Ernest Mancoba: Drawings and Paintings from the Studio

Drawings & Paintings from the Studio

E R N E S T M A NC OB A

Drawings & Paintings from the Studio

E R N E S T M A NC OB A

Ernest Mancoba is arguably the most important modern artist from South Africa, and perhaps Africa, yet his work has not received widespread critical revaluation. The British artist and activist Rasheed Araeen, in a keynote address to the South African Visual Arts Historians in 2008 (a revised version of which is reproduced here), described Mancoba as one of the most important artists in any genealogy of African modernism: [H]e is Africa’s most original modern artist, but, more importantly ... he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority … and demolishes it from within.

Mancoba was born in 1904 in Johannesburg, and died in 2002 in Paris, France. He trained as a teacher in Pietersburg, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Fort Hare.

In 1938 he left South Africa for Paris, where he studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs. The outbreak of World War II prevented him from leaving Paris and, in 1940, he was interned by the Germans in St Denis where he married Danish artist Sonja Ferlov in 1942. After their release, Ernest and Sonja settled in Denmark where they became members of the newly founded CoBrA group of abstract artists (CoBrA is an abbreviation of COpenhagen, BRussels, Amsterdam), and he exhibited with the legendary group between 1948 and 1950. In 1952 they returned to France with their young son, Wonga, and were together until Sonja’s death in 1984.

Throughout Mancoba’s life, he searched for the universal in art and humanity in the belief that art was ‘a means to favour a greater consciousness in Man, which ... is part of the struggle for any human liberation’ (see his interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist p53). Over the course of his life, Mancoba was dedicated to recreating a single image, loosely based on the human form as represented by the West African Kota reliquary figures. As time went by, its expression was reduced further and further in his search for the purest essence of the figurative form.

Mikael Andersen has known Mancoba and his wife since the 1960s, and his gallery has represented their estates since their respective deaths. The works in this catalogue were found

by Wonga Mancoba and Mikael Andersen in 2012, in the studio that Ernest shared with Sonja for many years.

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ESSAY

Modernity, Modernism and Africa’s Authentic Voice Rasheed Araeen

The question of Africa’s authentic voice within modernity can only be resolved within history. History contains both what is imposed upon it – often an ideology – and what confronts and transgresses it in an endeavour to maintain the ability of human imagination to create with total freedom. Although the former continues to prevail as the dominant discourse in Africa, as elsewhere, it is in what has been created by the latter that we find the true significance of Africa’s achievement in modernity. In other words, the historical achievement of Africa in modernity is not of a predetermined nature or contained within or by what is imposed upon it. More importantly, it also questions the racially based dogmas of Negritude and gives Africa a uniquely original modern voice; one that emerged in the work of an African artist in Paris in 1939.1 However, this proposition would

perhaps be difficult even for Africa itself to accept or recognise, because this voice not only does not conform to what prevails in Africa but confronts the most common perception by Africa itself about the nature of its place in modernity. What is, in fact, generally recognised and celebrated, even by most of Africa’s own historians, is what began as mimicry under the tutelage of colonial paternalism and patronage. In order, therefore, to recognise Africa’s true modern voice and its historical significance, it is important to separate it from a misguided notion of Africa’s entry into modern history. Whatever prevails today is not only due to flawed cultural theories and general ignorance of history, but also the inability of Africa’s own historians to fully comprehend the historical significance of what has surpassed the endemic mindset of Africa’s postcolonial ruling elite,2 7

or the aspirations of a surrogate bourgeoisie that takes pride in mimicking Western values in the name of Africa’s modern progress. The significance of Africa’s modern voice or identity lies centrally within the historical trajectory of modernism, not only in what it represents as art but as an allegory of what could have liberated and can liberate Africa from the legacies of both its own moribund, if not fossilised, traditions and what has been imposed on it by colonialism in the name of modern progress.

that can only be approached through a concept of history that is capable of recuperating the past in the interests of the present. There seems to be no such discourse as yet – or not to my knowledge – that connects Onabolu’s work with Africa’s own tradition of realism. Not only is empirical evidence needed but also theoretical discourse that connects the past with the present, beyond the facile polemics of the colonised mind.

The issue here is not only the relationship of ‘realism’ with the beginning of modernism in art in Africa, but how and why this particular realism became the beginning of modernism in Africa. Was it a benign creative force that led to this beginning, or was it meant to trap the imagination to serve a specific purpose? The answer to this lies within the new social forces that emerged in Nigeria at the end of the 19th century, resulting from the colonially imposed Western ideas of human progress and advancement – and they actually produced Onabolu.

The realism of his work is a product of colonialism, not an opposition to it as some believe. To understand this, it is necessary to acknowledge that colonialism was not a monolithic regime under which everything was carried out by force of stick or gun.

The success of a colonial regime depended not only on its violence but also on liberal means by which it successfully enticed the natives to participate in its consolidation and administration. This produced an educated class in Africa, as in other parts of the colonial world, which accepted the modernity of a Western system and, by adopting it, not only took part in the colonial regime but ultimately took over its very administration in the name of postcolonial independence and self-determination.

× Our concern here is with modern art in Africa, which according to most prevailing art histories began with what was adopted from so-called ‘realism’ in Western painting and became the basis of art in Nigeria at the beginning of the 20th century. But, if ‘realism’ can represent the beginning of modernism in African art, as is believed by many historians, why is it seen particularly in the work of Nigerian artist Aina Onabolu? Why not, for example, in Africa’s own tradition of realism in the terracotta and brass portraits of Ife during the 13th to 16th centuries?

They represent a kind of realism which surpasses the realism of the Western academic painting with which Onabolu became so fascinated that he had to come to London to learn its technique. It can be argued that at the end of the 19th century, when Onabolu began to draw by ‘copying out illustrations from European religious and business literature’, information concerning Africa’s own past was not easily available and he had no choice but to turn to Europe to begin his journey. However, the relationship of Onabolu’s work with the realism in African tradition is an issue 8

“The success of a colonial regime depended not only on its violence but also on liberal means by which it successfully enticed the natives to participate in its consolidation and administration.”

Onabolu’s interest in Western-type academic drawing began, I believe, as a young student in a missionary school, which then opened an opportunity for him to take it up professionally. Onabolu went to England, with support from the colony, to equip himself with the necessary expertise of a Europeanstyle academic painter and learn the tricks of the trade in order to pursue his professional career. On his return to Nigeria he started painting portraits, particularly of the newly emergent affluent native class of doctors, lawyers, engineers, government officials and so on, also establishing this type of painting as the basis of art education in Nigeria.

