Notes

The 1948 date of this unusual still life composition, Homage to Hieronymus Bosch, is significant. It followed a period of acute anguish in Alexis Preller’s own life and was completed after his return from a recuperative trip to Paris where he had acquired a much-prized book on the works of Hieronymus Bosch. It was a feature of Preller’s temperament that personal traumas did not surface immediately in his work: only after a period of time and degree of metaphysical transformation would the emotional experience find expression in his painting. In this case it took the form of a dialogue between details from Bosch’s elegantly explicit catalogue of mental and spiritual torments in Triptych of the Temptations of St Anthony (circa 1505) and Preller’s predilection for creating symbolic still lives.

This work was painted in the same year as Preller’s famous and unsettling Still Life with Eggs (1948), which also directly quotes Bosch’s work with figures painfully strung on a harp and others scrambling to stay upon a lyre, all set in a phantasmagorical context.  In the work on offer, this same fantastic quality and the strange conjunction between still life and allegorical figure painting create a heightened dreamlike strangeness that connects Preller’s work obliquely to both the Italian metaphysical painters and to the Surrealist tradition.

Homage to Hieronymus Bosch is a precursor to Preller’s 1949 work, Symbols on a Beach, painted on Preller’s return from the Seychelles. Central to both paintings is a complex image of a dead tree with a branch penetrating a shallow bowl-like structure that cups a flying fish and a European or Florentine head. This disembodied, brooding, turbaned head gazes directly at the viewer from beneath the stark branches of the tree. A naked falling figure is impaled on a branch below an owl which is quietly perched at the apex of the tree.

“When Alexis was not studying the riches of the Louvre, he often prowled the bookshops of Montmartre. One day, he came upon a rare treasure, a beautiful and very costly illustrated book on Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450-1516). The Dutch master of fantasy and symbolism was a fascinating figure and an eminently compatible addition to his artistic production. Alexis was enthralled and Susan* bought the volume for him as a gift.”¹

“Books were extremely important in Alexis Preller’s life and appeared often in his still lifes. He read ferociously, and living so far away from the world’s major art centres and great collections, he was heavily dependent on his art books for their visual content and inspiration. His impressive collection of volumes with colour illustrations was highly valued in a time when art reproductions were rare.”² The stage-like setting of Homage to Hieronymus Bosch is significantly created by two books, one lying horizontally and the other opened on an illustrated page creating a backdrop for a complex tableau of figures involved in fantastical rituals, figures flying on a fish, a hand appearing from behind a draped brilliant red cloth that must obscure a figure centre stage, while another figure, a hermit-saint referenced from Bosch’s painting St Jerome at Prayer (c 1842), lies elegantly across the illustrated page.  On the far right of the book platform, a stocky ‘peasant’ woman carries an infant on her hip; below the stage, the deep blue cloth beneath the book transforms into an ocean-like moat, and a fish in a sumptuous medieval cape is marooned in its shallow waters.   

This composition, dramatically lit in chiaroscuro, highlights Preller’s capacity to transform the ordinary and mundane into a fantastical evocation of his emotional world, and his ability to harness the rich vocabulary of world art.

1 Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. Page 105.

2 Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. Page 51 and 53.

*Peter and Susan Marais were Preller’s hosts while he was in Paris.

Karel Nel, 2017

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by the current owner's grandfather.

Literature

cf. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 135.

cf. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. A similar example is illustrated in colour on pages 83 and 153.