Notes

When Alan Crump was appointed professor and head of the Fine Art department at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1980, through the influence of Neels Coetzee, it was a radical change from the benign reign of the avuncular Robert Hodgins, who had been acting-head of the department the year before. Crump fairly terrified junior students with his scathing critique of pedestrian conceptual frameworks and less-than-perfect craftsmanship. Only 31 years old at the time of his appointment, one of the youngest professors ever appointed at the university, the Fulbright scholar and international art world luminary shook things up and pushed the boundaries of creative practice and art education and helped made Wits one of the leading art schools in South Africa in the 1980s and beyond.

“Crump was driven throughout his distinguished career by a fearless vision of excellence”,¹ which he applied not only to teaching and mentoring, but also to curating, publishing and arts administration ­– he was influential in local biennales, worked with various galleries and public and corporate collections, sat on acquisitions committees and advisory boards, and shaped the Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, in a number of important ways.

A master printmaker and watercolourist, Crump’s own art-making ranged from esoteric conceptual etchings like the Wedge Series (1978), to the monumental large-scale mining landscapes of breath-taking beauty and technical dexterity that antithetically magnify the ravages and degradation they depict (1993), and the reduced macro focus of the exquisitely delicate and subtle camphor tree studies of 2001.In the catalogue for the posthumous retrospective held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2011, Freschi writes that Crump was “an extraordinary man and a brilliant artist, whose legacy is the professionalism and bold fearlessness that characterises the contemporary South African art world that he helped to shape”.² The calibre of the artists who benefited from coming into his ambit – Jane Alexander; Deborah Bell; Kim Berman; Candice Breitz; Kendell Geers; Neil Goedhals; Moshekwa Langa; Karel Nel; Walter Oltmann; Joachim Schönfeldt and Diane Victor – is an indicator of the veracity of that statement.

1. Federico Freschi (ed) (2011) Alan Crump: A Fearless Vision, Johannesburg: Friends of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, page 9.

2. Ibid, page 10.

Provenance