Basic to Onabolu’s practice is Western academic painting, to which he introduces African subject matter that gives his work an African appearance.

There is no allusion to Africa’s own tradition in Onabolu’s paintings; in fact, he seems to abandon his own tradition in favour of mimicking what he considers to be more attractive and progressive.

Onabolu’s mimicry of Western art is often equated, particularly by some of Africa’s own historians, with Picasso’s interest in African art, but by reversing this historical phenomenon and with an absurd suggestion that this makes Onabolu the pioneer of modernism in Africa. Picasso engages with many traditions simultaneously, with his own primarily and that of Africa, out of which comes an entirely new thing in the form of a modern language of art. No such thing happens in Onabolu’s work.

What emerges from his work is a form of premodern European academic painting with African subject matter, which in fact betrays a confusion between subject matter and the content of the work. This perception of modernity in his work is actually the

modernity of a surrogate class, which can only mimic but is unable to penetrate what it mimics. The result is a mindset that is constantly in search of what it can mimic. It is this mindset that now prevails in Africa, as in most of the world that was once Europe’s colony.

There is a view that justifies this mimicry, suggesting that by this the colonised not only subverts the colonial power but realises his or her own humanity. But, in my view, the human body can be enslaved but not the mind, not entirely. It has the ability to escape all constraints and find its own genuine voice.

Onabolu does, however, represent the beginning of an intellectual discourse whose historical genealogy can be extended beyond Nigeria to include, for example, South African artists such as John Mohl and Gerard Sekoto. By this I do not imply that both Mohl and Sekoto had knowledge of Onabolu’s work and were influenced by him, or had produced similar kinds of work. It is merely to argue that the social forces or classes which produced Onabolu had also emerged in most of the rest of Africa, and provided 9

“With Mancoba, Africa’s place is no longer peripheral to the mainstream history of modernism but central within it. ”

Africa with the framework for its intellectual pursuits and struggle for self-determination. In other words, this development took a more or less similar path producing what can now be put together in a chain of progress and considered as a historical genealogy of the whole of Africa.

Mohl and Sekoto, for example, who are recognised historically as South Africa’s most important artists, are, in my view, part of a colonial genealogy. They struggled to confront this genealogy in order to move towards liberation from it, but largely failed. This failure was not due to their submission or capitulation to the colonial regime but to a lack of understanding of what was expected of them by the liberal section of the colonial society in which they lived and which provided them with the means to realise their ambitions as artists, both in their own countries and when they migrated to the Western metropolises. What I find disturbing is not only the continuing prevalence of this genealogy in the histories of African modern art – written by Africans themselves – but the ignorance of what has challenged and liberated it from the colonial regime.

the freedom of his creative imagination. What is extraordinary about this defiance was not only that it challenged and intellectually demolished the very regime or ideology that produced apartheid, ahead of its demise some five decades later, but also gave a vision that was and is necessary for the postcolonial self-realisation of Africa through its own liberated imagination. The historical genealogy in which Mancoba thus locates himself is not separated from that which he challenges. As he enters modernism’s central core and confronts it, it is transformed into what he can and does claim for himself – and indeed for Africa. With Mancoba, Africa’s place is no longer peripheral to the mainstream history of modernism but central within it.

What interests me here is not only that Mancoba is Africa’s most original modern artist, but, more importantly, that he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority – the very same myth on which apartheid was based and its violence justified – and demolishes it from within. He thus rejects the view that the colonised had no choice but to resort to mimicry. It is unfortunate that Mancoba’s achievement is not yet fully recognised, not even in Africa itself,

× If there has been one artist from Africa – indeed from South Africa – who confronts successfully the colonial genealogy of art in Africa and the Eurocentrity of the mainstream history of modernism, it is Ernest Mancoba. His penetration and understanding of what was expected of him as a black artist led him to a realisation that this expectation was a prison of the benevolent or liberal colonial discourse which he must defy in order to realise and maintain 10

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for in my view without this recognition Africa cannot rid itself of the colonial legacies that still prevail and suffocate its creative energy.

I might have simplified or somewhat diverted from the main issue here, but it is important not to separate the discourse of art from the overall social conditions that are fundamental to the production, reception and understanding of art in Africa – as elsewhere. What is commonly recognised as art might be a reflection of the social conditions that provide its impetus or dynamics. But art also has the ability to transcend or escape from what becomes restrictive or does not nourish the creativity of artistic imagination.

It is therefore not unusual for artists to emigrate; and it seems Mancoba’s departure from his homeland was an attempt not only to escape from such restrictions, but to find a place which would trigger his imagination to function at its fullest power.

When Mancoba arrives in Paris in 1938, he finds himself on extremely fertile but problematic ground. The city is infused with the creative energy of African intellectuals who have come there from both its mainland and its diaspora. But this creativity is also full of contradictions. While it represents a genuine pursuit of self-realisation, it is dependent on the approval of those whose perception of Africa is based on a fascination with the exotic other: the ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, ‘magical’, and so on. This view first emerges in the early century with the interest of some European artists, such as Picasso, in African and Oceanic artefacts that leads to Cubism and is then picked up by Surrealists who see Africa as their unconscious. But the fascination with what was then a fashion for the ‘exotic negro’ is actually brought to Paris via the Harlem Renaissance of New York, Opposite Untitled, c.1960-65, detail (illustrated p23)

thereby reinforcing the prevailing stereotypes of Africa. By the end of the 1920s, Paris had fallen under the magical spell of what some writers call ‘Negrophilia’, an exotic entertainment industry of musical performances of jazz and tap-dancing, whose central figure was Josephine Baker. Most of these music halls were situated in and around the Paris district of Montmartre where many painters, sculptors, musicians and writers also lived and congregated. In short, the so-called ‘vogue of the Negro’ became an integral part of Parisian intellectual life. By the end of the 1930s the influence of this ‘negro vogue’ had somewhat waned, but the stereotypical views of Africa remained dominant in the Parisian avant-garde. Many African intellectuals were aware of this disturbing problem and struggled to deal with it. Among them were Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique and sculptor Ronald Moody from Jamaica.

