Christo Coetzee - Neo-Baroque artist

"Christo Coetzee is an assemblage and Neo- Baroque artist, closely associated with avant-guard movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. The theorist Michel Tapie, art dealer Rodolphe Stadler, art collector and photographer Anthony Denney, and the Gutai group of Japan all played and important role and influence in Coetzee’s work.
Coetzee, from and early age, had a talent for drawing and the arts. After graduating from Parktown Boy’s High School he attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) from 1947 to 1950. It was here that Coetzee became part of the so-called Wits Group, along with other esteemed artists; including Larry Scully, Cecil Skotnes, Esme Berman, Nel Erasmus, Ruth Allen, Gordon Vorster and many others. After graduating with a Fine Art degree in 1951, Coetzee held his first solo exhibition, which was opened by John Paris, the then current director of the South African National Art Gallery.Funded by a Wits scholarship, Coetzee travelled to London in 1951 and married Marjorie Long the following year. When his wife returned to South Africa, Coetzee unhappily followed her six months later. He returned to London the end of 1953, without Marjorie. After being a sales assistant for a tobacco company in London, Coetzee eventually found work at Robert Savages’ framing business where he was able to stay in closer contact to young artists and the London art world. During this time, Coetzee met Anthony Denney, who would not only become his future long-term friend but also the person responsible for arranging Coetzee’s first solo exhibition in Europe, held in March of 1955 at the Hanover Gallery in London.
In 1956 Coetzee travelled to Italy for a four-month period with funding from the Italian government. It was here that Coetzee was exposed to other influential people within the art world at the time, including Pavel Tchelitchew and Albert Burri. During this period, Michel Tapié de Ceyleran, the French critic, visited Anthony Denny in London and was taken by one Coetzee’s paintings hanging in his house. Tapié then sent Coetzee and invitation to come to Paris to meet the owner of the Galerie Rive Droite. This meeting resulted in Coetzee staying in Paris for the majority of the next ten years where he continued his work under the guidance of Tapié, and in collaboration with Galerie Stadler.In 1959 Coetzee was awarded a Japanese government bursary for two years of study in Osaka, Tokyo. It was here that Coetzee was introduced to the Gutai group and many of the influential Japanese artists associated with it. Coetzee would continue to use the influences of the places and people he had met during the time spent in Paris and Tokyo in his later works. In 1965 he left Paris, settling in a small village in Spain, and began visiting South Africa more frequently. After traveling back to Cape Town in 1975, he held a solo exhibition that marked the beginning of what some call his ‘protest period’. Coetzee, after the day of the opening of the exhibition, returned to the gallery and cut up 23 of his paintings, and then began to ‘reconstruct’ them. Although, at the time, he was labeled by the media as being angry, Coetzee later gave a lecture at the South African Association of Arts, Cape Town, situating his destructive act in the context of work he had done in the 1950s, calling it a Gutai act."( wallsaart.co.za )

Neo-Baroque artist Christo Coetzee

Christo Coetzee  (1929 - 2001) was born in Johannesburg on 24 March 1929. His father died when he was 10 years old, and he was raised by his mother and his two sisters who were 16 and 20 years older than him.Growing up in Turffontein, Coetzee had no lack of material to spark his imagination, and he often spent his evenings making mud-sculptures in the garden after the five-o’clock-rains. During his childhood he built a miniature theatre complete with furniture and grand piano, and also made chessmen for his four-sided chessboard out of washers and screws which he glued together and painted in bright colours. A friend of Christo’s parents, Finie Basson, owned many interesting works of art, and Christo found inspiration in her collection. When he was 13, she gave Coetzee his first commission – a medium sized oil painting of pink and white roses – for which she paid him £5 (Binge-Coetzee in Ballot, 1999).Coetzee attended Wits University from 1947 to 1950, and among his classmates were a number of artists with whom he would maintain friendships for many years: Cecil Skotnes, Esmé Berman and Gordon Vorster, among others. Also during his time at Wits, Christo was able to meet Alexis Preller and visit the studio of JH Pierneef.After his graduation at the end of 1950, Coetzee had his first solo exhibition in Cape Town which was opened by John Paris of the SA National Art Gallery. He then travelled to London with a Postgraduate scholarship from Wits, where his talent was further developed under the guidance of Prof. William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art.

