Mother and baby ,1969
Provenance : Private collection, Johannesburg.
Exhibited : Everard Read, Cape Town, 'OASIS: 25TH ANNIVERSARY GROUP EXHIBITION', 3 December to 31 December 2021.; Johannesburg Art Gallery, 'Dumile Feni Retrospective Exhibition', 31 January to 19 April 2005.
Literature : Dube, P. M. (2006). 'Dumile Feni Retrospective'. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, illustrated on p.102 where the title 'Woman and Baby Smoking' is given and the work is listed as undated and on p.6 where it was displayed at the 'Dumile Feni Retrospective' exhibition.
Notes : Dumile Feni’s signature style of provocative and emotive contorted figuration has enjoyed widespread, singular aesthetic influence on generations of creatives working in South Africa since the mid-1960s. What distinguishes Dumile’s work is the symmetrical combination of enviable artistic talent, and an interest in depicting the unspeakable suffering of blacks under apartheid. Prior to Dumile’s entry into the South African art world, this tension between the terrible and the beautiful was hardly explored so plainly and with such vigour. Even if he wasn’t the first to invent new ways of seeing the black experience, using commonplace references, Dumile calibrated more tormented and intensified ways of seeing the black condition. As art historian Frances Verstraete once noted, such art can be ‘politicised by subject alone, even if the aims of the artists involved were not specifically political.’[1]
Interestingly, the theme of mother and child portrayed in this pen-ink drawing aptly titled Mother and Baby – done in 1969, the year just after Dumile went into exile – adopts this subject-matter, not necessarily as a motif of art historical convention, but simply for its resonance with the artist’s upbringing and life experiences. However, this adoption deliberately betrays the basic tenets of the tradition largely predicated on preconceived Western theology of gender and maternity, and according to Verstaere, ‘becomes the image of pathos, a memory of a lost unity.’[2]
The drawing depicts a slightly emaciated nude woman whose unapologetic pose contrarily dignifis her. She is contemplating the lit cigarette in her left hand and pressing her right breast into the open mouth of her also unclothed child with her right hand. She’s paying no attention to the precariously positioned child clinging to her body. What might seem like a cynical commentary on the subject, has very personal resonance with the artist’s life as an orphan. Dumile lost his parents at a very young age. When his mother, Bettie Feni, died in 1951, the role of raising the young Dumile fell to his older sister, Nomakula ‘Kuli’ Mngxaji, to whom he often dedicated epistolary and poetic inscriptions at the edges of some of his well-known works. Kuli and Dumile would never see each other again after he went into exile in 1968. The inscriptions made on the drawing; ‘Yoliswa. 68. Amos. Feni. Beti’, repeatedly memorialize his family – that is, his cousins, ancestors and his mother – some alive and others already passed away in 1969.
Athi Mongezeleli Joja
[1] Francis Verstraete, 1989. ‘Township Art: Context, Form and Meaning’, in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, eds, Anitra Nettleton & David Hammond Tooke. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, pp152–71.
[2] Ibid, 160.
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