There is an anecdote in art historian Elza Miles’s upcoming book, Nomfanekiso, Who Paints at Night (soon to be released by Fernwood Press), about artist Gladys Mgudlandlu. It tells of the painter visiting the eminent trade unionist Ray Alexander-Simons in the Cape Town suburb of Oranjezicht.
On this occasion, which probably took place sometime in the early Sixties, Mgudlandlu intended to paint a wealthy home from the vantage point of Alexander-Simons’s veranda. According to the aged activist she told the artist: “Use my stoep, but what about painting the shanty homes where your people live?”
As Miles puts it: “Mgudlandlu said that nobody would buy these paintings, but Alexander-Simons assured her of the contrary. At Mgudlandlu’s next exhibition there were four paintings about her own people. They were all sold.”
This anecdote hints at the complex relations Mgudlandlu had with her critics and mentors. If Miles’s text is to be believed, while Mgudlandlu was fêted to the point of being black South Africa’s most celebrated artist of her time, she was also rather misunderstood.
Born near Peddie in the Eastern Cape in 1917, Mgudlandlu may have been christened Gladys, but her African name was Nomfanekiso. Miles notes that the name is derived from the word “picture … because at birth, as a six-pound baby, she simulated the picture of a person”.
Later in life Mgudlandlu would train and work as a nurse, but ultimately she came to function as an art teacher, working for 15 years at the Athlone Bantu Community School as an art instructor.
Mgudlandlu held her first exhibition in the Port Elizabeth township of New Brighton in the early Sixties. On that occasion her fellow artist George Pemba paid tribute to her in the Eastern Province Herald, with the words: “She is an honour to our womanhood, since they have always been regarded as useful for scrubbing floors and hoeing corn and mealie fields.”
Miles’s text is quite sketchy, probably because of the lack of any detailed recording of the lives of black artists of the period. But it tells a fascinating tale of what life was like for even the most prominent black artists of the day. When the township of Athlone was “rezoned” under the Bantu Education Act of 1953, Mgudlandlu and other black teachers were moved to Langa township where they taught under a tin roof. And when the school was transferred to better premises, the move “lasted the entire day as each person (including learners) had to carry books, furniture and equipment”.
Mgudlandlu painted by paraffin lamp since there was no electricity in her neighbourhood, and she stored her work under an old stove and under her simple iron bed.
Another anecdote tells of a township fire that obliterated all her work in her home except for a single landscape of a Xhosa homestead, damaged at its bottom edge.
Life must have been an experience of immense contradiction for the artist who took tea with parliamentarians’ wives and who sold work to liberal Jewish housewives at, what was for those days, a good price. Indeed, the Cape Argus noted in 1963 that a “R105 work by Gladys sells in three minutes”.
Given her life experience, Mgudlandlu would have been amused, and would probably have felt quite at home at the launch of a major retrospective of her work held at Johannesburg Art Gallery last Sunday. She would have been comforted to discover that what remains of her life’s work is still a precious entity retaining all of its original enigma. People are still trying to fathom why, in a time of turmoil and difficulty for her people, Mgudlandlu chose to paint mostly hills, cows and birds.
At the time of her greatest productivity (she produced her work in a period spanning about nine years before becoming too religious to paint) she was lightly panned by critics who termed her work naive.
Today Mgudlandlu still battles that criticism, even though the current collection sees her as an “expressionist” rather than naive.
In opening the exhibition Keorapetse Kgositsile, the deputy director of Strategic Support for Arts, Culture and Heritage Services for the City of Johannesburg, said: “Some critics have called her naive and childish. My argument would be that if you look at what she does with colour, image and texture, no one naive could possibly produce what she produced. She was very conscious of what she wanted to do. And she was courageous to follow her imagination, to express the fruits of that exploration.”
The collection and its accompanying book took Miles six years to assemble. In its presentation, Miles has chosen not to show the work chronologically, but thematically, narratively and dramatically.
The exhibition, called Gladys Mgudlandlu: A Retrospective of the South African Expressionist, is divided into six halls bearing titles that reflect the significance of the works assembled in them. The first, dubbed In the Beginning, houses three key paintings from diverse periods of Mgudlandlu’s career. According to Miles, these show her move from the maturity of her early work to the loose and free style she adopted towards the end of her short painting career.
In the section called Growth and Flowering Miles notes there is an overall picture of paradise. “Not a single hint of death or suffering — this is joy and paradise.”
The next section is called Harmony and “pays tribute to the creativeness of people. Women gathering wood are symbols of nurturing.”
Then comes a revelation of Mgudlandlu’s major theme, Language of Birds. With her vast knowledge of Eastern Cape “bird lore”, Miles tells us, Mgudlandlu became known as unoktaka — the bird lady.
Most dramatic is the hall dubbed The Fall, which begins with a work of 1960 that hints at the style of William Blake. It is this painting of Adam and Eve being ousted from paradise that provided Miles with the trigger for her themes. Surrounding The Fall are images Mgudlandlu painted of Cape urban sprawl.
Finally, as an epilogue, there is a small section called Hope and Goodwill. Here is a video monitor showing bizarre black-and-white Afrikaans newsreel footage from the Sixties. White women in miniskirts, with thick eyeliner and period bobs, eye the works of Mgudlandlu in the same way their contemporaries were doing with the early prints of Andy Warhol on the far side of the art world, in New York.
Gladys Mgudlandlu: A Respective of the South African Expressionist is on show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Klein Street, Joubert Park, until January 5 2003. The exhibition is funded by the city of Johannesburg, the MTN Foundation, the National Arts Council, Sanlam and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.