It is difficult to say who then met whom. But we know that Senghor not only met Picasso many times but had great admiration for him; and Mancoba probably also met him as he was part of a small

“It seems Mancoba’s departure from his homeland was an attempt not only to escape from such restrictions, but to find a place which would trigger his imagination to function at its fullest power.”

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artistic circle in which both are reported to have moved. There was a constant mixing and exchange of ideas between people of different races within the art community in Paris, but this exchange was often unequal. Some Africans, aware of this, engaged in constant struggle to define Africa’s own modern identity based on its own self-consciousness. But they were not always successful and the confusion persisted between what was one’s own voice and what was stereotypical. This was significantly reflected, though problematically, during one of Senghor’s visits to Picasso. Senghor himself reminisced about it in 1988:

was a particular iconography derived from African traditional sculpture that became the basis of these stereotypes, which unfortunately were also partially adopted by Senghor as the basis of his ideas for Africa’s modernity.

Despite this, I find it necessary to separate Senghor’s concept of ‘Negro art’ from his overall vision in which all cultures are in a dialogue on their own terms, from which he envisages the emergence of universal civilisation. But, at the same time, Senghor is unable to formulate an approach that would have helped Africa liberate itself from what he and others encountered in Paris. Picasso’s view of Africa as ‘savage’ was his way of admiring what fascinated him.

But underneath this admiration or fascination lay something that needed to be confronted by Africa itself for it to regain its true self and freedom.

Picasso’s views on Africa and his experience of African or Oceanic artworks are nevertheless two different things. In his work there is no encounter between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, the rational and irrational. What Picasso actually brings together is two systems of knowledge with their own rationalities, and in a dialogue from which emerges a new system of knowledge, a synthesis that led him on to a path of 20th century modernism. It is also important to recognise that Picasso did not copy, imitate or steal African art. The talk about Picasso stealing African art is nothing but the silly rhetoric of a juvenile mind – a typical postcolonial mindset. Picasso did indeed study African art by copying some of its examples, but this is a normal process of learning for all humans, particularly when one enters another culture. It is not Picasso’s interest in African art that should be objectionable, but his perception of Africa that

I still remember Pablo Picasso’s friendliness, seeing me to the door as I was leaving and saying, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘we must remain savages’. And I replied, ‘we must remain negroes’. And he burst out laughing, because we were on the same wavelength.2 I have great admiration for Senghor’s struggle for Africa’s own voice, but when he faces Picasso he is unable to confront what negates it. It seems Senghor cannot separate the stereotypical from the real.

Perhaps it is this lack of differentiation that led to Senghor’s confusion in his own formulation and promotion of what he calls ‘Negro art’, a concept which seems not to have originated in Africa but in its American diaspora. It was the result of a nostalgic longing for Africa by African-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century which was then expressed and legitimised by the Harlem Renaissance.

When so-called ‘Negro art’ arrived in Paris, its ideas became conflated with the stereotypes of Africa in the Parisian avant-garde, particularly Surrealism. There 14

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reduces it perpetually to its past and prevents it from moving forward through its own consciousness of itself and the world around it.

For Europe, Africa has always been, and still is, its Other, its suppressed unconscious, the land of savages and primitives frozen in a state of blissful innocence. It cannot therefore explain or legitimise its relationship with Africa except through this otherness.

This Western view of Africa held sway when Senghor met Picasso.

It was this stereotypical view of Africa that Mancoba also faced in Paris, and to which he as an African was expected to conform, besides being surrounded by the saturated atmosphere of Surrealist iconography. Surrealism did in fact have a great influence on the African intellectuals of the so-called Negritude movement, among them particularly Césaire and Senghor. But Mancoba’s absorption of what appear to be some aspects of Surrealism is a very different thing.

What Mancoba did was extraordinary. It was Mancoba’s defiance and confrontation of what he was expected to do as an African or Black artist that enabled him to claim his own modern subjectivity.

It can therefore be said that it was not Onabolu but Mancoba who not only began to reflect Africa’s modern consciousness in art but placed this consciousness right at the centre of modernism.

By the end of the 1930s, Surrealism though still a dominant discourse in Paris had become exhausted, because of not only internal feuds and quarrels but also the staleness of its iconography (what I call the ‘pictorialism’ of Western art, from which modernism struggled to free it, and which has now become the popular media’s tool to exploit the masses for its own Opposite Untitled, c.1960-65, detail (illustrated p21)

financial gains). Then came the war, and most artists left Europe for New York. It was only after the end of war that the energy of Surrealism returned, but with a new understanding and freedom that produced CoBrA and Tachisme in Europe and Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Mancoba also resumed his work after he was released from a Nazi internment camp where he had been imprisoned during the war, and collaborated with Asger Jorn in the activities of CoBrA. Actually, what emerged as a new form after the war is common, with some variations, to CoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. It manifested the kind of freedom and free expression which had been in part absent from art before.3 Tachisme is derived from the French word tache, meaning stain; and tachisme (the word first used in 1951) is supposed to represent spontaneous brushstrokes, drips and blobs of paint, and sometimes scribbling reminiscent of calligraphy. Don’t we see all these features in Mancoba’s work of 1939 and 1940, seven to eight years before the emergence of the movements mentioned above? In a drawing of 1939, you can clearly see the blobs of paint freely applied to a piece of paper without rendering, with black parallel lines scribbled over them in a criss-cross formation.

Later, in a 1940 work titled Kamposition, the whole thing is rendered with spontaneous brushstrokes that produce symmetrical configuration. Does all this not make Mancoba a precursor of these movements?

The blobs and drips of paint, spontaneous free brushstrokes and scribbling of lines are not just formal devices but signify the new freedom with which modernism revised itself after the war.

Mancoba played a central role in this, and it still has 17

“With [Mancoba], the place of Africa in modernity is no longer that of an appropriated object but that of a liberated subject. ”

object but that of a liberated subject.

We do not have enough information regarding the nature of Mancoba’s involvement with CoBrA, but after CoBrA broke up in 1951, some of its members went on to join the most important postwar avantgarde movements in Europe – such as the Situationist International. The main thrust of these movements was to unite art and life. Mancoba himself did not follow these movements as he wanted to focus on his own priorities, but he did provide a stepping stone for many others.

It has been argued that Mancoba represents an African spirit, which of course is there. However, this spirit does not exist in its original traditional form, but has been transformed in its endeavour to move towards modernity. For Africa to claim Mancoba as its own artist on the basis that his work has roots only in an African tradition would be wrong. Without understanding his position within the central flow of the ideas of modernism, whatever Africa wants to claim him for will reduce him to (post)colonial marginalisation.

