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Daily Maverick
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
A shared lens on labour: Gerard Sekoto and Lena Hugo in dialogue
An exhibition of Lena Hugo and Gerard Sekoto's art captures the life of labour. Figures appearing at the car window imploring the occupants to buy Chinese sunglasses, multicoloured feather dusters, belts and silver balloons that dance in the hot sun. Sound familiar? An old man trying to direct the traffic when the lights have failed, a street juggler hoping for a small token of appreciation, road workers digging, their sweat glistening. You could say it's a slice of urban life, not particularly significant, not particularly noteworthy. Yet, for Gerard Sekoto, early 20th-century artist, profound thinker and recently the face of the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, it was this sort of snapshot that dictated his choice of subject throughout his life. The same could be said of contemporary South African artist Lena Hugo, whose childhood was dominated by the mine-heaped landscape of Roodepoort, with its politically charged atmosphere of the time – factors, she says, that strongly influenced her creative direction. While she and Sekoto couldn't be more different in background and age, their deep commitment to representing work and labour in the past century is uncannily similar. It is this double-etched narrative that is featured in an exhibition hosted by Strauss & Co in Johannesburg, entitled Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo, running until the end of May. Curator Wilhelm van Rensburg, a senior art specialist and head curator at Strauss & Co, reiterates that the aim of the exhibition is to demonstrate through selected paintings the strong synergy between the artists. 'In the work of Gerard Sekoto, we see nannies, washerwomen, brickmakers, coal merchants, miners, barbers, shopkeepers, street photographers, water drawers, endeavours that typified the world that workers created for themselves in the first half of the 20th century. 'Juxtaposed with Sekoto's paintings are depictions of workers by Lena Hugo, mainly of heavy machinery operators, in the working life of the 21st century.' Commenting on the exhibition, art writer, photographer and curator Nkgopoleng Moloi says Sekoto and Hugo's practices make visible the social structures that shape labour. 'Read together, they highlight the ways in which workers are portrayed but also how their experiences are understood and remembered. In this sense, they offer a form of social realism that insists on the visibility of labour and the dignity of those who perform it.' Among the paintings on show for this exhibition is Sekoto's iconic political composition Song of the Pick, which focuses on the often back-breaking work undertaken by labourers. Van Rensburg describes Sekoto's painting as a classic example of his artistic exploration of the relationship between the economically powerful and the vulnerable. 'He achieved this using a direct, concrete approach based on what countless people had either experienced or witnessed. 'Although [it was] painted in 1942, one could say that little has changed since the ushering in of the democratic order; labourers who obtain employment are still predominantly black.' Hugo takes the narrative two generations ahead, focusing on the relationship between work and worker, making the viewer aware of the face of labour, which we may not always be aware of, though they form an important part of our landscape, economy, community and life. Her 2008 painting The Seamstress, for example, brings us up close and personal with a woman who works in the clothing industry. Gerard Sekoto Born in 1913 in Botshabelo, just outside Gauteng, Sekoto was drawn to art as a child and would practise drawing on his school slate, and used clay from the river banks to make small sculptures. He was a pioneer visual artist who made many paintings portraying the harsh socioeconomic realities of life for black folks in urban South Africa. He did so by standing on street corners and capturing people in their domestic and everyday activities, such as hanging laundry up to dry. In 1947 Sekoto fulfilled his childhood dream of being an artist in Paris, through what he called a 'self-imposed exile'. Back in South Africa in 1989, Wits University awarded him an honorary doctorate, helping him in his move to a retirement home for artists where he could paint and converse with friends until his death in 1993 at the age of 79, just one year before Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa. Lena Hugo For more than 30 years, exhibiting widely in group and solo exhibitions locally and abroad, Lena Hugo has portrayed ordinary people and workers. Her work highlights the dignity of her subjects and serves as a visual archive of labour and identity in South Africa. A key theme in Hugo's work is highlighting the fundamental significance of having a job – not only as a means of survival but also for its impact on psychological wellbeing and a sense of belonging. Hugo vividly remembers one of her most compelling memories originating from her childhood: her special relationship with Ngoanang William Matseba, a man who worked as the family gardener. She describes William as a protective, father figure who would reward her with Chappies bubblegum for garden chores well done. Although he was treated well by her family, she still remembers with sadness his plate and cup stored in a cupboard under the kitchen sink, separated from the rest of the family's crockery. William would later become a central figure in her portraits and the most-often depicted worker in her portfolio. DM The exhibition Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo is on at the Strauss & Co gallery in Johannesburg until the end of May. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
TimesLIVE
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
A Gerard Sekoto moment at Strauss & Co
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.
