Notes

Alexis Preller is known to have produced a number of very small-scale works through the earlier part of his career. These were often very specifically framed in the late 1940s, either by himself or with the help of the young Zakkie Eloff. In this example, the white Ndebele-beaded surround and scalloped grey frame were crafted by Eloff to enhance the work. These small, jewel-like paintings talk to his ability to make striking works no matter what their scale. This tiny oil, Ritual Bull, relates to a lineage of works focusing on the iconic status of the bull within the southern African region where these huge horned creatures, with their very distinctive hump, elicit great respect. These ceremonial and monumental animals are associated with the ancestral world among many groups living along the eastern seaboard of Africa, and the white Nguni cattle in particular are associated with royal clans within Kwa-Zulu Natal. Preller's The Small White Bull of 1953 in the Sasol collection refers specifically to this reverence.

The importance and scale of the piebald animal in Ritual Bull is amplified by the low horizon, and the yellow radiance that glows behind it suggests a symbolic significance. The bull looks at us with a wide-eyed and strangely bemused expression, possibly as a result of all the activity on his back. A delightful syncopated line-up of white egrets with their bright red beaks pointing in various directions, are perched along his rump, back, his pronounced hump, his forehead and on one horn.

Preller is well known for the repeated exploration of both subject matter and images that are used and reused in variations, and Esmé Berman has described how he carefully tended and burnished these over a lifetime. An identical bull is found in another small exquisite work entitled Herd Boy from 1949, in which the same animal is depicted with the same stance, same markings, same gestalt of birds placed on the back of the bull, but with eyes more slanted and inscrutable. Sleeping below the bull in this lonely and extended landscape is a herd boy, well built, stocky, with a white loincloth, brass armband, bracelet and anklet. With his bearded, broad face he sleeps oblivious of his surroundings, of the bull, and of the egrets that curiously look at him or tend him. It is somewhat startling to see here, as early as 1949, the emergence of the strong physiological prototype and likeness which emerges much later to inform Preller's distinctive, almost life-size intaglio Adam (Lot 239) in 1969.

Provenance

The Collection of the Late Mrs Liselotte Hardebeck.

Purchased by the late owners from Sotheby's South Africa, 11 August 1986, lot 107, with the title The Enchanted Bull.