Mancoba’s importance lies not only in what he himself did in 1939 and 1940, and subsequently, but what seems to be his precognition of what emerged later as CoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. What is extraordinary about Mancoba’s achievement is that he is very likely the first artist from the whole colonised world – Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific – to enter the central core of modernism at the time when this world, particularly his own country of South Africa, was still struggling under colonialism, and to challenge modernism’s historical paradigm on its own terms. The success of his entry not only challenges

an enormous significance for Africa. Africa is now no longer trapped or contained within the dogmas of the past or what is imposed upon it. In his work, Mancoba does not re-present or even represent Africa, but gives it a voice which was not heard before, a voice of liberation and free imagination.

Mancoba defies not only Surrealist iconography, as I have said before, but – even more remarkable – apparently abandons the iconography by which art is and can be recognised as African. And yet Africa is there at the centre of his work. It is in dialogue with the West, on equal and on its own terms. This dialogue also happens in Picasso’s work, but in the case of Mancoba there is a paradigm shift of both ideological and historical significances which should be recognised not only in the context of his individual development but also as fundamental to Africa’s modern identity. In Picasso’s work Africa exists only as an appropriated object in dialogue with a dominant subject of the colonial regime, ie, with Picasso himself. But this is not the case in Mancoba’s work. This is the most significant aspect of Mancoba’s achievement, historically as well as culturally. With him, the place of Africa in modernity is no longer that of an appropriated 18

the Eurocentric notion of modernism’s historical agency, determined philosophically, ideologically and culturally by the exclusivity of European subjectivity, but also demolishes the very discourse that racially separates the Self from the Other. And by this he places the creative role of free human imagination above all predeterminations.

Moreover, a considered examination of Mancoba’s post-CoBrA work shows that he has moved on, leaving behind what appears to be the personal angst of his earlier expressionism and adopting what is contemplative and symmetrical, elements fundamental to what later emerged historically – Minimalism, and then particularly the conceptualism of the Land Art movement at the end of the 1960s. This is not to suggest any connection between Mancoba’s work and the above movements, but to locate him within the trajectory that ends with a movement of land transformation in art. And although this movement has failed to realise its potential to integrate art within the dynamics of everyday life, this potential is now being realised – as I have suggested elsewhere – in Africa; and with this Africa has opened a way forward not only for itself but for what humanity demands from us at the time when the earth is struggling for its future survival.4

1 My concern here is only with the problematic nature of modernity in African art. In other areas, such as literature, filmmaking, music, environment, political theory, etc, the achievement of Africa and its diaspora is undoubtedly extraordinary and universally recognised.

2 See Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que je crois’, in Seven Stories: about Modern Art in Africa, ed Clémentine Deliss, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995, p 218.

3 It is important to note that Africa’s art writers, curators and historians, particularly those who live in the West, constantly make noises about the oppressive nature of Western art institutions which either ignore Africa’s modern achievement in art or marginalise it as derivative or inauthentic. But they are the same people who tirelessly engaged with the support and collaboration with these very same institutions, in promoting – both within Africa and in the West – the mediocrity of most contemporary African artists, which is disguised as the necessary cultural difference of the specificity of Africa’s encounters, experiences and expressions of the modern world.

4 See Rasheed Araeen, ‘Wangari Maathai: Africa’s Gift to the World’ and ‘Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century’, Third Text, 100th Special Issue, ‘Art: A Vision of the Future’, 23:5, Routledge, UK, September 2009, pp 675–8 and 679–84.

This revised essay forms a section of the paper that Rasheed Araeen wrote on the invitation of Lize van Robbroeck and delivered as the keynote address to the 24th Annual Conference of the South African Association of Visual Art Historians (SAVAH), Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, 4 September 2008. It was published in Third Text, Vol. 24, Issue 2, March 2010

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Untitled | c.1960-65 | Oil on canvas | 55 Ă— 46cm

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Untitled | c.1960-65 | Oil on canvas | 72.5 Ă— 54cm

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Untitled | c.1960-65 | Oil on canvas | 99 Ă— 72.5cm

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25

Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 50 Ă— 32cm

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Untitled | c.1958-60 | Oil pastel on paper | 37.5 Ă— 20.5cm

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Untitled | c.1976-88 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 50 Ă— 32.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 50 Ă— 32.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 50 Ă— 32.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 48 Ă— 31cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 44 Ă— 28cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 32.5 Ă— 24.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 33 Ă— 25.5cm

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Untitled | 1986 | Ink on paper | 32.5 Ă— 25cm

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Untitled | c.1976-88 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 50 Ă— 32cm

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Untitled | Undated | Oil pastel on paper | 50 Ă— 32.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Oil pastel on paper | 50 Ă— 32cm

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Untitled | 1973 | Ink on paper | 50 Ă— 32.5cm

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Untitled | Undated | Oil pastel on paper | 43 Ă— 53cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 42 Ă— 29cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 50 Ă— 32cm

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Untitled (V.8) | 1993 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 32.5 Ă— 50cm

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Untitled | 1990 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 42 Ă— 60cm

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Untitled (V.3) | 1993 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 21.5 Ă— 32cm

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Untitled | 1988 | Ink on paper | 26 Ă— 38cm

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Untitled (V.7) | 1993 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 32.5 Ă— 50cm

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Untitled | Undated | Ink on paper | 42 Ă— 29.5cm

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Untitled | 1993 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 30 Ă— 42cm

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Untitled (V.6) | 1993 | Ink and oil pastel on paper | 32 Ă— 52cm

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INTERVIEW

Ernest Mancoba in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist Paris, March 2002

HUO: Let’s begin with the beginnings. How did you

tradition of democratic kingship. So they thought it might have been justified to unite our nations against the colonial invasion. So they had taken refuge among the Xhosas – ‘fingo’ means ‘wanderer’. She taught me Ubuntu, the African ‘philosophy’ of human brotherhood, and she was at the same time a fervent Christian. She also used to read us poetry aloud, African poetry from an old book wrapped in a piece of cloth, and she explained the importance of poetry, especially the notion of expressing the ‘unspeakable’.

become an artist in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century?

