Last week, the great South African artist and teacher, Cecil Skotnes, passed away in Cape Town, and I want to seize this opportunity to pay homage to a courageous man and artist whose life story is imprinted indelibly on the history of modern South African art.
Skotnes was born in East London, South Africa, to a family with roots in Britain. Enlisted in the South African army during World War II, he fought on the side of Britain against Mussolini’s fascist Italy.
At the end of the war he remained in Florence where in 1946 he studied under Heinrich Steiner (b. 1911), the German artist and follower of Matisse and the Fauves.
This experience no doubt introduced Skotnes to the formal attitudes of modernism—specifically the use of stylised form and non-associative colours in painting—although he rejected the Matissean festive colour in favour of sombre, darker, reduced and mysterious palette.
Skotnes was not disinterested in colour as such, but his primary concern, after formal art training between 1947 and 1950 at the University of Witwatersrand, was in the reconstitution of form on two dimensional picture plane, and it is here that he seems to have drawn the most from the lessons of cubist formal analysis that was in turn influenced by abstract qualities of African sculpture.
Thus like many of his African contemporaries, the journey to traditions of African sculpture began with the encounter with the work of the European classical avant-garde.
His greatest accomplishment as an artist is undoubtedly the work he developed from print making, specifically woodblock.
After an initial attraction to the graphic possibilities of black and white design and composition in which lyrical line and highly stylised forms resulted in totemic and elemental figural forms, he turned, in the early 1960s, to wood blocks from which he previously pulled his prints as matrices of his painted relief works, although he frequently returned to painting and drawing.
If Skotnes’ story is only about his achievement as an artist, it would still be a heck of a story, worthy of respectable tomes, overwhelming retrospectives and a befitting catalogue raissoné. Fortunately, his courage as an artist, in the age of Apartheid, is incomparable.
By the sheer significance of choices he made as a young man in his twenties, he became arguably the most influential modern South African artist, and this is without prejudice to the significant achievements of Irma Stein, David Goldblatt, Walter Battiss.
In 1952, at only 26, Skotnes was appointed cultural officer of a recreation center located at Polly Street, Johannesburg. Meant to provide recreational services to working black and white populations in a city officially segregated after the Afrikaners and their Apartheid ideology came to power, Skotnes used the opportunity to establish art classes for mostly black youths.
Whereas most young white South Africans could study in the available tertiary-level art programs, blacks had no such chance. Thus Skotnes’ Polly Street Art Centre was the first of the several alternative art training centres open to black art students in Johannesburg and elsewhere during the age of Apartheid.
The Polly Street Art Centre thus is synonymous with the rise of a generation of black South African modernists. Although there were solitary pioneering black artists—including Ernest Mancoba (1904-2004) and Gerard Sekoto who migrated to Europe before World War II and the institutionalisation of Apartheid; George Pemba (1912-2001), Gerard Bhengu (1910-1990) and John Mohl (1903-1985) who after training in Germany returned to run art classes for blacks in Sophiatown—with the Polly Street Centre came several contemporary artists whose work would eventually constitute an identifiably modernist black art in South Africa.
Although the works of these artists, including Sydney Kumalo, Lucky Sibiya, Ephraim Ngatane, Durant Sihlali, Louis Maqhubela and others, would be controversially and even uncharitably called “Township Art,” their emergence in the 1960s marked a crucial moment in the excruciatingly slow process of the entry of black artists into the South African modern art history.
In the early 1960s Skotnes cofounded the historically important Amadlozi (“Spirit of the Ancestors,” in Zulu) Group, which included Kumalo, Guiseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash and Edoardo Villa. Although one may have to strain quite a bit to see the connection between this invocation of ancestral spirits and the work of the group, what is undeniable is the ideological significance of their gesture.
For, after centuries of effacement of black presence in the making of South Africa, these young artists changed the story by emphatically acknowledging and paying homage to the black ancestors and guardians of the land. The group thus anticipated some of the emblematic reversals—what my friend Okwui Enwezor has called “counter-memory” processes—that have come in the wake of Apartheid’s demise.
Given the place of the initiatives and institutions Skotnes helped establish in the struggle against and eventual vanquishing of Apartheid (the legendary Community Arts Project of the 1980s for instance), he must be counted among the “quiet” heroes of that age.
This is no doubt why the South African government awarded him the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold for “exceptional achievement in the deracialisation of the arts and for outstanding contribution to the development of black artists.”
In life Skotnes was a giant of an artist; in death he has become a veritable ancestor. He has, indeed, now joined the Amadlozi.
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