Alexis Preller; South African 1911-1975; Pastorale
Provenance : Acquired from the artist by his friend Tobie Louw, and thence by descent.
Exhibited : Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Alexis Preller, retrospective exhibition, 24 October to 26 November 1972.
Literature : Deichmann (1986) Die Werk van Alexis Preller 1934-1948 en 'n Catalogue Raisonné, unpublished master's dissertation University of Pretoria, catalogue number 595. Pretoria Art Museum (1972) Alexis Preller Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Pretoria: PAM, illustrated in black and white on page 99, catalogue no 87.
Notes : In classical music, a pastorale is defined as a passage with a seemingly familiar, gentle melody that evokes an idyllic rural life of times long past. In the present lot, painted in 1957, Preller presents the image as if it were an ancient tablet, a palimpsest that has been inscribed and reinscribed over the ages, the apparent ravages of time seeming to reveal hieratic figures and carved forms that partially emerge from the layered sediments. The draped women suggest a mythical African history that Preller returns to repeatedly in his oeuvre, and the central red figure combines an Egyptian pharaonic head with the bent-kneed ancestor figures that the artist encountered on his travels in the Congo in the 1930s and sketched on visits to the Musée de l'Homme ethnographic museum in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s.Preller studied Egyptian, Etruscan and Quattrocento murals in situ in 1953, in preparation for his Johannesburg Receiver of Revenue building commission, and the seemingly time-worn, peeling and encrusted surfaces of the present lot, which reflect the state of decay of the murals he visited, were revisited by the artist in another tripartite composition, In the Beginning (1962), as well as in the similarly enigmatic Solomon and the Queen and Sheba (1965), now both in the Pretoria Art Museum.
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