Stephen Gray
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
Arrived at last in Johannesburg – via the Pretoria Art Gallery, the Labia Museum in Muizenberg and the Bellville Gallery of the show’s sponsor, Sanlam – is the retrospective of the work of the neglected South African artist, Harry Trevor. Perhaps retrospective is too sweeping a description, as Trevor’s career was embattled during his furious youth, and then aborted after 1947 when he went into exile in Britain. Depression and drink drained what was left of his skills.
As the auctioneer Stephan Welz made clear at the launch of Harry Trevor: The South African Years (1939 to 1946) for the friends of the leaking, now only semi-functional Johannesburg Art Gallery last week, Trevor did not promote himself and keep producing, and so turned out a poor commercial proposition. He was briefly written about, then written off, so he went into no public collections and hence apparently disappeared.
This select assembly of Trevor’s small remains, curated by the South African National Gallery’s Hayden Proud, is indeed an eye-opener, even if it presents only the furious output of a 20-year-old intent on flouting the established art world. So, 47 items, all but three engravings being of the crucial and conflicted early 1940s.
He was a product of Johannesburg’s primarily Jewish intelligentsia, his father from Riga being one Yedidya Trapowski, who had Anglicised himself into Godfrey Trevor. Nor after King Edward VII School and a stint at Wits University was the son in question utterly converted. On the contrary, the wall of seven self-portraits in oils shows him trapped in the frames, enlarging his nose and flattening his lips in order to Africanise, shrieking colours calling attention to his increasingly unsettling, mask-like face.
One of his cronies, subject of an astounding portrait, was the rebel Boerseun poet, Vincent Swart, who, in 1941, sat for him in Cape Town, together with his ferocious wife Lilian, hanging alongside him once more. The grooved pink impasto catches the man’s vigour, but those piercing eyes are a fellow drinker’s. Desperately grounded by club- feet, as an immortal gesture of solidarity, Swart would come to lead the Alexandra bus-boycotters marching to town. Trevor just fled.
And yes, they were old-time communists, which means they detested and feared Nazis. Herman Charles Bosman was another such, one of the culture’s constitutional irregulars of the left. When the conservative system confronted Trevor in the shape of the then doyen of South African painting, Edward Roworth, he was offered only two options: a concentration camp to sort out his race problem, or a mental asylum where his decadent tendencies might be brought under some control.
The source of this appalling anecdote is the exhibition catalogue, a model of its kind, funded up to the roof by Sanlam and so costing a pleasantly affordable R15. A further morning in the gallery’s reference library produced not much, except this: in 1946, to reform and sweep the arts forward after that wretched war, David Lewis published the manifesto The Naked Eye. There Harry Trevor is nominated to do the “leadership”. But instead, we know, the clock then ran backwards in the South African arts for the next half century. The radical fringe was taken out first.
By way of resistance, what Trevor did best was quote to cut-off South Africans those very moderns which were so taboo. He did a gorgeous, purply reclining Cezanne woman, here part of a wall of nudes; a Van Gogh of vigorous workers in a field, even down to those graveyard cypresses on the horizon; and the teasingly Cubist version of an Indian rug. Georges Rouault’s stained-glass effect is everywhere, but stirred around as a child does, to redesign your basic fried egg with tomato sauce.
And his genius is in the humour. His big beggar is a real Yiddish schnorrer. Anything but sentimental tourist kitsch, his Malay Quarter studies are more Slav than Slaams, Russian ghetto stuff.
He undertook all the prescribed traditional subjects: the portrait (note the devastating Mr Wolpert), the studio interior, the flower piece and the still life. But one of the latter category is the tip-off, being a savagely satirical Still Life with Decaying Vegetables. And his only religious study is of that utterly neglected labourer – not the Christ or Mary, but The Carpenter.
Coming to know the whole of the brief Trevor story as on display here, as it never was in his lifetime, one finds most poignant those studies of bottles. They signal a talent just pissed away. But they also testify to a harsher truth, that the retrograde South Africa into which he was born was not sharp enough in art matters to sustain him. A young country then, South Africa so loathed the revolutionary power of its very own youth, it forbade even the exhibition of them. Now see exactly what was withheld.
Harry Trevor: The South African Years (1939 to 1946) is on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until May 15