The crisp white walls of the Standard Bank Gallery now accommodate a broken line of framed sketches by Gerard Sekoto. The works, executed mostly in Paris between his arrival in 1947 and his death in 1993, form a continuous thread. They hint at the artist’s ongoing dilemma.
There is much conjecture about what plagued Sekoto, but it is generally regarded that he laboured under the complexity of his own nature. Which great artist, one may ask, hasn’t wrestled with life’s strictures in pursuit of artistic freedom? Lest this sound corny, historians are there to remind us that, for Sekoto, there was the creeping net of apartheid closing in on all forms of expression, and, for blacks, the very fabric of life. So he fled to London, then Paris.
Clinical psychologist and academic N Chabani Manganyi, in his book Gerard Sekoto: I am an African (Wits University Press), asks the inevitable: “Was post-war Paris a secure refuge from racial bigotry: a place where the supreme measure of humankind was humankind? He must have known that, in the end, the answers did not count for much because, although in due course he became an African Parisian, he never became a Frenchman.”
Manganyi refers to Sekoto’s “sense of unease”. It is this, coupled with Sekoto’s perceived lack of real integration into Parisian society, that left the biographer proclaiming, on his subject’s behalf: “I am an African.”
In the gallery this week, exhibition officer Nhlanhla Ngwenya was hanging the extensive exhibition Gerard Sekoto: From the Paris Studio that has arrived after its season in Cape Town. Ngwenya, a slight man with a sharp eye, has hung every exhibition in this sanctum of corporate involvement in the arts for the past four years.
Ngwenya is also the gallery education officer, responsible for trucking schoolchildren around the venue. As Sekoto’s sketches went up, so he was measuring the height from the floor where the captions would be placed.
It didn’t take much prodding to glean knowledge from this backroom worker of the arts. “Look here,” he said, dragging me over to a rare, undated sketch of a political riot executed by Sekoto sometime between 1975 and 1985.
The work is subtitled Violent Scene in a Township and is done in water-based gouache. In it, in bold oranges and under a blue sky, people are running hither and thither. If you view some of the entwined figures in isolation, they could be dancing. Sekoto must have known, from visitors and news broadcasts, of the macabre carnival atmosphere pervading the riots of the time.
But that’s not what Ngwenya was pointing out. He was pointing to a piece of sticky tape Sekoto had placed on the torn artwork holding the thing together. “When I take schoolchildren through the exhibition, they won’t appreciate this. They want everything to be perfect,” he said.
“Perhaps they are too influenced by the digital revolution,” I ventured.
The current exhibition is presented without bells or whistles — on show is just the artist’s light touch. Then there is also the implicit irony. There are rioting people who could be dancing and, as curator Joe Dolby points out in his catalogue, the finest sketches produced in the worst circumstances: at St Anne’s Hospital in Paris, in 1948, after Sekoto had attempted suicide and suffered a nervous breakdown.
According to Manganyi, quoted in the catalogue, “he had begun hearing accusing voices”.
It is to these voices that playwright and composer Xoli Norman has turned in the making of his cinematic musical Guga Mzimba! The Spirit of Sekoto, currently playing at the Market Theatre. In the play, actress Harriet Manamela plays Matsatsi, a figment of Sekoto’s imagination. She has literally jumped out of a Sekoto portrait — she cajoles him, criticises him, instructs him.
‘I think his personal journey led him to a state in which he was very torn,” says Norman. “There was a lot of ambiguity in the way he represented art. He was averse to joining in movements — the existentialist hype that defined artistic expression when he got to Paris. Then there was the post-war trauma. And yet he wanted to paint Africa at the same time that the African image was fading from memory. I think that the line was torn.
“Hence, in the play I create the figure of Matsatsi. All the books written about him suggest there must have been this other world that he inhabited that led to his epileptic seizures. So I have delved into it, to give a voice from Africa confronting him, saying ‘go back home’.”
To create the play, Norman travelled to Paris, to the studios where Sekoto produced the work now on show at the Standard Bank Gallery, to the hospitals where he convalesced and, finally, to his grave. “For me, being there and not knowing the language kind of got me into the shoes of the man, what he might have felt — the music, the nostalgia,” Norman says. “But I knew I was going to come back home — he didn’t. He didn’t make his dream come true. The very exit became the prison.”
Gerard Sekoto: From the Paris Studio runs at the Standard Bank Gallery in Simmonds Street, Johannesburg, until September 30. Call (011) 631 1889 for more information. Guga Mzimba! The Spirit of Sekoto runs at the Market Theatre until August 20. Call (011) 832 1641 for more information