When Alan Crump passed away on May 1 2009 he left behind an extraordinary legacy of committed engagement with, and passionate involvement in, the South African art world.
As a teacher, curator, writer, judge, arts administrator and artist of extraordinary subtlety and skill, Crump was driven throughout his distinguished career by a fearless vision of excellence.
This vision informed his role as professor of fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, where, as one of the youngest professors ever appointed (he was just 31 years old), his commitment to professionalism and pushing the boundaries of creative practice informed every aspect of the fine-arts department.
Crump was also an important and powerful figure in the South African art world, actively involved in the influential Cape Town Triennial and Johannesburg biennales, as well as a number of competitions. He served as director and adviser to many art galleries and prestigious collections, and was on the advisory boards of many of the country’s national museums. He also chaired the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts between 1995 and 1999, and curated and published widely.
Towards the end of his life he was instrumental, as scientific curator and consultant for the Standard Bank international exhibitions, in bringing comprehensive exhibitions of the important European modern masters, Chagall and Miró, to South Africa for the first time.
Comprehensive retrospective
The considerable scope of these activities in no way detracted from his ongoing practice as an artist. This exhibition is hosted by two significant cultural institutions that he in many ways helped to shape — the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the National Arts Festival. It celebrates the extraordinary depth and integrity of Crump’s artistic vision by bringing together, for the first time, a comprehensive retrospective of his work.
From the austerity of early conceptual work, influenced but in no way constrained by the conceptualism he encountered as a Fulbright student in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s, to the boldly monumental watercolours that push the limits of what we understand by the notion of landscape and the ravages wrought upon it by mining an industry and the profoundly subtle and elegiac abstract watercolours of his last solo exhibition in 2001, Crump’s work is testimony to his unwavering vision and consummate skill as an artist.
Crump was not a prolific artist. He tended to work in short, concentrated periods, balancing his creative output with his considerable commitments in the art world. He was also well known to many students, young artists, colleagues and associates as something of a behind-the-scenes facilitator, a man of extraordinary collegial generosity and insight with an uncanny ability to identify and bring to fruition potential synergies.
Nonetheless, as the works in this exhibition show, his relatively small output in no way detracted from the quality and integrity of his work. Indeed, the fact that his work is represented in all the major South African public and corporate collections is a testimony to the high esteem in which he was held as an artist.
Clarity and fearlessness
The exhibition also features many works from private collections previously not exhibited. Viewed with the better-known public works, it is possible to trace the consistency of his vision and the consolidation of his technical skills over the course of his career. The themes of abjection, loss, destruction and suffering that first appear in his student and postgraduate work are developed with a clarity and fearlessness that pervade the body of work.
Featuring a number of watercolours engaging a range of subjects and scale, the exhibition also allows us to celebrate his skill as a watercolourist and his unrivalled mastery of this extraordinarily difficult medium, even as he pushes its boundaries to limits unimagined by any of his South African contemporaries.
This is an edited extract from curator Federico Freschi’s foreword to the catalogue for the exhibition Alan Crump: A Fearless Vision which opens on July 1 at the Standard Bank Gallery in the Albany History Museum
For more from the National Arts Festival, see our special report.
