This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th November 2009

View online here

Nowadays, we tend to take synthesis for granted. While racial and cultural conflicts persist, post-apartheid South Africa has seen a gradual dissolving of binaries such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘African’ and ‘western’. For a long time, however, these were fixed categories; those who successfully negotiated them were few and far between.

There was a particular generation of white English-speaking South Africans to whom this presented an acute dilemma. Born into an already-segregated nation in the early decades of the twentieth century, they joined the ‘mother country’ Britain and her allies in fighting a war against fascism, only to see the entrenchment of fascist principles in South African law in the years following 1948.

Alexis Preller was part of this generation. He grew up in conservative Pretoria thinking he would become a dramatist, but liberating stints in London (studying at the Westminster School of Art) and in Paris confirmed his true vocation as a painter. Serving as a medic in the Second World War, he encountered north Africa and the Mediterranean – including the pyramids and artefacts of Egypt – as well as the deprivations of a POW camp in Italy. Throughout his life, he would remain an ardent traveller.

Yet he was one of those who, with poet Guy Butler, declared: ‘I have not found myself on Europe’s maps,/a world of things, deep things I know endure/but not the context for my one perhaps.’ Preller was, as Esmé Berman describes him in a new biography of the artist, ‘a child of Africa; but he was also the offspring of his western heritage’. This was a creative conflict – much of his art was forged in the attempt to reconcile these apparently opposite facets of his identity.

Karel Nel, co-curator (with Berman) of a retrospective exhibition of Preller’s work, describes him as a ‘pre-postmodernist’: ‘He had a sense of world art before that term became common. His work makes reference to cultures and artistic traditions from across the globe, demonstrating an extraordinary synthesis of various mythologies.’

This, Nel suggests, is one reason why there has been a critical neglect of Preller since he died in 1975 – and why, while he was alive, his paintings elicited a love-him-or-hate-him response – the density of allusion in his work is ‘too overwhelming, too complex, perhaps too oblique’ for art scholars and critics.

In light of this, Nel and Berman’s achievement in documenting and presenting Preller to a new audience (the last major exhibition of his work was in 1972; the only book previously published on him appeared in 1947) is all the more impressive. Together they have produced a twin-volume ‘visual biography’ that comprehensively narrates Preller’s life story and offers a careful analysis of every piece in his oeuvre. The exhibition, which shares with the book the title Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, offers a condensed version of the duo’s research and writing.

Before being introduced to the paintings themselves, visitors can gain some insight into their origins. There are photographs by Richard Cutler and Constance Stuart of Preller’s living and working conditions at Ygdrasil (named from the Tree of Life in Norse mythology), the small farmhouse and studio where he lived as something of a recluse.

There are also samples of what Preller called his ‘household gods’: items with personal or aesthetic significance that he incorporated again and again into his paintings. These include striking sculptures and objets from Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali and other African countries, as well as from southern African cultures – Swazi, Pedi, Ndebele and Basuto.

If, collectively, these African artistic traditions contributed one strand to Preller’s knotted imagination, another was provided by a European tradition spanning the markedly different techniques of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and even Dali or Picasso – although Preller resisted association with surrealism and (despite the geometric distortions in many of his paintings) was not in sympathy with the abstractions of modernist schools like cubism.

Nel has arranged the paintings more or less chronologically, so that these shifting influences can be traced through the development of the artist’s own idiosyncratic style.

Other narratives are implicit in the order of presentation, like the evolution of the male body as depicted in Preller’s work. Nel compares the 1937 “Garden of Eden”, in which a scrawny Adam-figure stands awkwardly in the background, to later manifestations of this archetypal man. In his 1955 “Adam and Eve”, Preller adapted a Dogon carving of a man with his arm around a woman for an oil painting in which a dark-skinned Adam holds a pale-skinned Eve. The 1969 work “Adam” and the 1972 “Icon Barbare (Adam)”, which also allude to a crucified Christ or a martyred St Sebastian, emphasise the Afro-Arabic provenance of biblical characters.

Paintings dating from the war years show both the virility and the vulnerability of soldiers. “Prisoner of War” (1943) has a bearded but curiously effeminate figure whose tattooed chest is mirrored in the ambiguous markings on the recumbent body in “Fleurs du Mal” (1944), which are both flowers and shrapnel wounds.

The variations on male nudity in Preller’s paintings are rendered more complex, Nel suggests, when one takes into account the artist’s struggle with his gay identity in a society that was not tolerant of homosexuality. Rediscovering the classical celebration of the masculine form in ancient Greek kouros figures helped Preller, towards the end of his life, to celebrate the male body without shame in works such as “The Creation of Adam” (1968) and “Marathon” (1970).

Contrastingly, women appear in Preller’s work both as embodiments of lost ‘tribal’ ways of life (he returned again and again to the “Mapogga” women of an Ndebele village north of Pretoria) and in hieratic poses reminiscent of Egyptian monumental friezes. 

The breadth and depth of Preller’s vision cannot be represented by discussing these few examples. As Nel and Berman contend, his work stands alongside – perhaps above and, certainly, distinct from – that of precursors such as J.H. Pierneef or near-contemporaries like Walter Batiss, Irma Stern, Maggie Laubscher and Gerard Sekoto.

* Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows is at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until 5 December. The visual biography of the same title is available from Shelf Publishing (011 486 3493).