Notes

This panel was completed at the same time as a smaller painting that the Cape branch of the South African Association of Arts selected to represent South Africa at the Sao Paulo Bienalle, Brazil, 1959.

Eugene Labuschagne studied art under Walter Battiss at Pretoria Boy’s High School and briefly under Lippy Lipshitz at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town before departing for Paris in 1947 to study the works of Modern masters he admired – Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and, in particular, Juan Gris.

In A Still Life of Flowers in a White Jug (Lot 100) Labuschagne downplays the more naturalistic approach to the subject with simplified forms, strong outlines and subtle tones. By comparison, Synthesis borrows the Cubist abstractions of Gris to find a new means of expression for local colours and dramatic iconography such as thorns.

In an interview with Walter Battiss for an article in Lantern in 1952, he spoke of his intention to continue Gris’s notion of painting as architecture on a flat surface in order to achieve the highest aesthetic freedom and symbolic richness beyond the limitations imposed by the object and the surface.i

i Walter Battiss, Lantern, Volume 2 Number 2, October 1952, pages 177 and 210.