Notes

Greatly admired as a pioneering artist and teacher, Delmas-born Cecily Sash was trained by Maurice van Essche in Johannesburg and Victor Passmore in London. A founding member of art dealer Egon Guenther’s Amadlozi Group of artists, in 1965 she spent a year studying art education in Britain and the United States, notably interviewing abstract painter and teacher Josef Albers.¹ On her return to Johannesburg, where she taught design at the University of the Witwatersrand, Sash became a committed proponent of hard-edged abstraction in painting. In a 1968 interview with Robert Hodgins, Sash rationalised her internationalism as follows: “What we must be careful of is not to be afraid of our borrowings. I think myself that there is a sort of over-anxious desire for national art in this country.”² Sash’s commitment to pure abstraction was however short-lived. In the early 1970s, she returned to figurative subjects, notably the bird.

An enduring motif in her work, Sash began depicting birds in 1955 after a dove flew into the art room where she gave classes at Jeppe Girls’ High.³ This work forms part of a series known as Bird and Target (1973-74). Sash here integrates the vibrant palette and linear styling of her earlier hard-edged abstractions into a self-described “metaphysical” painting that visualises her personal crisis – she emigrated to England in 1974 due to this country’s segregationist politics. “The target was on the bird originally as a decorative device which derived from my tapestry designs in 1973,” explained Sash, adding that here it however served as “a symbol of destruction”.⁴ Esmé Berman has remarked on the dual role of the avian symbols in this body of work: “concurrently victims and aggressors, their weapons are their vicious claws and beaks, but their wings have been replaced by brightly coloured targets”.⁵ Sash recognised this ambiguity: she has described her target-festooned birds as both “monumental and vulnerable.”⁶

¹. Sash interviewed Albers in December 1965, transcript in the archives of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
². Hodgins, Robert,  ‘South African Art: Has it Made it?’, News/Check, 20 December 1968, page 16
³. Harmsen, Frieda. (1985)  Looking at South African Art, Pretoria: JL van Schaik. Page 33
⁴. Sash, Cecily. (1999) Working Years, Presteigne: Studio Sash. Page 44
⁵. Berman, Esmé. (1993) Painting in South Africa, Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers. Page 272.
⁶. Sash, op.cit., page 45

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Cecily Sash Retrospective 1954-1974, catalogue number 91, illustrated in colour in the catalogue centrefold