Notes

The Sixties was a pivotal period in the biography of Sydney Kumalo, marking his passage from promising Johannesburg sculptor to nationally recognised artist with an international career. Influential promoters aided his career, notably Cecil Skotnes, who in 1960 favourably commented on his protégé’s work in a review published in Fontein, a short-lived art journal co-edited by poet Charles Eglington. Around this time Kumalo received a commission to produce a large outdoor sculpture for display in Milner Park, Johannesburg. While still tethered to a pious Christian theme, Kumalo’s St Francis (1961), a smooth-surfaced bronze portraying the founder of the Franciscan order, nonetheless exemplified his idiosyncratic style of figurative sculpture, which broadly synthesised the formal experiments of European modernists with the distorting and reductionist idioms of West and Central African sculpture. In 1962 Kumalo held his debut solo exhibition with Johannesburg dealer Egon Guenther, a noted local promoter of German Expressionism and collector of African traditional art. Guenther further aided Kumalo’s early public reception by, from 1963, showing him under the Amadlozi banner with fellow artists Giuseppe Cattaneo, Cecilly Sash, Skotnes and Villa (and later Ezrom Legae). Emboldened by the increasingly positive reception of his work, Kumalo resigned his teaching position at Polly Street in 1964 to pursue a full-time art career. Kumalo’s mature style, announced in 1964 with the work Large Seated Woman, is noted for its expressive figuration and preference for stippled and/or lacerated surface finishes.¹ This particular work is part of a series depicting an elderly seated male figure. The wizened black elder is an enduring trope in South African art, but Kumalo’s work is more than the sum of its parts or “primitivising influences”.² A precursor work, Madala I (1966), was awarded a bronze medal at the Transvaal Academy in 1967, the same year this particular iteration was shown on the Sa~o Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

¹ Watter, Lola (1978) ‘Sydney Kumalo’, Our Art III, Pretoria: Lantern. Page 70.
² Powell, Ivor (1995) ‘Us Blacks: Self-construction and the Politics of Modernism’, in Persons and Pictures, Johannesburg: Newtown Galleries. Page 15.

Exhibited

The Egon Geunther Gallery, Johannesburg

São Paulo Biennale, 1967

Literature

Berman, Esmé. (1983) Art & Artist's of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema. Another example from this edition illustrated on page 403.