EM: I was born a black miner’s son in 1904 in

Turffontein, along the goldfields of the Reef near Johannesburg. My mother influenced very much what I later became, even though she was not an artist herself. But she went out at times with other women of her age group, as was the custom, to make (with clay, in a collective oven, built with branches of wood) the earthenware pots, which we used at home. I remember that she told me about the origins of my clan among the Fingo people. They were originally Zulus who had emigrated, under persecution for opposing the military conquest of other tribes by King Shaka, in a way that they estimated contrary to the African

What were your first works like?

I had never received any formal art training as such.

During my school years, my vocation started at GraceDieu, the Anglican Teachers Training College, near Pietersburg where I learnt the technique of sculpting 53

in wood from a nun, Sister Pauline. I made altar fronts and such pieces of church furniture. I became a teacher thereafter. But, by then, I already knew that I wanted to become, one day, a full-time artist. At that moment, what I was doing was mainly woodcarving that was both inspired by and struggling with the European style, trying to make it my own. One of my religious carvings even got a fine reception, Bantu Madonna (1929), for which an African girl, one of my fellow students, had posed. It didn’t interrupt my studies though, and after Pietersburg I went to the University of Fort Hare, at Alice, a little town in the Eastern Cape. Fort Hare had only just received university status; before that, it had been known as the South African Native College. Religion and a certain form of humanism were at the heart of the institution; it was a tradition shared by the ‘black elite’ (as they were expected to become) and by the white liberals, many of whom belonged to the clergy. Unlike the Bantu education, later implemented in South Africa from the 1950s, Fort Hare was not based on the assumption that black Africans require and deserve a different, inferior kind of education.

In Fort Hare, I did not study art – there was no such thing; my subjects were English, history, mathematics, psychology and biology. And like many black students then, I was also thinking about becoming a journalist.

Did you have ‘dialogues’ about art and the role of art in South Africa there nevertheless?

When I was in Pietersburg, I became friendly [with] Gerard Sekoto, who later [became] an important painter, [and] Thomas Masekela who, though he was to dedicate his later life to an organisation of hospitals for our people, worked privately with sculpture; we had a constant dialogue, and also, together with other African students and young teachers like Nimrod Ndebele, another close friend, we organised theatrical representations at the school, and discussed the future of the arts in South Africa. At Fort Hare, where I was head of the debating society, we rarely spoke about art as such. When I came to Cape Town (on a cargo ship from Port Elizabeth), the most intense conversations that I had on the subject were probably the ones with Lippy Lipshitz, whom I often visited in his studio, while I had mine in District Six, the ghetto for coloured people. Lippy was a sculptor who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. He introduced me to another South African sculptor, also of European origin, Elza Dziomba, whose studio in Johannesburg I entered by the back door, pretending to be the service boy, as it was situated in an area for ‘whites only’. It was also Lipshitz who told me about the growing interest in Europe for African art and about the influence it had had at the beginning of the 20th century. Paul Guillaume’s book Primitive Negro Sculpture (La sculpture nègre primitive, with Thomas Munro, 1929) was at the heart of

The history of the African intelligentsia is inextricably linked to the University of Fort Hare …

Absolutely. It’s in Fort Hare that political activists like Nelson Mandela, my friends Govan Mbeki, Isaac [Bangani] Tabata and Jane Gool, or poets like Dennis Brutus, or, later on, Can Themba, the Drum journalist, received their higher education.

Were there a lot of students training in art in Fort Hare?

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“I soon understood I would never be able to feel free enough, in my mind, to express myself as fully as I wished.”

to show visitors the production of folkloric art by natives, and, secondly, to develop a whole indigenous art trade by selling all sorts of pseudo-tribal figures for tourists. He offered me a good job with a fine salary, to [gather] young Africans to provide for this kind of traffic. I was shocked and, as politely as possible, refused the proposition. In my daily life, I felt more and more humiliated at the conditions made [with regard] to my people; and I had a growing difficulty in containing myself on certain occasions.

Thus, I soon understood I would never be able to feel free enough, in my mind, to express myself as fully as I wished, but would always knock the head against the barriers, which the colonial order had set up in my country, wherever I went.

those discussions. I remember that on Lippy’s advice I had gone to the National Library in Cape Town to read that very book. People there could hardly understand it, that a black man could have had anything to do in the place, and, even less, that he should have been asking for such a recently known French author. But I argued and finally had the possibility to sit down and read the book, which they kindly brought me. While absorbing what I found in it, which astonished me very much, I began to think about how enriching it would be to have an exchange of ideas with such an open mind, who spoke with [such] deep respect about the expression of Africans, when I wasn’t even considered as a full human being in my own country.

And at the time, apartheid wasn’t even instituted as a wholly legal coercive system?

It came only after the Second World War, but it had, indeed, existed ever since the European colonists decided, with full support of the metropolis, to exploit the black Africans in a system of near slavery for the purely economic reason of gold and diamonds. I felt I had no time to lose with the petty vexations, the daily wrongs that the indigenous man had to put up with.

Moreover, there was, basically, at the time, no public to receive what I had to express, in the colonial society where I was normally destined to spend the rest of my days. Several of my works have disappeared, probably because those who got them in hand at the time did not consider them worth preserving. Even some of my political friends told me that artistic activity was not the most urgent thing to concentrate upon, while our people were undergoing such a terrible plight,

So you decided to leave South Africa. It was 1938.

How did you decide that it was time to leave?

Did you see Paris as a place of freedom, both politically and artistically?

The first reason for my leaving South Africa was probably when I understood that I would not be able to become either a citizen or an artist in the land of my fathers, especially after a meeting I had with the Commissioner for Native Affairs in Pretoria, who, after seeing some of my works reproduced in a newspaper (The Star, I think it was), decided that I should take part in [the upcoming] [British] ‘Empire Exhibition’ (Johannesburg, 1936). The idea was, first, 55

but I believed, on the contrary, that art was precisely also a means to favour a greater consciousness in Man, which, for me, is part of the struggle for any human liberation, and without which any practical achievement would probably, sooner or later, deviate and miss its point. Therefore, making art, I thought, was as urgent as working for the political evolution, which, at the time anyhow, seemed still a faraway prospect. So I decided to engage upon a debate with European artists, by coming to Europe.

and the few immigrant artists I have mentioned, who themselves [encouraged] me to go to Europe.

Moreover, certain words of my mother were ringing in my head. When I was a little boy, I had wept because I, on certain occasions, missed [having] someone to play with, so I asked her for a brother, as she, at the time, had only given me sisters. But she answered, “Do not weep, Ernest. Your brothers, you’ll find them in the greater world.” So now I was going away to try to find them in my fellow artists.

