Notes

This intaglio Apple II (1969) was shown alongside two other companion pieces at the Alexis Preller Retrospective Exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in 1972. This disarmingly simple image of an apple, floating against dramatically silhouetted leaves on an azure blue-green background has a complex iconographic genesis within Preller’s oeuvre.

Preller’s early work is known for its strongly African themes and for his interest in still life paintings in which objects of special significance to him appear and items of fruit take on singular importance. In his famous still life, The Feast (1946), the Swazi platter is filled with Gauginesque mangoes, while a single iconic mango appears in a small early work, Red Mango, painted in the Seychelles in 1948. In this work the low horizon line of the ocean and the foreground of the beach amplify the simple monumental presence of the single mango into something of mysterious significance.

In another work, Mangoes on a Beach (1948), Preller proliferates the reading of the mere presence of fruit with his inclusion of strong Hieronymus Bosch allusions, where boat-like mangoes sail out towards the horizon, embellished with quoted details of masts and long flapping pennants.

Preller’s great capacity to create works of evocative power, mysterious content and a proliferation of meaning is to be seen in his complex development of a personal iconography over a lifetime.

By the late 1960s, there is a drift away from African themes in Preller’s work towards a broader classical Mediterranean iconography. Archaic Greek kouros figures provide the source for his powerfully mysterious painted and intaglio images of mythical male torsos: The Creation of Adam (1968), Adam (1969) and The Unfound Kouros (1969).

A shift in the type of fruit that Preller chooses to paint is also significant, the mangoes of the east coast of Africa give way, in the case of the present lot, to Eurasian apples, seemingly a banal image, but here symbolically loaded. The apple is linked to the biblical Eden, the primordial state disrupted by moral choice, temptation, the loss of innocence and original sin. Adam as the first man exercises Preller’s creative mind and leads to a series of works in which the symbolic presence of the apple is apposite to the presence of Adam. The apple appears in a number of Preller’s earlier works, but less starkly than in the intaglios prepared for the much anticipated and innovative 1969 exhibition at the Henry Lidchi Gallery in Johannesburg.

‘Nothing that Preller had revealed about his experimental medium had prepared viewers for a completely new art-form. Three versions of a favourite subject titled Apple I, Apple II and Original Sin exemplified the intaglio in its simplest state.

In each of these, a concave form, the negative cast of half of a single apple, receded from a flat rectangular surface – the equivalent of the conventional picture format. Preller had then painted on both the flat and the concave surfaces, treating the apple as he would normally depict any three-dimensional object. The effect was deceptive. At first sight, the work appeared to be a conventional painting, with a prominent image of an apple. The intaglio form – the apple – gave no suggestion of concavity; but as the light changed, or the viewer moved, the perceived aspect of the image seemed to vary. The visual effect was dramatically apparent in the case of a more complex image.’¹

Karel Nel

¹ Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009). Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, page 282.