On the day before the Thursday-night opening of Battiss and ÂCompany at the Goodman Gallery, curator Neil Dundas entertained 19 requests for personal previews of the exhibition.
Each resulted in a sale. And by the end of the opening weekend more than half of the 76 works had been sold, bringing in a snip over R2.2-million. And that’s before VAT, by the way.
Even with the help of some accompanying artists whose work is also for sale, Walter Battiss has a following that’s clearly in the pink.
The kernel of this exhibition comprises a 1949 oil titled: Swimmers and Fish in a Pool and a suite of 15 drawings made between 1940 and 1945. The painting, now benefiting from a cleaning and light restoration, had been on extended loan to a friend of the artist, whereas the drawings had been kept in a shoebox and never exhibited until now.
“These works come from the very beginning of Battiss’s attempt to reduce the figure to a style he’d seen in rock art,” said Dundas. “It was part of his desire to distil a simpler line for a new African modernism.” This interest in what rock art had to offer modern art had already resulted in Battiss publishing The Amazing Bushman in 1939 and also organising the first exhibition of rock-art paintings in Johannesburg in the mid-1940s.
Leaving behind the realism that had preoccupied his early output, Battiss’s passion for new forms of modernism was influenced by petroglyphs he had seen around Southern Africa. These ancient rock engravings not only influenced his style of image-making, but also constantly appear in the details of the works on this exhibition.
Reinventing the familiar
The colour palette and stylisation of figures in Swimmers and Fish in a Pool prefigured Battiss’s own abstraction and the ways in which other South African artists who would later take up varying degrees of abstraction.
When Dundas first viewed these works four years ago, it sparked an idea for an exhibition that grew to include selling examples from seven private collections. ÂBattiss and Company is the third exhibition on the artist Dundas has produced in the past nine years.
Throughout his career, Battiss returned to renditions of seas, rock pools, swimmers and pastoral figures, constructing compositions with birds and flowers, each time reinventing something in the repetition.
The exhibition includes Unpundulu Bird (c 1979), a spectacular work of human and bird forms that leaves much of the warp yarns exposed, creating the intense effect of an over-stringed puppet. It is these various recurring themes that also coalesce in Fook Island (the imaginary world Battiss created).
What the exhibition does very well is to establish the connections between an early interest in rock art, the quest for a new African modernism and the coalescence of many of these ideas in Fook Island. From the late 1960s Battiss travelled to a number of islands — Greece, the Indian Ocean islands of the Comores, the Seychelles, Madagascar and Zanzibar, the Pacific island of Hawaii and the South Sea islands of Fiji and Samoa. He was taken with the apparent simplicity of island life and began working on the Fook Island concept, which was first materialised in an exhibition with Norman Catherine in 1975.
Apartness and isolation
There is a particular poignancy to the different Fook Island works on exhibition in Battiss and Company. The island form, by its very nature, presupposes a certain apartness and isolation.
But Fook’s idyll was the opposite of apartheid’s isolation. It is sometimes difficult to reconcile its escapism with the intensity of political violence and oppression in the second half of the 1970s, notably the Soweto uprisings and the death of Steve Biko.
Fook garnered a substantial following, locally and internationally, at a time when South Africa was becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. The emergence of Fook’s utopia in the context of an apartheid dystopia makes it difficult to ignore its irony.
“Fook Island combines whimsy with bittersweet seriousness,” said Dundas. “This is part of what makes it one of South Africa’s great art
projects.”
Jack of all trades and a master of none
From courtroom clerk and spare-time sketcher to teacher, notably at Pretoria Boys’ High School, from art professor at Unisa to King Ferd of Fook Island, Battiss’s work has been highly entertaining right from the beginning. “He was our Matisse and our Picasso,” said Dundas. “He was our king of Pop.”
But his reputation among scholars took longer to establish. “In some ways he was a jack of all trades and a master of none,” said Dundas of the artist’s vast output and variety of approaches that includes oils, watercolours and silkscreen printing, as well as sculpture and ceramics.
Alhough this eclecticism and eccentrism are hard to ignore, what tends to be elided in popular and even scholarly understandings of Battiss’s output is the sheer passion, innovation and quality of output that underpins the playfulness of his practice. In the mid-1950s, for example, Battiss was the first South African artist to produce an art exhibition consisting entirely of silkscreens. This is forgotten in a distraction with his fantastical silkscreen worlds of multiple limbs with lashings of nakedness and erotica.
He also remains one of South Africa’s most accomplished watercolourists, a fact quietly recognised by one of his greatest admirers, Robert Hodgins, who shared Battiss’ whimsical semi-abstract subjects and rich use of colour.
Unlike many of his white peers, Battiss found inspiration in the works of artists such as Ephraim Ngatane and Lucas Sithole, reversing the stereotype of how art education was transmitted during apartheid. Some of this attitude is reflected in the way Dundas has modestly introduced the “company” in this exhibition, including works by Sydney Kumalo and Cecil Skotnes, as well as the aforementioned Sithole and Ngatane.
Incongruence
Ironically, at a time when Battiss was energised by the way Ngatane reduced forms into a blurring series of rhythmic shapes, the latter was starting to produce increasingly derivative township scenes and exploring European “salon” styles from studying the work of, in particular, Jean Welz.
The incongruence between ÂNgatane’s artistic interests and commercial imperatives is reflected in two paintings Dundas has included in the exhibition: Kwela Boys (1967) and Blue Nude (1969). Whereas the abstract vitality of the former shows Ngatane at his inspiring peak,
the latter is a derivative quote of a Welz painting, produced for an easy market.
The company in this exhibition extends to other artists and works, including the artist’s wife, Grace Anderson, an art educationalist whose painting career lingered in the shadow of the colossus that was Battiss.
Rain, the artist’s daughter-in-law, works in a densely composed style that still bears the influence of Battiss. She mixed the colours for many of his paintings, including Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift in the Distance (1979), painted on the centenary of the Battle of Isandlwana.
Vivid simplicity
Battiss was invited by Dan ÂRakgoathe to teach at Rorke’s Drift, at a time when John Muafangejo was a student.
In addition to one of Rakgoathe’s prints, Battiss and ÂCompany includes a remarkable self-portrait by Muafangejo, one of less than 10 known paintings by an artist more well known for his black-and-white linocuts. The portrait has a vivid simplicity that is uncannily echoed by Moshekwa Langa’s similarly vivid and simple mixed-media portraits shown at Michael Stevenson in Cape Town in 2007.
By locating most of the accompanying works by other artists in a wing of the Goodman Gallery, Dundas missed an opportunity to rethink a version of Battiss that is often reduced to the eccentric ego. An exploration of the group of artists that inspired and collaborated with him comes at an important time in the reconsideration of the artist’s place in the history of art.
Sure, this is a selling show, not a museum exhibition, but Dundas’s self-positioning as a curator creates an expectation for more complex insights into this remarkable artist. The realisation of the “company” section makes for one weakness in an otherwise stellar show.
Rory Bester is an art historian at the Wits School of Arts.
Battiss and Company is on at Goodman Johannesburg until August 6