When I lived in London, I was a sucker for the blockbuster art exhibition. Caravaggio and the Terracotta Army lived up to the star billing. Others did not. But there was an equally special pleasure in stumbling on the unexpected and revelatory somewhere out of the limelight.
Blockbusters are thin on the ground in Johannesburg but surprising, striking, serendipitous shows are not. I watched a bulldozer knock down the wall of the Goethe-Institut to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Johannesburg Art Gallery, located in the now unfashionable downtown, has a terrific combination of old masters and contemporary talents. Arts on Main, the Everard Read and the Goodman Gallery also stand out.
Last weekend I arrived at the Standard Bank Gallery, 90 minutes before the end of its latest month-long show, Ephraim Ngatane: Symphony of Soweto. I’d never heard of Ngatane and didn’t know what to expect. It was one of those wonderful moments of blowing the dust off buried treasure.
He was nicknamed the “Hogarth of the township”. I could see why.
This retrospective featured his acutely observed images of music, sport and social life in Soweto in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Ngatane, who died young, was far from the only township artist in the apartheid years, but I imagine he was the best.
His eye settled not on the bland generality but the telling particular. Celebration shows a family at a dinner table. Their faces, body language and clothing give an ironic rebuttal to the title. The geometric shapes of the figures seduce the viewer up close or from afar.
The Wedding, similarly, has all the joy of a funeral. Seated figure depicts a man in a hat, slumped with hands on knees in cosmic despair, but his left shoulder standing improbably tall in defiance and pride.
Snow Scene, Township is a sublime impressionist rendering of that rare occurrence, snowfall in Johannesburg. The Penny Whistlers nods to a cheap and popular musical instrument, while Fah Fee recalls a widely played Chinese numbers game not unlike working-class bingo.
Eulogises poor but never glamorises poverty
A Township Scene from 1969 is a glowing red and orange haze of people and animals that evokes San cave paintings from millennia ago.
Ngatane walks that tightrope from which many fall. He captures the warmth of township people, even with a tinge of nostalgia, yet never glosses over the hardship and degradation represented by shacks, dirt roads and stray dogs. He eulogises the poor but never glamorises poverty.
The grimmest of scenes are parodied with flamboyant colours. Neville Dubow, an art critic, put it: “This is life in the raw, but couched in terms which are always life-enhancing and not life-defeating.”
What’s also remarkable is the range of subjects and styles, borrowing from old masters but bending them to his own expression. Aside from these scenes from Soweto, you are caught off guard by Nude Woman, a tender portrait that, the caption noted, “is a rare reminder that the nude does not have to be the prerogative of white artists only”.
A still life painting shows a feather in a jar, the silence inviolable, the fibres so exquisite you long to touch them. A portrait of Ngatane’s younger brother shows him an earnest and hopeful student; but a stylised version in violent colours locates him in some Van Gogh or Munch nightmare.
Impressionism and cubism, abstract and documentary realism are all here, delivered in watercolours and oils but also in varied materials including sand and plaster-of-paris. He belonged to an artistic community but followed the beat of his own drum.
Painting becomes a way of life
Ngatane was born in Lesotho in 1938, went to school in Soweto and studied at the influential Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, where Picasso was a lodestar. His teacher, Cecil Skotnes, said: “We soon discovered that painting was not just a hobby for him, but a way of life.”
A book accompanying the exhibition, A Setting Apart, notes that the perpetually difficult life of an artist was heightened by South Africa’s apartheid legislation. Failure to show a regular job in their pass book when it was inspected by police could see them sent to labour farms or prison.
Ngatane held down a day job for a while, but became a successful painter and teacher able to exhibit and sell his work. He was also famed locally as a registered boxer and for playing the penny whistle in jazz bands.
But in 1970 he was involved in a car crash that led to the death of his wife, Thembi. His health and his art went into decline, and a year later he collapsed and died from the effects of tuberculosis. He had worked in a small studio which lacked proper ventilation to remove the turpentine fixatives that slowly poisoned his lungs.
Ephraim Ngatane was 32-years-old, though it seems perverse to say that such a body of work represents promise unfulfilled. His father lived to be 100, his mother to be 99. At their request, new tombstones were placed at the graves of Ngatane and his wife in 1993.
Unfortunately, the engraver misspelled the name of this neglected genius. So it stands, carved in stone, as “Ephriam”. – guardian.co.uk