HISTORY

Art of 20th century

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By the 1930s, two women artists, Maggie Laubscher and Irma Stern, brought the techniques and sensibilities of post-impressionism and expressionism to South African art. Their bold color and composition, and highly personal point of view, rather scandalized those with old-fashioned concepts of acceptable art. The years (1948-1994) witnessed a great diversity in South African art ranging from landscape painting to abstract art.

An Extensive View of Farmlands by JH Pierneef (1886-1957)

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Artists found different ways of interacting with the visual stimuli of Africa. Alexis Preller created fantastically detailed canvases influenced by the European surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s. Beginning in the late 1940s, Preller painted African scenes and themes such as The Kraal and Hieratic Women, but these were not realistic portraits of African life.

This detail of a mural by Walter Battiss

Black artists of Africa

Song of the Pick (1947) by Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993)

By contrast, black artists concentrated on depicting their realities and environments in a direct, though forcefully expressionist, manner.

From the 1930s onward, Sekoto portrayed urban African life in places. George Pemba stayed in the township of Motherwell near Port Elizabeth, living into his 90s His often styled work focused on the simple lives of poor black people, humbly and sometimes humorously evincing their fundamental humanity, though he also treated themes such as the story of the Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse of the 19th century. Black artists began to give voice to a political sensibility that left behind the realist depiction of township life.

Art in 1970s and 1980s
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The Conservationists Ball (1985) by William Kentridge
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As the apartheid state any artists faced the harsh realities of South African life in the early 1980s, Paul Stopforth made a series of works dealing with police torture in paintings, lithographs and sculpture, Norman Catherine developed the playful sensibilities into a disturbing private menagerie of threatening and threatened theriomorphs and larger-than-life human figures. William Kentridge used expressionist drawings and highly developed personal metaphors, symbols and characters to expose the hypocrisies and ironies of white South African life. In the 1980s, art was increasingly recognized as a genre of expression directed at the white elite's oppressive exercise of power.