Something you must know about South African Art Paintings

 

South African art has always captured on the distinctiveflavour of the country, from the 4 000-year-old cave paintings of the San Bushmen – the widest collection of rock art in Africa – to the home-based theoretical art movement that jumped up as apartheid came to an end in the 1990s.

The San Bushmen, Africa’s erstwhile hunter-gatherers, survived in the enormous Drakensberg range of mountains from 4 000 years ago until they were thrown out by colonialists in the 19th century. Over a period of time, they created an enlarge pool of art on the walls of caves and rock shelters – the largest and most focused group of rock paintings in sub-Saharan Africa.

This dynamic collection of South African art painting prompted Unesco to inscribe the Drakensberg as a mixed natural and cultural world heritage site in 2000. The paintings, Unesco said, “represent the spiritual life of the San people” and are “outstanding both in quality and diversity of subject”.

“The San people lived in the mountainous Drakensberg area for more than four millennia, leaving behind them a corpus of outstanding rock art, which throws much light on their way of life and their beliefs,” according to UNESCO.During the early colonial era, white South African painting artists inclined to focus on depicting what they saw as a “fresh world”, in precise detail. Artists such as Thomas Baines travelled the country recording its flora, fauna, people and landscapes – a form of reporting for those back in the metropolis.

Towards the end of the 19th century, painters Jan Volschenk and Pieter Hugo Naude and the sculptor Anton van Wouw began to set up a locally rooted art. Their work – the first glimpse of an artistic vision that engaged with life as lived in South Africa – marked the moment the country began to capture its own national identity, with the 1910 Union of South Africa marking the formal end of the colonial era.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the Dutch-born painter JH Pierneefintroduced a coolly geometric responsiveness to the South African landscape; he also, in a way that nourished into Afrikaner nationalist ideology, discovered it bereft of human inhabitants.

By the 1930s, two women artists, Maggie Laubscher and Irma Stern, came with the techniques and sensibilities of post-impressionism and expressionism to South African art painting and mixed media on canvas art. Their strongcolour and composition, and extremely personal viewpoint, rather scandalised those with old-fashioned theories of acceptable art. Yet younger artists such as GregoireBoonzaier, Maud Sumner and Moses Kottler were rejoicing in this fresh spirit of cosmopolitanism.

Today, there many art galleries in Cape Town that boast of wonderful South African art paintings.