Notes

It was at the advice of Maurice van Essche that Erik Laubscher decided to study abroad. He arrived in war-ravaged London in 1948 where he briefly studied portrait drawing under Frank Slater, a student of Walter Sickert, before enrolling at the Anglo-French Art Centre, a newly opened institution in the old St John’s Wood Art School whose staff included John Berger. Laubscher painted in a mannered style that reflected his youthful enthusiasm for pre-war Parisian modernism. In 1949 he briefly returned to Port Elizabeth before moving to Paris in 1950 to further his tuition at the Académie Montmartre. Cubist painter Fernand Léger was the school’s best-known faculty member, although Laubscher initially fell under the spell of Bernard Buffet, a fashionable painter linked to the “miserabilist” school of French expressionism (also described as New Realist).

This lot shows compositional similarities to Buffet’s tonally arid severe still life arrangements, which reflected the French experience under the Nazis and dislocated austerity that followed.¹ But Buffett, who enjoyed early success, was an unreliable model for Laubscher, an undemonstrative colourist who later rejected figuration in favour of various forms of abstraction. Buffet, by contrast, is remembered for his belligerent anti-modernism in the face of inevitable innovation in the art world.²

Laubscher’s infatuation with Buffet was however short-lived. “In the last few paintings
I did in Paris there was a big shift towards more colour, away from the subdued, Buffet-type greys and greens of the New Realists,” said Laubscher in a 2008 interview.³ This lot captures a moment of transition, as Laubscher’s youthful uncertainties and anxiety of influence tentatively give way to a new self-confidence that would sustain his career when he returned to Cape Town in 1951.

1 Michael McNay. (1999) ‘Obituary: Bernard Buffet’,  The Guardian, 6 October.

2 Natalie Adamson. (2009) Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the Ecole de Paris, 1944-1964, Farnham: Ashgate. Pages 140-41.

3  ‘Erik Laubscher in conversation with Baylon Sandri’, in Hans Fransen. (2008) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Art, Cape Town: SMAC. Page 261.

Literature

Hans Fransen. (2009) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Art, Cape Town: SMAC Art Gallery.  Illustrated in colour on page 31.