But could you leave just like that?

And it happened when you arrived in Paris?

As I had absolutely no means to travel, I had the good fortune to be helped by missionary institutions, and when I arrived in London, I lived by Bishop Smythe, whom I had known as the head of my student hostel at Fort Hare. I naturally visited the British Museum, the National Gallery and other institutions of art. But my goal was Paris, for all that this city represented, as a centre of artistic concern and responsibility, unique in the world, as I had been told by the artists who had emigrated from Europe. During these years, you could come and, almost from one day to the next, enter into a universal debate about the political, cultural and spiritual destiny of mankind. Even [if] you did not join any group, and might, at times, feel isolated as an artist – indeed many have died there, in loneliness and poverty – you, at least, were given the minimum respect to breathe as an individual, and had the full freedom to create in a town that was open to the winds of the world.

In South Africa, I had not been able to find anyone to discuss the work, apart from a traditional carver from the noble tribe, one or two schoolfellows

I took the ship from Cape Town. When I arrived in London, I remember that, out of solidarity, I had dressed up as a worker with a cap, but when I crossed certain poor areas, children stared and soon followed me through the streets, singing “Nigger, Nigger go to hell. English, English ring the bell!” But already I had decided not to stay, for Paris had always been the destination. Through Bishop Smythe’s connections in Paris, I got into the École des Arts Décoratifs, rue d’Ulm. In fact, the students and the staff there had been told that an Englishman from London would arrive the following day. So they were not a little astonished when they saw me.

Was it at the École des Arts Décoratifs that you met the group of Danish artists with whom you worked closely afterwards?

Yes, at the art school I met Christian Poulsen. He was studying sculpture at the time, but later became a famous ceramist. He told me he was in connection with a group of young Danish Surrealists. He invited 56

me to follow him to one of these, at the latter’s studio.

Thus, I first met Ejler Bille, who was very interested in African art, as [were] all the other members of the group. So he told me that I would surely be glad to speak with one of his comrades. It was a woman, who also had been a member of the ‘Linien’ group, together with Richard Mortensen and others. That is how I saw, for the first time, Sonja Ferlov, who was to become my lifetime comrade and spouse. She came from a bourgeois family in Copenhagen. And she happened to have been very familiar with African expression from early childhood, because her parents had a friend who was the greatest collector and connoisseur of African art, Carl Kjersmeier. So, as a little girl, instead of dolls, she had been sitting with African masks and sculptures on her knees. This had developed in her an intimacy with, and a feeling for, African sculpture – but also for Oceanic and Mexican expression as well – that was unique. Thus, I know not which kind of destiny had brought me into the presence of the ideal person, and the right group of artists, for a fruitful dialogue and collaboration. They were very interested to know more about the continent that had produced the objects they so admired. Only a few, though, wished to hear more about the actual conditions of the people in South Africa. But they appreciated my work, so I got more and more integrated into the group, and I could have many conversations with them, especially, about the creations we had seen in the studios, the galleries and the museums we visited regularly.

You arrived in Paris only a few years after two other famous immigrants had arrived, one from Martinique who was Aimé Césaire, the other from Dakar, Léopold Sédar Senghor. It was the beginning 57

of ‘négritude’. Did you meet them then?

I made a sculpture on this fundamental relationship between mother and child (Faith, 1936).

In fact, strangely enough, I could well have met them, because the School of Decorative Arts was situated [on the] rue d’Ulm, in the same street as Césaire’s school, l’École Normale Supérieure [Higher Teacher Training College]. But the occasion was not given [to] me of an encounter with these two great personalities. Césaire and Senghor both belonged to the French-speaking colonies or territories, and were part of other circles than [I was]. Personally, it took me some time to learn the language, while the Danes spoke almost fluent English, which made it easier for me. I suppose I would have managed to understand Césaire and Senghor.

But we might have had have some disagreements also because the problem with their approach was that I never believed, for my part, that the racist ideology of the Occident is a problem of defective reason or insufficient comprehension. And I do not think, therefore, that it can be treated by forming new ideological concepts, like ‘négritude’, any more than I would imagine that the humanity of the white man might rely upon any virtual concept of ‘blanchitude’.

For you will never prove or disprove the truth of our common humanity, any more than a child needs material evidence to instinctively know that his mother is his mother. No scientific or moral demonstration, no genetic test, nor any ethical imperative will ever add to this simple recognition, identification and love.

But ‘négritude’ was part of an anti-colonial struggle strategy …

Indeed, but I do not believe that we Africans, any more than other people, should need (as it would not diminish racism a jot) to show the white man how good we are at speaking or writing his language, performing in his sports, learning his customs, manners and intellectual actions or to develop ourselves along the lines of his so-called ‘universality’, to be considered as human beings and his equals.

Because the true universality is a common goal on the cultural, political and spiritual horizon, that will be reached only when all ethnic groups achieve, through an authentic dialogue, the many-faceted diamond shape and the full blossom of the deepest and widest human integrity.

I hold Aimé Césaire’s oeuvre as vital, though, particularly in that he was the first, in the West Indies, to insist on the fact that black people, there or elsewhere, must reject the prejudice which the colonial masters have engrained into them about their African origins being something to be ashamed of. I, for my part, have only relied, throughout my life, on two ideas – one, from the deepest heart of Africa, which constitutes the basis of ‘Ubuntu’: “Man is man by and because of other men”, and the other, the precept of Christ: “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” I do not bother with anything else.

“... before me there had never been, to my knowledge, any black man taking part in the visual arts ‘avant-garde’ of the Western world.”

Who were the artists that you met in Paris that you consider [to] have been influential?

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So I met the Danish Surrealist group, that is, among others, Richard Mortensen, Egill Jacobsen, and particularly also, as I have said, Ejler Bille. At my studio [on] rue Daguerre, my neighbor was Henri Goetz, an American artist. Bille’s neighbour was a German Expressionist painter, Erwin Grauman, who remained a good companion to us until his death, and by the intermediary of whom I met German anti-Nazi artists and, in particular, befriended Hans Hartung. In 1938, I also became friends with Alberto Giacometti. It was on his proposition (to help me live closer to Sonja who had her studio next door on rue du Moulin Vert), that I even left my atelier in rue Daguerre for a little room on top of his atelier [on the] rue Hippolyte-Maindron. In fact, apart from his brother Diego, I can say I remained for nine years (interrupted by my four-year internment during World War II) his nearest neighbour. We caught sight of each other practically every day, spoke from time to time, and were always ready to give a hand, for mutual support, if need be. Sonja knew that she could always count on Alberto when we had a difficulty or were, as happened once or twice, economically in a fix. He also gave Sonja some good advice on working with plaster.