 As a young South African artist with a dynamic and developing personality Christo Coetzee found himself, immediately after his formal training in Johannesburg (1947 - 50), in the privileged position of being able to experience the great variety [of art movements and styles of his time] at close quarters in a number of overseas centres for a considerable number of years. From 1954 Coetzee […] regularly presented his work at solo and group exhibitions in famous venues in London, Milan, Paris, Japan and from 1965 in South Africa and Spain. During this time he engaged with some prominent artists and important art critics. It was not long before a number of important galleries as well as corporate and private collectors in South Africa and abroad began to acquire the works of the artist (Ballot, 1999. pp 27, 28).

 Coetzee’s first job in London, arranged for him by a friend, was as a salesman for a tobacco company, but he was unhappy there as the work was administrative. He turned to the Gimpel Art Gallery, where he visited regularly, and the two owners recommended that he get work at Robert Savage’s framing business where he would be in contact with young artists and the London art world. Here he was able to master methods of framing which he had learned previously, and he would later use these skills for his own art.

 In London at the end of 1953, Christo met Anthony Denney, a photographer, art collector and interior design consultant. A very significant friendship began, through which Coetzee was able to meet many influential people including gallery owners and art collectors. In 1954, Christo began renting a room in Anthony’s house, which he paid for with paintings. The arrangement lasted for about 2 years until Christo left to live and work in Paris. Denney was also responsible for arranging Coetzee’s first solo exhibition in Europe in March of 1955, which took place at the Hanover Gallery in London.In 1956, through the mediation of the British Council, Coetzee received funds from the Italian government to go to Italy for the first four months of that year. During his time there, he met many interesting people in the art world, such as the Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Italian artist, Alberto Burri.

 While Coetzee was in Italy Michel Tapié de Ceyleran, the French critic, visited Anthony Denney in London where he was taken in by a large painting of Christo’s which hung above Denney’s French antique chest of drawers. He immediately asked who the artist was, and then sent Christo an invitation, through Denney, to travel to Paris on his return from Italy and be introduced to the owner of the Galerie Rive Droite, Jean La Carde. Tapié was advisor to the gallery where talented painters such as Georges Mathieu, Jean Dubuffet and Alfred Wols regularly exhibited. Christo spent most of the next 10 years in Paris during which time he was in collaboration with the Galerie Stadler and under the guidance of Michel Tapié.

 There was no lack of recognition for Coetzee’s original ideas and practices in persevering along the route of Informal Abstraction. During the period 1958–1961 his work was exhibited at a number of important international group exhibitions in Osaka and Tokyo (Japan), in New Hampton, Pittsburgh and New York (USA) and in Turin (Italy). In addition, in 1959 the Galerie Stadler requested him to participate in a two-man exhibition with Lucio Fontana in Paris. The latter exhibition was held just before he left to spend about a year in Japan with the help of a British Council Bursary (Ballot, 1999. pp 33, 34).

In Japan Coetzee was introduced to the avant-garde Gutai Group, and he remained in close contact with them. Before his return to Paris in early 1960 they invited him to exhibit his new works in Osaka at the Takashimaya gallery. The Gutai artists were as stimulated by his work as he with theirs. Shuzo Takiguchi noted that: ‘I see many changes in methods & forms of painting today & I am somewhat tired of an excess of method, but this painter’s work of the Informel type gave me a fresh feeling.’ (van Rensburg in Ballot, 1999).
At the end of January 1961 Christo had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Stadler, and then, immediately after, travelled back to Johannesburg to have his first exhibition in 10 years on home soil. He spent most of the next three years in Paris, and his second solo exhibition at the Galerie Stadler took place in 1963.
In 1975, the day after the opening of a solo exhibition of Coetzee’s work in Cape Town, the artist went back to the gallery and cut up 23 of his paintings in what he called an act of ‘construction’ rather than ‘destruction’. The press labelled him sensationalist and angry, but Christo lectured that there was a cycle of destruction and recreation in his creative approach. Four months after this ‘protest exhibition’, as Coetzee called it, he restructured (or ‘re-imaged’, in his own words) these same works by combining the fragments and pieces of the original artworks creating new pieces to be shown at the Rand Afrikaans University’s Gencor Gallery in Johannesburg. This process of destruction and recreation was consistent throughout most of Coetzee’s oeuvre, and was largely a result of his contact with Michel Tapié (who was, in turn, inspired by Nietzsche and Bataille), as well as the time he spent with the Gutai group in Japan. He wrote two formal texts on the subject during the 1970s (van Rensburg in Ballot, 1999).

