This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th September 2009

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Braam Kruger was a man of many parts: artist, restaurateur, TV personality, writer, general dissident and latter-day Lothario.

He applied great energy to the art of living and was well-known for his skill as a raconteur, his peremptory comments about many of his fellow artists, his curious dress sense and other quirks – such that his personality (or the persona he cultivated) often overshadowed his substantial artistic output. After his death last year, friends and former colleagues decided to rectify this imbalance by putting together a retrospective exhibition.

Kruger experimented with various techniques and materials, but his best pieces were oil paintings; accordingly, curator Fred Scott has selected works in this medium to represent the artist’s oeuvre. Portraiture is the dominant genre. Here we have sultry nudes, heroic and mock-heroic self-portraits (the artist with a god complex who knows he shouldn’t take himself too seriously), mythical reformulations of the people surrounding Kruger and a smattering of high society commissions.

Yet, as Federico Freschi notes in his excellent essay for the exhibition catalogue, Kruger felt that “The actual portrait is only a small part of the painting.” While details of facial expression, skin tone and fabric texture evince the accomplished brushwork that (along with careful attention to posture and mood) made Kruger a fine portraitist, for many viewers the real interest will lie in the backgrounds and settings of the figures.

There are recurring images here: the distant cityscape, often recognisably the Johannesburg skyline and often burning, either because it has been attacked or because of the smokestacks of heavy industry; the aeroplane (which, in “Self-Portrait as St George”, he slays like a dragon); the road of uncertain origin and destination. Collectively these hint at worlds elsewhere or, alternatively, could be seen to represent the reality from which Kruger distanced himself as he created fantastical terrains populated by pseudo-mythological beings.

Kruger declared, “I rather cherish the notion that meaning in my art is secretive and obscure and will remain so forever. For that reason I never discuss symbolism.” This self-indulgent obscurantism is somewhat disingenuous, for – although he claimed that he “deliberately placed false symbols” in his artworks to “throw [academic interpretations] off track” – there are certain motifs running through his work that manifest distinct preoccupations.

Even parody and satire are ideologically motivated, and the choice of object is telling. Kruger often playfully mimicked the ‘old masters’ (Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian among others) in his work, a gesture that simultaneously undercut the authority of European tradition and – precisely because the imitations were so precise – proved his own mastery of the form.

Similarly, the repeated presence of particular reference points in many of his paintings suggests not just the free play of signifiers but also critique and commentary. There are, for instance, the desert islands (or, in some cases, dessert islands) and palm trees that, as Freschi writes, “evoke the pre-packaged glamour of exotic beach holidays and the false promise of an escape into an unspoilt paradise”.

There is an unavoidable ecological dimension to a number of his paintings: in “Dakota Jane”, zebras (or quaggas) tumble over a cliff edge, while a shadowy figure in “Food, Venison Display” holds a rifle up to his shoulder, reminding the viewer of the violence required to cater for our omnivorous diets.

Kruger was, of course, a gourmand of distinction – popular as his chef and food critic alter-ego, ‘Kitchenboy’, in which guise he wrote for The Weekender – and it is appropriate that cuisine is prominent in this exhibition. Orthodox still life arrangements (“Ham, Fig and Melon”) are hung alongside lampoons such as “Food Fish”, in which a shocked-looking fish on a plate is opened up like a tin can. Another self-portrait is styled on the sixteenth-century paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who produced likenesses composed entirely of fruit and vegetables.

Kruger’s appetite for food was matched by his libido, and these twin passions are fused (again with irony) in “Food Aphrodisiacs”, a naked woman reclining on a tree filled with breast-shaped fruit. It is not surprising that, in the Arcimboldo homage, Kruger depicts himself with enormous ‘melons’ for breasts – this gender-bending occurs elsewhere in his work, such as when he inserts himself as a feminine model used by Titian and Rubens, or as an hermaphroditic Hindu deity in “USS Cobra”. Typically, however, his artist’s eye is a virile, seductive one; for Freschi, Kruger’s nudes “are not merely vehicles for passive contemplation, but willing receptacles of aggressive sexual desire.”

Kruger professed to be vehemently apolitical in his work, but once again the content of his paintings suggests otherwise. His equestrian portraits of Pieter Cillier and Katherine Swaneveld, like the Napoleonic horse-and-rider of “The General”, link the regal, chivalrous, idealised notions of warfare as the exercise of power to modern weapons of destruction.

His paintings from 1986-1990 are direct products of SA’s revolutionary moment. The “Bicentenary” and “Centenary” triptychs are impressive in scale, showing apocalyptic scenes; “SA Helderberg”, “Dwarf on Dog” and “Snoopy Bazooka Oil” are violent works that, as Freschi puts it, “resonate powerfully with the troubled contexts of the time”.

“Dan Mugabe as St Sebastian” portrays an archetypal struggle figure, wearing a red-starred beret, beaten but not defeated (Kruger would later depict himself as a wounded, dying St Sebastian); “Anna Mongale as Justitia” and “Anna Mongale as Liberty” show a black woman conquering the oppressor and squashing rugby balls, army helmets and TV screens under her feet. These paintings are problematised when one learns that Dan and Anna were Kruger’s gardener and domestic worker respectively. 

Ultimately, however, Kruger was most radical in the deliberately unconventional representation and projection of his own identity. He displayed himself as military leader, as superhero, as divinity.

In his ‘Black Paintings’ of the mid-1980s, he identified with Batman (whom Freschi calls “lascivious, voracious and forbidding ... a compelling metaphor for the abuse of power”, and who remains a haunting presence in Kruger’s final, unfinished painting of 2008). Twenty years later, inspired by the Indian community of Fordsburg, he fused himself with Shiva, Superman and Jesus Christ. Such was the man’s endearing hubris.

* "Braam Kruger: A Retrospective" is at the University of Johannesburg's Art Gallery until 14th October.