Notes

This small fresco-like painting on a wood panel was in all probability completed in early 1953. This would have been before Preller’s study trip to Europe and Egypt to look at mural painting in preparation for his first large-scale commission for the new Receiver of Revenue Building in Johannesburg.

Two versions of this African Head (I and II) were exhibited at the HAUM Gallery in Cape Town in April 1953, with the exhibition opened by the then-director of the National Gallery, John Paris. In these two works (the present lot and the work now in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum, Port Elizabeth), the mirrored images of the same head have their origins in the earlier 1949 work, The Gateway, painted by Preller on his return from the Seychelles. In the larger work, The Gateway, twinned profiles, based on an East African ebony head in Preller’s possession, face each other across a walled walkway that leads to a small Ndebele lapa. The lapa’s unusually shaped walls are decorated with characteristic geometric patterning, also seen in the later Mapogga works.

In African Head, 1953, the painting on auction, the left-hand head in The Gateway becomes the focus of the work. It is meticulously re-created, having been gridded and traced in the manner that historic European painters used for master works. Preller’s process is revealed in a 1964 prototype sketch for a similar Primavera head. [Kevin main illustration on p 219, Collected Images]

The icon-like presence of the huge, freestanding female head fills the format, like a guardian at the gate. Her profile is set against an expanse of bleached aquamarine sky with its small flat-bottomed clouds. As in the forerunner work, she looms over the decorated entrance to a small Ndebele homestead. The startling scale of the objects is brought about by the low horizon line of a barren, almost Karoo-like landscape punctuated by distant, isolated outcrops: the architectural features around the head appear distant, and miniature by comparison.

The work evokes a stark, stylised metaphysical quality. The head is surrounded by an auric echo, partly in shadow and partly in light. This ‘echo’ is adorned with a dorsal fin, curved red spines and punctures which seem to reveal the sky beyond. These characteristics are shared with the famous Mozartian Fish painted the previous year.

The female profile has an elongated nose, full lips, a strong jawline and a precisely delineated ear. Her hairstyle has characteristics of an early Ntwana or North Sotho coiffure, coloured with red ochre and neatly faceted. Strong, dark lines sweep over her face from the crown of her head but it is the staring, circular eye that rivets. It has the visual power of the bead- or metal inserts placed in the eye-sockets of ritual, carved figures found all along the eastern seaboard of Africa. Perhaps it seems even more like the eye of a fish than that of a human. Using details like this, Preller at his best challenges and tempers the beauty and precision of his vision, opening up an inner world that is mysterious and sometimes unnerving.

His consummate skills as a draftsman and colourist are to be seen in this work with its sombre umbers, reds and aquamarines; its precision of form in the smooth surfaces played against the spiky shapes and cerulean and black circular punctuations. The delicate bloom or leaves in the right hand corner that seem almost propitiatory complete a mesmerising conception so distinctive to Preller’s African vision.

Karel Nel

Exhibited

Katzen Collection, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, April 1968.

Alexis Preller Retrospective, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, October 24 to November 26, 1972.

Alexis Preller 1911–1975, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, January to March 1991.

Literature

Pretoria Art Museum (1972) Alexis Preller Retrospective, Pretoria, exhibition catalogue, illustrated in colour on page 5, catalogue no 73.

Esmé Berman (1983) Art & Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema, illustrated in black and white on page 10.

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Collected Images (vol. 2), Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, a work from the same series, belonging to Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum, illustrated in colour on pages 183 and 218.