Notes

Preller was held by the mystique of the Mapogga. He certainly drew heavily from their rituals, architecture and traditional dress to colour his own vision of Africa. That he so consistently returned in his work to their motifs and silhouettes, more often than not from different directions and in different styles, hints as much at his respect for the Ndebele as at his ever-shifting imagination. The present lot, The Storm, is a small, early Mapogga work in subdued, translucent colours, painted at a time when the artist’s work was enjoying wide exposure both locally and abroad (examples had been included in the Overseas Exhibition of South African Art at the Tate, London, and others had toured Italy with the International Art Club). While a sense of natural power and foreboding comes from the title, a sense of immovability and dignity is suggested by the oversized figure that dominates the composition. The conceptually scaled Ndebele woman stands centrally, conically, stylised in the extreme, and carefully wrapped in a beautiful, striped blanket. Beaded rings and brass bracelets hide the figure’s neck, wrists and ankles, her simplified, egg-shaped head sits proudly and still, and a spectacular halation of blue and green light spreads from her form into the sky.

The Storm, which might be considered a precursor to the Grand Mapogga series from the 1950s, was painted shortly after Preller’s return from the Seychelles, Zanzibar and Mombasa, and provides evidence of the artist’s preoccupation with distinctly African subject matter. In this regard, the landscape, in which the Ndebele village is so beautifully nestled, takes on particular significance. While the artist often envisioned poetic, internal landscapes, the one in The Storm, punctuated by the iconic Ndebele homestead with its lapas, passages and decorative walls, is undoubtedly African.

Karel Nel and Alastair Meredith

Provenance

Owned by Mr R. A. Bernardi at the time of the Alexis Preller retrospective exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in 1972.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Arcadia Park, Alexis Preller Retrospective, 24 October – 26 November 1972.

Literature

Pretoria Art Museum (1972). Alexis Preller Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum. Illustrated in black and white, unpaginated.
Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009). Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. Illustrated in colour on page 143.