Notes

The President Hotel, bounded by Eloff, Plein and De Villiers Streets in Johannesburg, opened in October 1967 and cost its investors then in excess of R7 000 000. Thankfully, a significant share of the budget was set aside to fund a number of commanding, site-specific new artworks by Transvaal artists. Major paintings by Aileen Lipkin, for instance, depicting the geological wealth of the Rand, were hung on the first floor of the building, while Walter Battiss and Larry Scully, both encouraged to draw inspiration from the local countryside and cityscape, provided a pair of paintings each for the second floor. Carved and painted mural panels offering wide views of the veld, moreover, were executed by Pino Cattaneo for the so-called Transvaal Room. But perhaps the showpiece of the hotel's decorative scheme was the present lot, a luxurious, vast tapestry woven by Marguerite Stephens from a design by Cecil Skotnes. Composed with geometric and contrasting segments of yellow, amber, maize, ochre, olive and charcoal, and measuring nearly 3,5m by 4,5m when unfurled, the tapestry took pride of place in the hotel's palatial central lobby (fig.1).

Remarkably, the President Hotel tapestry was one of Marguerite's earliest commissions as a professional weaver. Without any assistance, limited by a modest Gobelin loom in her mother's hand-weaving studio in Swaziland, and using aniline-dyed mohair that was hand-carded and hand-spun, she completed it according to the artist's original cartoon over a period of six months. The central, frieze-like section of the work, brilliant in colour and enlivened by birds in flight, fish, and stylised, upward-arcing branches, was as wide as her loom would allow, while the two narrower sections above and below it, made up of a patchwork of greys, were each produced separately.

Besides its striking and obvious decorative quality, there are few better examples in a South African context of the power of collaboration. The splendour of the work relies just as much on the artist-designer as it does on the artist-weaver. Moreover, as Marguerite went on to produce tapestries with Cecily Sash, Edouardo Villa, Sydney Kumalo, Robert Hodgins and Judith Mason, and continues to do so with the likes of Norman Catherine, Penny Siopis, Sam Nhlengethwa and William Kentridge, the President Hotel example should be recognised as a vital catalyst for the medium.

Provenance

President Hotel

Dr Peter Wissekerke collection