Gerard Sekoto (South African, 1913-1993)Interior with woman, Sophiatown oil on canvas 39.7 x 49.5cm (15 5/8 x 19 1/2in).Footnotes:ProvenanceCollection of Lily Basner;Thence by descent, Marcella Bloom.ExhibitedJohannesburg, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, (November 1989 - January 1990), no. 24.IllustratedBarbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, (Randburg: Dictum Publishing, 1988), pp. 70-73. (illustrated).Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989), p. 26. (illustrated).Gerard Sekoto painted Interior with Woman in Sophiatown, a dormitory suburb of Johannesburg, where he lived from January 1939 until his departure for District Six, Cape Town, early in 1942. In 1938, his father had died, effectively releasing him from any obligation to continue a career in teaching and, in the same year, he won second prize in a national competition for Black artists which confirmed his ambition to become an artist. First prize had gone to George Milwa Pemba because, as Sekoto noted, 'he had been through a course of art which improved his technique'. Because of his own perceived technical limitations, Sekoto resisted the encouragement of his friend, the sculptor Ernest Mancoba, to travel with him to Paris at that time. He also felt that he did not know enough about people's everyday lives which he had already decided would be his principal subject-matter. His visits to Sophiatown and, subsequently District Six and Eastwood, Pretoria, were opportunities to immerse himself in urban culture which he, coming from a protected small-town background, felt he knew too little about. But Paris, the home of Baudelaire's Painter of Modern Life, remained Sekoto's ultimate destination, notwithstanding his ambivalence about Modern European art.Sekoto's prize-winning works had been a drawing and a water-colour which have not been traced. In Sophiatown he quickly acquired poster paints and, through the assistance of Judith Gluckman, Alexis Preller and other artists of the recently-formed New Group, was soon introduced to oil painting. Having saved money from his teaching, and staying with relatives, Sekoto was able to devote his time in Sophiatown to his art, and he produced a prodigious amount of work in different media in the three years he was there. His subjects included street scenes, usually with people, scenes from a commuter's life, on trains and in waiting rooms, domestic interiors, and figure studies. Sekoto had several exhibitions while he stayed in Sophiatown, both in the race-based South African Academy exhibitions and in the commercial Gainsborough Galleries. His Yellow Houses, A Street in Sophiatown was bought by the Johannesburg Art Gallery from the South African Academy exhibition in 1940. And he was invited to exhibit with the New Group in 1943. These successes seem to have confirmed his ambition to move to Paris.While still teaching in Pietersburg/Polokwane, Sekoto had observed young men, returning from Johannesburg and Pretoria, who would display 'certain fashions in ways of dressing, walking, manner of speaking, singing, [and] dancing' and he was keenly aware of the behaviour patterns of all social types in his new urban environment. He abandoned rural subject-matter and later also encouraged Pemba to paint 'township life'. He described how he would make rapid sketches of people on small pieces of paper to avoid drawing attention to himself and then work up the images at home. Interior with Woman, while atypical in subject-matter, displays the same sympathetic curiosity about the living conditions of his Sophiatown subjects. In a well-ordered domestic space, a woman rests from her labours while her family is at work, or at school. The lack of electricity in the house has given Sekoto the opportunity, as in a few other interior scenes of this time, to explore the emotional, even dramatic potential of sunlight flooding through billowing curtains. The mood is uncertain. But, for an artist who had only recently started working in oils, the painting exhibits extraordinary sophistication in the revelation of objects through light and the sense of light occupying space.We are grateful to Professor Michael Godby for his completion of the above footnote.BibliographyElza Miles, Land and Lives, A Story of Early Black Artists, (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1997).N. Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto: 'I am an African', (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004).Jillian Carman, editor, Visual Century, South African Art in Context, Volume I, 1907 – 1948, (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011).Song for Sekoto, Gerard Sekoto, 1913 – 2013, (Craighall: The Gerard Sekoto Foundation, 2013).This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: ** VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium.For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com