A second retrospective exhibition of Coetzee’s works was held in the Pretoria Art Museum in 1983, showing 81 works from 1965 to 1983, and he was awarded a medal of honour from the Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns that same year. A third retrospective took place at the University of Stellenbosch on his seventieth birthday in 1999, and was accompanied by a book illustrating his work from the previous 3 decades.Coetzee died in Tulbagh at the age of 71 in November of 2000. Coetzee was always searching for magical and transcendental moments while extending the perceptions of art. As he recalled, he endeavoured ‘to push the imagination … just a little bit more towards that particular interface where Art becomes something that it is not.’ (Stevenson & Viljoen, 2001). (Johans Borman Fine Art )

Contemporary Art of South Africa

Walter Whall Battiss 

 

Walter Whall Battiss (6 January 1906 – 20 August 1982) was a South African artist, who is generally considered to be the foremost South African abstract painter and known as the creator of the quirky "Fook Island" concept.
Born into English Methodist family in the Karoo town of Somerset East, Battiss first became interested in archaeology and tribal art as a young boy after moving to Koffiefontein in 1917. In 1919 the Battiss family settled in Fauresmith where he completed his education, matriculating in 1923. In 1924 he became a clerk in the Magistrates Court in Rustenburg. His formal art studies started in 1929 at the Witwatersrand Technical College (drawing and painting), followed by the Johannesburg Training College (a Teacher’s Diploma) and etching lessons. Battiss continued his studies while working as a magistrate’s clerk, and finally obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at University of South Africa at the age of 35.Wikipedia 

 

Christo Coetzee

Christo Coetzee (24 March 1929 – 12 November 2000) was a South African assemblage and Neo-Baroque artist closely associated with the avant-garde art movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the influence of art theorist Michel Tapié, art dealer Rodolphe Stadler and art collector and photographer Anthony Denney, as well as the Gutai group of Japan, he developed his oeuvre alongside those of artists strongly influenced by Tapié's Un Art Autre (1952), such as Georges Mathieu, Alfred Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies and Lucio Fontana.Wikipedia

Robert Hodgins 

  

Robert Hodgins (27 June 1920 - 15 March 2010) was a British-born South African artist, best known for paintings and printmaking. He was born in Dulwich, London, on 27 June 1920, and immigrated to South Africa in 1938. He enlisted with the Union Defence Force in 1940, and served in Kenya and Egypt.
In 1944 he returned to England, and studied art and education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he received an arts and crafts certificate in 1951 and a National Diploma of Design in painting in 1953.He returned to South Africa, where he taught at the Pretoria Technical College School of Art from 1954. From 1962 he was a journalist and critic for Newscheck magazine. He lectured in painting at the Univer..(ask art )

 

Fikile Magadlela

 

Fikile Patrick Magadlela (or Magadledla) was born 13 December 1952 in Newclare, Johannesburg South Africa. He started drawing on his parents’ walls from as early as he could remember. Reading books his father bought and getting knowledge from older people. He dropped out of High school in standard 8 (10th grade) to work as a full-time artist. Magadlela was relatively self-taught but he spent many hours with fellow artists exchanging ideas and techniques.Magadlela worked closely with artists such as Ezrom Legae, Solly Maphiri, Winston Saoli, Percy Sedumedi, Pietro Cuzzolini and Harold Jeppe who became his mentor, introducing him to art circles in Johannesburg.His most renowned work was entitled “Birth of The Second Creation” a series of drafted, mystical landscapes showing an African man and woman in flowing drapery and overwhelming clouds.Later Magadlela would do bolder landscapes with similar characters using more colour and poetry. His first exhibition first solo exhibition was at the Goodman Gallery then owned by Linda Givon in 1978.Magadlela died in 2003.Wikipedia

Frans Claerhout

 

Frans Claerhout (15 February 1919 – 4 July 2006) was a Belgian painter who spent most of his adult life in South Africa.Frans Claerhout was born in Pittem, West Flanders in 1919, and moved to South Africa as a missionary for the Catholic Church in 1946. he moved to South Africa at age 27. He stayed on a farm near Bloemfontein in the Free State province of South Africa. He worked as a priest and in his spare time he concentrated on his art.He started painting more after relocating to Thaba Nchu in 1960, and became famous for his unique style, which used vivid colors and incorporated items such as donkeys, sunflowers and figures of people he met through his everyday life. Claerhout died of pneumonia at age 87 in 2006.Examples of his work, characterised by their warm colours, thick impasto paint, exaggerated forms, humour and compassion were exhibited widely in South Africa, as well as in Belgium, Canada, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.Wikipedia