South African art history, such as it is, is marked by a pattern of selective amnesias and cyclical returns. Remembering Legae, the Goodman Gallery’s homage to this artist, who died earlier this year, is a return, if you like, that offers a fascinating insight into that history, a still point in which to consider the circumstances of its uneven course.
The exhibition is a collection of Legae’s bronze sculptures and drawings, sought out and critically curated to trace the artist’s work from the Sixties to the present. The bronzes, divided into temporal sections, are both compelling artworks and articulate documents of international resonances in South African artistic production during the late Fifties and Sixties.
As part of the famous “Polly Street Era”, and as a contemporary and friend of such influential artists as Cecil Skotnes, Bill Ainslie and Eduardo Villa, Legae’s modernist and abstract influences are apparent. His genius was in fusing these elements with an African idiom that found in abstraction, figuration and metaphor a means of powerful political observation – contorting humans and beasts with strangely attenuated heads were a recurring theme of his work at the time.
Legae’s drawings, however, are the magnetic force of this show. In most cases, where these convey political protest, they do so with great power and delicacy. Producing at a time when overt political content in work by black artists was dangerous – perhaps a reason why abstract expressionism became such a popular expressive mode – Legae communicated his way around those dangers with intelligence and a complete command of his medium and material.
Chicken, one of his famous works made after the death of Steve Biko, depicts through its fine lines and swirling details an abstract creature, half-human, half-animal, an innocent spirit in the painful throes of departing from this world. What is sensed, from a contemporary standpoint, is an eternal moment in which something is profoundly wrong: the agonies of torture are suggestively traced but almost physically felt. Chicken, for all its covertness, is a profound piece of political work.
The gallery has also located works from Legae’s 1982 Freedom is Dead series, works which he exhibited in Chile under a different title after intervention by the apartheid government.
In these pencil-on-paper drawings, Legae
again subjects human and animal forms to a perverse but prophetic alchemy: these are nightmarish allegories of mutilation and decay, surreal mindscapes in which pre- sentient mutants preside over unnamable horrors.
There are a number of drawings which Legae had intended for exhibition at a later date with Skotnes, but which are now on show for the first time. They are exquisitely fine experiments in form and metaphor, in some cases reminiscent of Dumile or Goya. The privilege of viewing these particular works, shown unfortunately in the absence of their creator, is one that infuses this entire exhibition.
Remembering Legae: 1937-1999 is on at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until June 5