Prisoner ,1966
Provenance : Private collection, Johannesburg.
Exhibited :
Literature :
Notes : On the night of the 17th February 1968, the life of the young and phenomenally talented Julian Motau came to a sudden and violent end on the streets of Alexandra Township. His unexpected death elicited an immediate emotional reaction in Johannesburg’s art community, where he had earlier found succour and encouragement from the likes of the artist Judith Mason and the gallerist Linda Givon. The loss of this nascent star-artist was also lamented in the press. Writing in the Afrikaans newspaper Die Beeld on 10 March, after the opening of Motau’s subsequent memorial exhibition in Pretoria, Hennie Pretorius expressed his sadness that “this man had great potential. Even his first works showed that he was going to be one of South Africa’s greatest graphic artists … also his sculptural work, which he had just started, held great promise” [author’s translation].
Apparently struck by a stray bullet from cross-fire between warring gangs in Alexandra, Motau epitomises the urbanized black youth who lost and were denied so much during the repressive era of ‘grand’ apartheid of the 1960s and subsequent decades. His early death and truncated artistic career have endowed him with something of the status of a semi-martyr in the history of emergent art in South Africa’s urban townships. Motau was killed a mere week before his first solo exhibition was due to open. In the wake of the shock of his death, it was decided to defer and recast it as a Memorial Exhibition at the Pretoria gallery of the SA Association of Arts. Contributions to the display and the opening event were made by his influential mentors Dumile Feni and Ezrom Legae. Consisting of 90 works, the exhibition was sold out on the opening night.
Since the emergence of ‘Resistance art’ in South Africa in the late 1970s and the 1980s, Motau’s work has been, as art critic Ivor Powell observed, retrospectively “hailed as marking a new politicisation of township art”. However, while Powell conceded that “there is some truth to this”, he remained of the opinion that Motau’s work “remains too unruly and too unformed to constitute much more than an interesting beginning, tragically curtailed”.[i]
Motau was largely self-taught, but the influence of the brief mentorship with Feni, Legae and Mason is discernable in his highly charged charcoal and graphic works. There are relatively few surviving paintings by him and of them, Prisoner (1966), is both a rare and key example. Painted when Motau was only eighteen, its subject encapsulates the black experience under apartheid. In its simplicity and directness it prefigured much of what was to become part of the visual rhetoric of graphic ‘struggle art’ in subsequent decades. The painting’s compelling nature drew much attention when it was exhibited on Motau’s memorial exhibition in 1968, fuelling Press speculation that Motau had somehow by way of premonition painted this ‘strange picture’ of the mysterious gunman who was to subsequently take his life.
Hayden Proud
[i] Ivor Powell. 2007. Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art
online reference: http://revisions.co.za/biographies/julian-motau/#.YvtXz3ZBxPY
Accompanied by a framed article titled This strange picture may be... Portrait of a Killer - by his Victim! from Die Beeld newspaper, 10 March 1968 and Motau: 'loss to the Black nation' from an unspecified newspaper, 4 March 1968.
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