John Koenakeefe Mohl; South African 1903-1985; Caught in Storm in Soweto in Soweto Johannesburg (S.A)
Provenienza : Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 16 and 17 April 2007, lot 541 The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.
Exhibited : Pretoria Art Museum, General Exhibition, September 2001 - January 2007.
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Note : Weather - rain, wind, smog and even snow - figures prominently in the mid-century urban scenes of John Koenakeefe Motlhakangna, known professionally as John Mohl. Snow Morning, Sophiatown (1942) in the MTN Art Collection is a prototypical work depicting two female figures labouring outdoors in a working-class suburb blanketed with snow. Featured in the 1942 exhibition of the South African Academy, the work established a rhetorical style that Mohl gradually perfected over the ensuing decades as he definitively shifted from depicting rural landscapes to cityscapes. "A distinguishing feature of the cityscapes is that the workers are almost always hurrying into the illusory space away from the viewer so that the facelessness of an almost dehumanised working force strikes home," noted Elza Miles of Mohl's studies of workers dissolving into hazy urban backgrounds from the 1960s and 70s.1 The travails of long, weather-wracked commutes from segregated 'locations' to work undeniably form the basis of these documentary studies, but they are not reducible to mere sociological record. Mohl's work forms part of a global canon of portrayals of weather: from Childe Hassam's impressionist studies of umbrella-toting pedestrians in New York during the Gilded Age to Peter Clarke's pictures of windswept and rain-soaked inhabitants of the Cape. A perceptive Rand Daily Mail critic in 1964 noted an additional similarity: "One may sense the bleakness and the cold … Yet there is a peculiar beauty present reminiscent of that which one finds in Japanese prints."2 There is an undeniable worldliness to Mohl's paintings of black resilience in Johannesburg. 1Elza Miles (1997) Land Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists. Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, page 61. 2H.E.W. aka Teddy Winder (1964) 'Life in the locations (art shows)', Rand Daily Mail, Wednesday 4 November, page 10.
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