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing his environment – and, of course, using his intuition. But this is what graphic and plastic artists have always relied on, from time immemorial. Accordingly, as Manganyi documents the artist’s movements and work, we see a mirror of changing lifestyles from community to community. The clean idyllic rural landscape suddenly yields to urban shacks, road diggers and other less robust figures, and their movements. Very few works by Sekoto create a display of the sky and the elements, almost as if human life and landscape exercised their magnetic power on him as he, in turn, sensed the organic attachment between them.
As Sekoto moved from one social milieu to another, devouring chunks of life with an artist’s appetite, he also built up a core of friends and associates. Among these were his old mate, Ernest Mancoba the sculptor, painters Koenakeefe Mohl and Pemba. Sekoto eagerly welcomed the patronage of Brother Roger of St Peter’s Priory in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, who appreciated his work and introduced him to artists, gallery owners and white liberals in Johannesburg and later in Cape Town.
Then came the journey into the unknown: Paris and neighbouring districts – from 1947 until his death on March 20, 1993. The Senegalese excursion turns out to have been a fascinating interlude, for Sekoto found great delight in displaying the tall, slender West African figures in elegant attire and long shirts. In the grey and near-blue colours is a subtle suggestion of the dry Sahara winds sweeping across and over the dunes …
In this biography Manganyi adds a great deal of new information from various sources, material that gives the reader further insights into the life of the artist. And we are the richer for it. It is evident that Sekoto was a tidy, methodical artist, notwithstanding the closed-in apartments he occupied, especially at Rue des Grands Augustins on the Parisian Left Bank, a traditional symbol of the struggling artist’s life.
In 1988, Barbara Lindop, a South African friend of Sekoto’s and the faithful, conscientious custodian of his works at home and a publicist in the art world at large, published a book of his works. It was a landmark of no mean importance. Thanks to Lindop and Chabani Manganyi’s biographies, we have the benefit of meeting Sekoto as a survivor of the South African nightmare of institutionalised racism, a living personality, rather than a shadowy figure of the past. An artist who happened to become an exile rather than an exile who happened to be an artist.
As we read Manganyi’s text, we picture Sekoto selecting his facts and materials, giving them, as Irwin Edman ( Arts and the Man : 1967) says, ‘their particular order by impulse, reflectively disciplined’. So does the philosopher, we are reminded.
Manganyi takes us deeper into Gerard Sekoto’s ‘internal geography’, so to speak. The artist’s memories of his rural childhood were still with him in 1966, when he lived in Paris. The Christian beliefs he was born into and socialised to adopt as a child had, in time, become but a memory. Yet Manganyi discovered that the artist ‘was almost fanatical about the spiritual sources of art and its power to heal and effect reconciliation’. These beliefs still exercised an impact on his practice and became ‘part of the mainsprings of his imagination and his everyday life’.
By the time of his death in 1993, Sekoto had been living outside Paris for some time, in a home for elderly artists, the Maison Nation