But it was, above all, his unique personality that brought us one of the richest experiences in our life.

Henning Pedersen, Heerup, Erik Thommesen, Egill Jacobsen, and our Dutch comrades Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille. But Sonja and I worked rather isolated in a little village, going to Copenhagen only for meetings with our Höst or CoBrA friends.

As there came some misunderstandings in the group, we soon left the country. I felt a certain form of silent opposition to Sonja and me that hardly manifested itself openly, but, for instance, invitations to take part in exhibitions of the group inexplicably never reached us. I think that there was a certain irritation towards Sonja for repeatedly insisting on the movement, and also taking into account the plight of people still colonised by Europe. Though most of the founding members of CoBrA agreed with us – Jorn wrote a letter to us, just after the movement ended, expressing his solidarity with our attitude and his understanding for our reasons to go away – it seems that the time was not yet come in 1950 for the question to be clearly posed.

The embarrassment that my presence caused – to the point of making me, in their eyes, some sort of ‘Invisible Man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist – was understandable, as before me there had never been, to my knowledge, any black man taking part in the visual arts ‘avant-garde’ of the Western world. Of course, Wifredo Lam showed his work along the Surrealists in Paris, but he was a Creole, from an independent country, Cuba. Personally, coming from a colony where people were segregated by the law, but [that] was still vital economically for Europe, my status was unclear. And probably it was also our very conception of mankind and of art that not only contributed to our isolation from some in the group, but invalidated us in the appreciation of the official art world, especially, later, in the eyes and the evaluation

Later you left for Denmark and took part in the CoBrA group. Could you tell me about your meetings with the other members of this group such as Constant and Asger Jorn?

In Denmark, we were members of the Höst group and later the CoBrA group in the years 1948 to 1950, together with, among many others, Asger Jorn, Carl59

of certain critics and art historians. Some critics totally obliterate my participation in the movement, as modest as it admittedly has been, on the reason that my work was suspected of not being European enough, and in [the] words [of one], “betraying (my) African origins”.

I’m interested in knowing what kind of relationship you maintained with Africa in those years.

In those days, I also met regularly with my friend Gerard Sekoto, who had fled South Africa for Paris after the war. We discussed the news from home.

And as he was at the time more in contact with other artists and intellectuals of the Parisian or English scene than myself, he kept me informed. I also had a few meetings at the library Présence Africaine with Alioune Diop. And from the 1950s to the early 60s, I was a regular, or rather irregular, correspondent of the magazine Le Musée Vivant, which was at the time the only French publication genuinely interested, at least at the beginning, in giving the word from time to time to African intellectuals and artists. I had a rich dialogue for many years with Madeleine Rousseau, its editor, who, it must be said, with unbelievable courage – given the colonial context – faced the confrontation with the Other. She offered a possibility of expression and a platform for dialogue to people from the socalled ‘Third World’, at a difficult time, until the political pressure became too intense, because the struggles for independence had begun.

Can you tell me about the oscillation between figuration and abstraction in your work?

In my painting, it is difficult to say whether the central 60

form is figurative or abstract. But that does not bother me. What I am concerned with is whether the form can bring to life and transmit, with the strongest effect and by the lightest means possible, the being, which has been in me and aspires to expression in the stuff, or any material that is at hand. Our history has brought about, little by little, this dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomisation in the very essence of life. In no domain more than in the arts has this systematic dichotomy caused such destruction of the very foundation to the human identity, as both belonging to nature and sharing in the essence of an ideal being. Certain artists in Europe have too often been under the dictatorship of philosophy, or what is known under that name – which denomination, by the way, has always been puzzling to me, because that area of learning has, for a long time, been used not so much to put in practice any love of wisdom, as its name would imply, but rather for trying to fit our conception of man into the social structures offered by history, at any given time.

Moreover certain philosophers in Europe have had a more or less hidden aim to get rid of art altogether, for supposedly belonging to some outdated form of humanity, or to replace it by some purely intellectual ersatz, that would help discipline and control the inspired freedom of poetry, a concern shared by the political authority: this, as far as I can understand, was the main motivation behind the foundation of the Academy. Hence we have lost the capacity to unite in our vision the outward aspect with the inner significance. Because our eye has been mis-educated, so to speak, by the superficiality of academicism, which can only estimate the worth of any representation of man according to the abidance by the purely aesthetic rules

it has established, as, for example, the one decreeing that the human head must come eight times (or seven; I have forgotten) into the full length of the body. So when they see an African sculpture with, for example, an enormous head and short legs, they will consider it ugly and judge it ‘worthless’. But for the African artist it is not so much the abidance by certain rules (though he too, generally, works according to particular canons) that makes a thing beautiful, but its capacity to evoke the inner being, by the strength of the outward aspect.

To that effect, he uses all means, both figurative and abstract. When in my younger days I made the Bantu Madonna, I worked along certain European or classical canons, which some believers in the conception of ‘progress’ in art will judge outdated. In the Madonna, I followed a certain canon that was in contradiction with the newest Cubist or abstract ways and forms (which I, at the time, hardly knew), but without ever stopping my struggle with a style that was foreign to me. And the viewer, I hope, if I am lucky enough to have been understood and heard, can feel under the surface of the classical mould an African heartbeat. At [that] time, the inner spirit breaks through, first in the very innovation within the South African context of taking a black woman to represent the Virgin Mary, and secondly in the warmth of the pulse that, though provisionally contained by the strictness of the style, speaks up, under the skin or surface, and threatens to burst free.

In 1962, you wrote, “For the object of African art is not to please the eye or the senses but to use art as a means, as a language to express feelings and ideas in relation to the present, the future and the past, to discover new concepts by which to regard the world for the salvation of man.”

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“For me, art can only be founded on the single notion – of which it is both the confirmation and the proof – that Man is One.”

