Notes

A magnificent and important work, Vibrating Figure is closely related to The Broken Vase, another small-scale picture on wood panel from 1952. Seeing in the shape of his beloved Persian vase the simplified form of a seated Mapogga woman, Preller painted an exquisite and quivering conflation of two of his favourite motifs. While firmly rooted in an African idiom, Vibrating Figure seems to borrow a sense of dynamism from the Italian Futurists and an eeriness from the Metaphysical school of painters.

Vibrating Figure shares an El Greco quality with The Storm/Mapogga Woman, an earlierpainting of a stylised Mapogga figure, dwarfing her surrounding landscape and backlit by a filmy turquoise halation. While The Storm/Mapogga Woman and Vibrating Figure have much in common when it comes to style and palette – look particularly at the gauzy green haze hanging over the figures, the onion-skin texture of the painted surfaces, and the thin washes of luminous paint – the later picture is compositionally more complex. While a lone figure dominates The Storm/Mapogga Woman, one is ingeniously multiplied and overlapped in Vibrating Figure to create a mesmerising and memorable effect.

Vibrating Figure was first exhibited at the HAUM Gallery in Cape Town in April 1953. It hung alongside some of the artist’s most groundbreaking and beautiful paintings: Collected Images (Orchestration of Themes), Grand Mapogga I, Icarus I, Sleeping Boy, Three Women, The Mozartian Fish, The White Bull I and The Kraal.

Provenance

Frieda Harmsen, 1953, and thence by descent.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Retrospective exhibition, 1972.

HAUM Gallery, Cape Town, 1953.

Literature

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Alexis Preller: Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, a detail is illustrated in black and white on page 93 and in colour on page 110.

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, illustrated in colour on page 156.