Notes

After first arriving in Johannesburg in 1939, Sekoto was befriended by artists and enjoyed the support of several key people in the art world. Alexis Preller gave him his first tubes of oil paint. Judith Gluckman, recently returned from Paris, is likely to have had considerable influence on the way Sekoto painted as she initiated him into Western painting techniques, teaching him about the materials of oil painting and the use of brushes and palette knife.

In Cape Town, where he lived from 1942, he associated with members of the artistic community such as Gregoire Boonzaier and sculptors Lippy Lipschitz, Solly Disner and Emile Maurice. Through the influence of Walter Battiss, Sekoto’s work was included in several exhibitions in the mid-40s organised by the Gainsborough Galleries that included New Group members and Maud Sumner, amongst others. Reviewing a New Group exhibition at the Argus Gallery in 1944, the critic for the Rand Daily Mail noted that Sekoto’s “canvases are good enough to attract favourable attention in their own right next to a hundred others by 20 of the Union’s best painters”.ⁱ

In 1945 Sekoto moved to Eastwood where, according to Lesley Spiro, the curator of Sekoto’s first major retrospective exhibition, he produced some of his most masterful works.ⁱⁱ She describes how his already adventurous palette expanded enormously and pinks, purples and greens became familiar colours in his paintings.ⁱⁱⁱ

While Sekoto was part of an educated elite, he never forgot his rural childhood in Botshabelo nor the memories of Ndebele herdboys in Wonderhoek in the 1920s. Indeed, this painting of Eastwood evokes the bucolic charm of village life with its quiet, pastoral rhythms echoed in the repetition of trees and windows. The wide open spaces and the melange of soft colours create an arena in which the players act out their daily tasks.

The response to his first solo exhibition in 1947 was rapturous. The Star reporter enthused:

The painting community has for some years been interested in the work of Gerard Sekoto and they flocked to the opening yesterday afternoon at the Gainsborough Gallery of his first one-man show in Johannesburg. By the end of the afternoon Mr Sekoto had sold nine pictures, which by any standard means the beginning of a successful exhibition.^iv

ⁱ Quoted in N Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto: I am an African, Wits University Press, 2004, page 40.
ⁱⁱ Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 1989, page 35.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid, page 39.
^iv Star, 23 July 1947, quoted in N Chabani Manganyi, op cit, page 45.

Provenance

Sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet South Africa, Johannesburg, 31 October 1975, lot 215.