Yes, I remember when I wrote these lines. In fact, I would not change a word today. I think that this definition is still valid and could apply to the way I, personally, see my vocation as an artist even in the world to which I still belong, at this beginning of the 21st century. In my opinion, a certain evolution of art, in the second part of the 20th century, has been influenced by the misunderstanding around Duchamp. Duchamp never pretended that exhibiting a manufactured product was, in itself, art. But the world, the so-called art world has always made as if he had. In fact, as he himself insisted, his readymade, bought at the supermarket and put upon a pedestal, is only a challenge thrown at the face of the Academy and its spiritually empty canons. However the misunderstanding became the accepted interpretation of this artist because it fitted into the aims of a certain established nihilism, which, under the fastidious form of an objective aestheticism, in turn came to constitute a sort of new academism. Hence the development, among many creators, of a more or less imposed or self-imposed notion of non-art considered as art, which had the advantage of getting rid of the problem posed in a materialistic society by the invisible and by the enduring power of the universal mask, before or without ever facing the question: ‘What is art?’

I believe that one cannot answer this question as long as one has the false idea that humanity can be pigeonholed into different categories. That is why, for instance, I could never be considered as an artist in the South Africa of the early 1930s, where the Commissioner for Native Affairs wished me to make what the colonial authority called ‘native art’.

There was a time when, also in Europe, even among apparently progressive people or certain modern

artists, the notion existed that there was an art for the ‘savages’, which was only fit for them and could never be appreciated seriously by modern humanity. Bertolt Brecht spoke of ‘children of science’. One day, at the end of the 1950s, I met a well-known modern painter of the so-called ‘Hard Edge’ group. When he saw me together with Sonja Ferlov, addressing both of us, he said, “Ah, it is you who like the art of the negroes. They are too full of sensuality, always making sculptures with a big sex, while we modern artists of Europe have left behind these primitive obsessions. Here, it is all geometry, purity of lines and clarity of the intellect.”

When I tried to tell him that there also was geometry in African art, he shook his head and went away. For me, art can only be founded on the single notion – of which it is both the confirmation and the proof – that Man is One. That is why an expression from a most foreign culture (let’s say New Guinea, or the Mexico of the Aztecs) – and even without my having any knowledge of the particular customs and rites that gave birth to it – may touch me to the core, and sometimes infinitely more than some from my own cultural background and times. And this does not make me a Primitivist, in any way. Only, the first condition for entering the world of the spiritual expression we call art is to be open to the Other, even to the ultimate Other, whoever he be, with the knowledge, so well condensed by Arthur Rimbaud in his famous phrase, that: ‘Je est un autre’ [I is somebody else]. It is still 62

today shocking to many that he, the ‘Gaul with blue eyes’, as he called himself, should, at times, during his years of poetry, have seen himself as ‘un nègre’ [a negro]. But it is upon this very awareness that he founded the meaning of any true modernity. Our present times, though, have completely misunderstood the notion, because when we hear Rimbaud’s message: “Il faut être absolument moderne” [one must be absolutely modern], we think it is about driving the fastest car, surrounded with all the paraphernalia of the very latest technology, when what is meant thereby is much deeper and more radically subversive to all upon which we have based our society and our conceptions – even that of ‘modernity’. That is why the fact of seeing creations from the farthest elsewhere may help us to break free from our prejudices and our formalistic or ethnic enclosures.

I remember how my friend Gerard Sekoto, in our younger days, was fascinated when I showed him reproductions of pictures by Van Gogh, and how touched he was – to the point of being inspired by it in his own work – when I told him the story of this Dutch painter’s life, while we stood in the middle of the bush, near a distant country village in a tribal zone of the northern Transvaal.

the north, too, they possessed an original, primitive, pre-Christian art, which had previously been neglected or misrepresented: that of the Vikings, and also, in Greenland, that of the Eskimo people, who had lived for so long out of reach by the influences of modern history. Together with Asger, all the members of CoBrA were touched by the strength, simplicity and boldness of this expression. Sonja Ferlov was also fascinated by the reports of the great polar explorer Knud Rasmussen, who had lived, for a long time, among the Eskimos and had described abundantly their culture and customs. I was influenced by the art of the Eskimos, essentially in its economy of means and its capacity to treat just the essential, in a harsh and difficult environment of nature.

Can you think of any unrealised project of yours, a project that you have dreamt about but could not fulfill?

Yes, but I am not thinking about an artistic one. For me, what is still not realised is a common acceptance and understanding between whites and blacks (as the most contrasted opposition in terms of colour, but between other races, as well). The dialogue has not started yet. It reminds me of a passage in one of the books of the Danish writer Karen Blixen, where she says that if the encounter or the meeting between blacks and whites has happened, historically, it has, in fact, not yet taken place.

Like Asger Jorn you have been very interested in the Folk Art from Greenland.

Asger Jorn had participated, with other Surrealists, in the reappraisal and enthusiastic appreciation of ancient African art. When the Second World War broke out, he could no longer travel but stayed in Denmark, where he could not see so many works from Africa and Oceania. So it dawned upon him that in

This interview took place in Paris in March 2002, and was first published in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews Volume 1 (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The galleries would like to thank Wonga Mancoba, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Martin Heller, Berlin, for his assistance in realising the exhibition.

PROVENANCE ALL WORKS Estate of Ernest Mancoba; Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen PHOTOGRAPHS p1 Ernest Mancoba in the Company’s Garden, Cape Town, 1994. Photo: Bertel Bjerre p4 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and Ernest Mancoba in Provence, France, 1984.

Photo: Mikael Andersen p6, 11 & 15 Ernest Mancoba in his studio at Rue de Château, Paris, 1997. Photos: Mikael Andersen p52, 57 & 60 Ernest Mancoba during his conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, March 2002. Photos: Koo Jeong A

COPENHAGEN Bredgade 63 1260 København K T +45 3333 0512 F +45 3315 4393 cph@mikaelandersen.com BERLIN Pfefferberg, Haus 4 Christinenstrasse 18/19 10119 Berlin T +49 (0)30 2787 9404 F +49 (0)30 2787 9406 berlin@mikaelandersen.com www.gma.dk

CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501 JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 75 January 2014 © 2014 For texts: the authors © 2014 For works: Estate of the artist Front cover Untitled, c.1960-65, detail (illustrated p25) Inside front cover Untitled, 1988, detail (illustrated p46) Inside back cover Untitled, undated, detail (illustrated p29) Back cover Untitled, c.1960-65, detail (illustrated p23) Design Gabrielle Guy Artwork photography Jan Søndergaard, Mario Todeschini Image repro Mario Todeschini Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town