A Gerard Sekoto moment at Strauss & Co

TimesLIVE

29-04-2025

The art world is having a long-overdue Gerard Sekoto moment. Sekoto should have been one of South Africa's most revered and cherished cultural touchstones in his lifetime. Instead, choosing self-imposed exile in 1947 to escape race discrimination and the onset of high apartheid the after year, he spent his life on the fringes of urban life and alcoholism in his city of exile, Paris.
He remained on the fringes of artistic recognition for his work, until he was embraced first by Senegalese poet and president Leopold Senghor and the nascent Négritude movement in the 1960s, then later by his home country, with honorary doctorates and museum exhibitions happening in the early 1990s — the last years of his life — and the last years of apartheid itself.
In 2024, curator Adriano Pedrosa included Gerard Sekoto's earliest known self-portrait in his exhibition Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere — at the 60th Venice Biennale. The work was painted in October 1947, shortly after Sekoto's arrival in London en route to Paris. In 2008, it was bought by the Kilbourn Collection, the significant private collection of Strauss chair Frank Kilbourn and his family.
At present the self-portrait is the cover star of the publicity for the exhibition Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950—2000 (March 19-June 30) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition retraces the presence and influence of 150 artists from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean who were active in France from the 1950s to 2000 — among them Sekoto, who ironically spent much of his time in Paris playing jazz piano in a bar to survive.
Cleverly making the most of his current prominence in global art circles, Strauss & Co are staging a non-commercial exhibition featuring some of Sekoto's numerous paintings of working people. Curated by Wilhelm van Rensburg, senior art specialist and head curator at Strauss & Co, Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo explores not only Sekoto's depictions of nannies, washerwomen, brickmakers, coal merchants, miners, barbers, shopkeepers, street photographers and water drawers, but also contemporary artist Lena Hugo's large-scale pastel drawings of South African heavy-machinery operators, many of them set against treated and sealed backgrounds of local newsprint headlines.
While Hugo's work appropriately foregrounds and heroises local working people, the chief interest of the show the works by Sekoto, which span a crucial part of his working life as an artist, from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Sekoto is responsible for one of the most canonical single paintings in South African art history, The Song of the Pick, also from 1947, now in the corporate collection of South32 and on long-term loan at the Javett UP Art Centre in Pretoria. This magnificent work depicts, in Sekoto's dynamic but social realist early style, a black road gang in synchronised motion in the swing of their pickaxes, observed by their insouciant white 'baas' smoking his pipe.
Strauss & Co's exhibition presents a number of later variations on the theme, even versions of the same work painted and drawn much later by the artist. The show also presents a 1940s depiction of a domestic worker sitting in the sun outside the stoep of a house, done in a style reminiscent of Sekoto's near-contemporary George Pemba. Much later works depicting similar working-class figures in their daily lives reflect the more abstracted and more fluid style Sekoto developed after his year in the 1960s spent in Senegal under the patronage of Senghor.
Strauss & Co's commendable commitment to art education through their curatorial and exhibition projects such as this one is one of the last bastions of exposure to important local fine art that we have, in the vacuum left by the collapse of the public museum and gallery sector. This rare insight into one of our greatest artists is not to be missed.