This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

13th June 2009

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The art in portrait painting, Reshada Crouse reflects, is neither to flatter nor to insult: “I try to find a synergy between my subjects’ visions of themselves and what I see in them”.  This perhaps explains why Crouse’s collection of portraits is so eclectic – each subject demands a different approach. A range of materials and styles (not to mention poses and settings) is evident in her work, making it difficult to characterise.

She could be classified as a ‘portraitist’, yet Crouse resists such categories because they can limit the way in which an artist is viewed: “Calling a painting ‘a portrait’ has a favourable effect on the way the sitter is perceived (we have ‘portraits’ of important people, ‘pictures’ of ordinary citizens). But it can demean the artist. Frida Kahlo, Lucien Freud ... although there are many renowned painters whose output consists almost entirely of portraits and self-portraits, you wouldn’t label an exhibition of their work ‘portraiture’.”

If portrait-painting is a somewhat neglected genre in contemporary art circles, and if this is particularly acute in a country like South Africa, Crouse has attempted to address that neglect through an exhibition entitled “History Recorded Through Portraiture”. As curator, she has elucidated the exhibition’s subtitle (“Past and Present, Public and Personal”) by dividing it into three parts.

Firstly, there are works from the Museum Africa collection – including portraits of historical figures such as Thomas Pringle, Paul Kruger and Lord Kitchener, as well as a host of nineteenth and early-twentieth century socialites and once-important people who have since been forgotten.

The selection includes a number of significant local artists, but two paintings that stand out are George Pemba’s self-portrait and his portrayal of Es’kia Mphahlele. These are exceptional because, to put it bluntly, their subjects are black. Crouse acknowledges that portraiture has typically been seen as a ‘European’ art form, but denies that there is anything inherently ‘alien’ about it.

In fact, she argues, the acts of commissioning, sitting for and creating a portrait can be seen collectively as a kind of ancestor worship that resonates with ‘African’ cultural practices. More than just venerating one’s dead forebears in retrospect, portraiture insists on human connections between the living and anticipates a future in which ties of kinship and friendship will be remembered.

Insofar as the first part of the exhibition is largely in the realm of the “past” and “public”, Crouse’s own work – which constitutes the second part – straddles “past” and “present”, “public” and “personal”. Over the years, she has been commissioned to paint prominent businesspeople and educators; she has produced a number of private family portraits, including images of her son at various ages, a striking nude of her mother and a handful of self-portraits; and she has painted a number of well-known South Africans.

Her “Famous People” series dates back to the 1980s. Crouse had been in the United Kingdom, studying at St Martin’s School of Art in London, and was intrigued by celebrity culture in Britain. “When I came home I thought, ‘What about our own icons?’”

Some of the subjects she chose were willing to sit for her, while others were not; as a result, the series (as with her oeuvre more generally) is marked by both a photo-realist style and the more ephemeral, perhaps even organic, representation of individuals painted from life.

One of those who did not want to be painted was Helen Suzman, so her youthful image appears as if in a black-and-white photograph. What seems like a newspaper clipping (about Queen Elizabeth recognising Suzman’s contribution – a playful reminder that Suzman and Elizabeth looked remarkably similar as younger women) is ‘taped’ onto the ‘mounted’ picture, but on closer inspection it’s clear that clipping, tape and mounting have all been painted.

This tromp l’oeil effect is common in Crouse’s paintings; it’s her way, she says, of “reminding the viewer that the painting surface is flat” and that the skill required to create a three-dimensional likeness on a two-dimensional canvas should not be taken for granted.

On the wall opposite Suzman in the current exhibition is another reluctant subject, former apartheid Defence Force general and subsequently Freedom Front leader, Constant Viljoen. He appears in both these guises: as a younger man in uniform, a rifle that he designed for South Africa’s ‘bush wars’ in the foreground; and as a civilian politician, the gun replaced by a microphone. In the background is Viljoen’s cattle farm.

Some viewers might see this juxtaposition as an ironic comment on the part of the portraitist; but Crouse (echoing her credo of fair representation) insists that she is “not in the business of playing god, of striking out with a judgement stick”.

This deliberate avoidance of sarcasm or mockery is sustained in Crouse’s portraits of fashion designer Marianne Fassler and beauty queen Anneline Kriel. Fassler sits regally amidst peacock feathers, animal skins and other Afro-rococo flourishes – a setting that some viewers might scorn – but Crouse is quick to point out that this is not kitsch because “kitsch implies a lack of self-awareness”. Likewise, the embroidered kussingtjie that accompanies Kriel’s sensuous pose in a scene that mimics Ingre’s “Odalisque” (a portrait of a concubine) reminds the viewer of, but does not poke fun at, the former Miss World’s Afrikaans background.

The allusion to Ingre represents another common strain in Crouse’s portraits: the appropriation of paintings by famous precursors into her own work. Thus, a combined depiction of F.W. and Marike De Klerk sets the former president and his late wife against one of Pierneef’s landscapes. A small Ndebele motif decorates the words “Oranje, Blanje, Blou”; Crouse explains that, whatever Pierneef’s politics might have been, the geometries of his work suggest the influence of ‘indigenous’ art forms (what she doesn’t say, but may be implying, is that it would be equally simplistic to dismiss De Klerk as an unredeemed Nationalist who simply facilitated the inevitable).

Sections of Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” are recreated to provide a symbolic framework for a portrait of Justice Richard Goldstone. Similarly, the judge’s tie has been modified to include the emblem of the United Nations and the flags of countries such as Rwanda and Yugoslavia – indicating Goldstone’s role in the UN’s International War Crimes tribunals.

In later portraits, Crouse moved away from offering such interpretive frameworks or commentaries and towards “other ways of seeing”; her recent subjects are placed in more neutral settings. But she has always been dubious about the place of ideology in painting. Instead, she considers technique paramount. The skill of representation is often ignored in conceptual or abstract art; many artists seek “short cuts”, she notes, whereas her portraits typically take hundreds of hours.

After studying at three different schools of fine art (each of them antagonistic to realism), Crouse realised that no-one had actually taught her how to paint. She feels that painting as an art form has been “mystified” and, as a qualified teacher, wishes to expose this fallacy: “It took me ten years to get a grip on the techniques of painting, and portraiture in particular, but that doesn’t have to be the case for everyone.”

To prove this, the third part of her exhibition is dedicated to work produced by her students – none of whom, until a few years ago, had experience in drawing or painting. And, given the quality of the work on show, the idea that ‘art is for everyone’ does not seem too far-fetched.

* “History Recorded Through Portraiture” is at Museum Africa until 30 June.