Notes

Mangoes appear in Alexis Preller’s paintings prior to the 1940s, when he purchased a property with mango trees on the outskirts of Pretoria. His early works celebrate the mango for its inherent purity of form and was a motif that he developed over the years becoming progressively more symbolic. The early paintings reveal allusions to Paul Gauguin’s still lifes in which mangoes frequently appear and the ‘beautiful’ fruit reappears in Preller’s Seychellois works between 1948 and 1949.

In his 1972 retrospective held at the Pretoria Art Museum, Preller included no less than five paintings of mangoes: Mangoes and Sunflower and Mangoes on a Beach, both painted in 1948, and a series of works, Hieratic Mango, Red Mango and the current lot Crucifixion Mango, all executed in 1970.

In Mangoes on a Beach of 1948, he transforms three perfectly formed deep yellow mangoes into boats with masts and pennants. In his 1970 paintings, the mango takes on a distinctively transcendent quality as a floating symbol above the landscape inhabiting another dimension unusually evoking a symbolic or hieratic quality.

His interest in the physicality and materiality of his paintings, particularly towards the latter part of his life, is made manifest in Crucifixion Mango. It is rendered in dramatic black, red and orange impasto brush strokes with the radiant orange mango seemingly honoured by a sacred canopy. The mango levitates above a bed of glowing embers, which is reflected in the dark sky above. Finally, the spatiality of the work is completed by an enigmatic recessive glowing horizon line.

Preller continuously reinterpreted and re-imagined subject matter that inspired him and explored the shapes and colours of the objects he observed in the context of his studio. He metaphorically transforms a simple mango into a symbolic image with iconic resonances.

Provenance

Gifted by the artist to Guna Massyn and thence by descent.

Graham's Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg.

Private Collection, Cape Town.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Alexis Preller Retrospective, 24 October to 26 November 1972, illustrated and listed as cat. no. 167.

Literature

Johan Reinder Deichmann (1986) Die Werk van Alexis Preller 1934-1948 en 'n Catalogue Raisonné, Pretoria: University of Pretoria, cat. no. 769.