Notes

After her return to South Africa in 1924, Laubser avoided urban life. Although she lived in Cape Town in between leaving her parents’ farm in 1936 and moving to her cottage, Altyd Lig, in the Strand in 1947, when she travelled it was to uncrowded coastal villages or rural farming areas.  Throughout her oeuvre, birds remained an important leitmotif in her work. Laubser’s representations of ducks and ducklings which are some of her most well-known images would have been part her early life on the farm. She continued to paint birds in the landscape throughout her life, whether it be flamingoes and gulls at Langebaan or storks in the Freestate landscape. Here in this late work, Yellow Bird, she continues with the theme of the integration of living beings with vegetation and landscape elements reduced to their most basic through abstracted lines and shapes.  This interconnection between different aspects of the world around her was part of her belief system of the mutual dependence of all living things. She spoke of the ‘unity of creation’ and the ‘harmony of nature’. Positive messages resonate continually in her writing and in her art: “Separateness cannot be – it is the community that brings us here – we are to be in harmony with all”.¹ 

It is probably this attitude which drew her to the work of the German modernist and member of Der Blaue Reiter, Frans Marc, whose work she said she understood immediately when she saw it in Berlin. Marc’s representations of interlocking and overlapping forms communicated his world view of the totality of nature and this resonated with Laubser.

Naïve, simplified motifs like the oversized yellow bird and rudimentary landscape elements, although not as powerful and emotionally resonant as her earlier work, still constitute a fine example of Laubser’s late work.

1 Handwritten note on an envelope dated 7.V.1957 left in Laubser’s estate to Elza Miles, Johannesburg.

Elilzabeth Delmont, 2017

Provenance

Acquired by the current owner's mother from the SAAA exhibition in 1963.

Exhibited

SAAA, Cape Town, 1963, catalogue number 18.

Literature

Dalene Marais. (1994) Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor. Illustrated on page 365, catalogue number 1624, with the titles Bird in a Landscape and Yellow Bird.