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Basquiat to Delaney: inside the exhibition honouring 50 years of art in Black Paris
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I was in France at the weekend to check out the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, an odyssey through the generations of Black artists from across the world who found a complicated sanctuary in the city. This was supplemented with a walking tour on the life of the artist Beauford Delaney, guided by the company Entrée to Black Paris, and finished off with a mind-blowingly delicious Senegalese dinner. Yes, I'm trying to make you jealous. That's all after the roundup. You're invited into Paris Noir by the frank, sobering gaze of its lead exhibition image: a self-portrait by the South African artist Gerard Sekoto completed in 1947. A modernist, expressionist work with bold, contrasting colours seeming to convey unease, reflection and solemnity, Sekoto painted it days before travelling to London as a self-imposed political exile from South Africa. That year, he would arrive in Paris where he faced difficult living conditions, finding employment as a jazz pianist and singer of South African melodies and Negro spirituals at the nightclub l'Échelle de Jacob (Jacob's ladder). Of the 150 Black artists across 350 works exhibited, many of them have stories like Sekoto's – coming from the US, Caribbean, South America and Africa to find an artistic refuge in Paris. The scope of the exhibition is expansive, an excavation of artistic movements from Afro-Atlantic surrealism to Parisian syncretism. There's paraphernalia from Présence Africaine, the pan-African culture magazine founded by the Senegalese writer and editor Alioune Diop in the 1940s (to which Sekoto contributed), theological meditations in the Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier's 1957 work Le Christ, and subversions of US racial stereotypes in advertising and comics abstracted into a collage by the French-Haitian artist Hervé Télémaque. What emerges from this vast collection is a beautiful sense of the Black Atlantic. Of artists and writers and thinkers pouring in from across the globe, finding a haven in which aesthetic expressions, debates and dialogues were forged in a world contending with decolonisation through pro-independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean as well as western civil rights struggles. They often documented these times: Bob Thompson depicted US lynchings and the violent quashing of civil rights protests; Sekoto covered the tragic revolutionaries in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). But political art was not only of the world outside France. In May 1967, in response to a racist attack, riots broke out in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island that morphed from a colony to an overseas department. Protesters were violently suppressed by French police, who opened fire on striking workers in the economic capital, Pointe-à-Pitre. In 1975, the French Guianese artist José Legrand painted a photorealistic diptych of a scene from the demonstrations. In this Parisian Black Atlantic, the refining of method and a collaborative, artistic corpus flourish. Networks and friendships are formed. Black artists enter one another's orbits and are moved to create even greater works. In the 1990s, the Senegalese artist As M'Bengue created a visual language in his paintings, with its graffiti, graphic art and anti-capitalist social criticism, inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he had met in Paris in 1988. Equally, the abstract, impressionist works of Ed Clark, which includes an untitled painting of three bold strokes created by a 'big sweep' technique, are inspired by the works of his friend Beauford Delaney. If Sekoto is the face of the Paris Noir exhibition, then Delaney is its beating heart. The first piece in your line of sight when you enter the show is his 1968 painting Street Scene (Paris), a sunny, hazy vision of the city through thick, swirling yellow brushstrokes applied using his signature impasto technique, reminiscent of the style of Vincent van Gogh. Tennessee-born Delaney features in all corners of the exhibition, his work relevant to discussions of abstraction, representation, political resistance and portraiture. Delaney's life was fascinating but tragic, as I learn from Monique Y Wells of Entrée to Black Paris, which provides guided walking tours of Black Parisian history, culture and contemporary life (and which I cannot recommend enough). Wells takes me on a stroll through Montparnasse, a neighbourhood steeped in history. As Wells tells me, Henry Ossawa Tanner, often described as the first famous African American painter, came to live in Paris in the late 19th century, which became a draw for other African American artists to arrive. After the second world war, US legislation provided a package of benefits including education funding, low-interest loans and low-cost mortgages for returning veterans to readjust to civilian life and access opportunities. As such, Montparnasse received a wave of African Americans travelling to Paris to attend art schools. Though Delaney was not a veteran, it was this pre-established enclave that he was welcomed into when he moved to Paris on the invitation of his friend James Baldwin in 1953. Wells tells me that Montparnasse was 'in effect a slum' with ramshackle properties – meaning that poor artists such as Delaney could afford to live and create there. There were a number of bouillons, inexpensive restaurants, that Delaney would frequent, such as the Les Mille Colonnes. Wells also takes me to the site of La Bohème, a former club exclusively for white GIs who had imposed their racist attitudes on to post-second world war French proprietors. It was eventually taken over by Buttercup Powell, the girlfriend of the musician Bud Powell, who transformed the premises into Buttercup's Chicken Shack - a space where musicians and artists could eat cheaply, and where the Trinidadian jazz pianist Hazel Scott played. In the Paris Noir exhibition, the affectionate relationship between Delaney and Baldwin is honoured. As Black gay men, with Delaney struggling with acceptance of his sexuality, their friendship was especially important in light of the hardships and social pressures they faced. Next to a Delaney painting of Baldwin is a quote by the Giovanni's Room author: 'I learned about light from Beauford Delaney: the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face.' Delaney created more than a dozen works featuring or inspired by Baldwin, presenting him in different modes – from the majestic intellectual thinker to the compassionate source of warmth and intimacy he had come to know so well. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion That intimacy is key to Delaney's work, as is the prominence of colour and light – particularly yellow, a pigment for hope that, with the raised textures of impasto, captured a yearning for freedom and happiness in contrast to his real life circumstances. His textures seem to capture sound through image: he uses yellow impasto brushes to paint the contralto and civil rights figure Marian Anderson, reminiscent of Byzantine iconography. As the exhibition text reads, the portrait 'vibrates like a strange music'. The tragic details of the artist's life that I learned on the walking tour added a poignancy to his works. As Wells tells me, Delaney lived in poverty and struggled with mental illness for much of his life. He spent the final years before his death in 1975 in hospital 'for the insane' . Much like Delaney is threaded throughout the exhibition, he is also felt everywhere in this corner of Paris. There are numerous plaques for residences and restaurants he frequented, and so many cafés he would sit outside for hours, people watching and doodling - La Bohème, La Select, La Coupole. At the end of the weekend I'm left with a sense that Paris, as a crossroads for the meeting of Black artists and cultures, has a strong claim for being one of the great Black diasporic cities – something Monique Wells tells me is under-discovered, and continues to surprise people. I finished my time in the French capital with a visit to Waly-Fay restaurant, which serves traditional Senegalese cuisine, and ate one of the best meals of my life – fish pèpè soup, suya skewers breaded in cassava flour and chicken yassa, washed down with a hibiscus drink. I wondered about the Black artists of today who come through here, making plans for radical work and sharing ideas over incredible food. Paris Noir is at the Pompidou Centre until 30 June. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
