Notes

Alexis Preller returned from London in 1935 and showed new work the following year, initially in Johannesburg at Leon Levson’s photographic studio, followed by an expanded version of the exhibition in December in Pretoria at Glen’s Music Salon. These exhibitions included his iconic Man in the Sun of 1936 and this work entitled Breying the Riems. Two versions of this painting are known, this one from 1935 and the other, a copy, from 1936. Both are characterised by the broad, definitive brushmarks, a stylised approach, and the intense colour that reveals Preller’s indebtedness to Van Gogh.

The rural, ‘peasant-like’ figure, with straw hat, engaged in manual labour, iconographically links the works to Van Gogh’s paintings made in the South of France forty-seven years earlier in 1888. Yet Preller’s subject matter of Breying the Riems is particularly South African. The hat and the striding figure echo Van Gogh’s images of himself as an itinerant painter walking through the sundrenched landscape. The dramatic light in Preller’s work casts intense blue shadows on the vivid orange-yellow circular tread path, a powerful contrast to the complementary and intense, gusty blue sky beyond the emerald green band of cacti.

Preller’s scaffolded, formal composition is based on the rudimentary structure built to enable the twisting and softening of lengths of leather to make the bindings or riempies used in the stringing of seats of local furniture, as well as more generally for the securing of wooden structures. The composition has strong resonances of Van Gogh’s distinctive structural and vivid colourful renditions of the drawbridge in his famous series of works of the Langlois-Bridge-at-Arles, 1888.

Pierneef, who had been encouraging to Preller on his initial undertaking to study in London, and was later helpful in the organization of the Pretoria exhibition in 1936, is known to have acquired two of the young Preller’s works on the exhibition.

Provenance

Purchased directly from the artist and thence by descent.

Literature

Esme Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows and Alexis Preller: Collected Images. Saxonwold, Johannesburg. Shelf Publishing. Illustrated in colour on page 29.