oil on hessian

Signature details: signed

(1)

72 x 72 cm

Purchased from the artist in 1936, and thence by descent.

Notes:

In a hall decorated with bunting, but with lights and chairs that seem to suggest a more quotidian function, five black couples are shown dancing. The men are smartly dressed in tuxedos; and the women wear full-length sleeveless ball gowns with tight, figure revealing bodices. Three of the women have headwear – a beret, a polka-dot scarf and a cloche hat – and the hair of the other two women, like that of the men, appears to have been relaxed. The dance is physical and very energetic.This description of the painting should show that in a pre-war South African context, The Dance is a highly unusual representation of African people. It is certainly not a typical Preller image of Africa that he had begun to develop following his first contact with the Ndebele in 1935 and that, drawing on the purity of Constance Stuart’s photography, he was to refine as his mythical African dreamworld. Nor is it Irma Stern’s Expressionist image of Africa that Preller invoked occasionally, for example, in The Garden of Eden (1937). Nor, evidently, is it the African idyll that A.M. Duggan Cronin and others claimed to discover in the so-called Native Reserves. Nor, even, is it the counter to this image demanded by Alan Paton and others for the representation of the contemporary urban experience of South African black people: Constance Stuart’s 1948 photograph of dancing couples in the Johannesburg Welfare Centre is similar in subject but utterly different in the style that is represented. In fact, it is not until Drum magazine of the 1950s that a comparable cosmopolitan image of urban black life emerged in South Africa.A painting of The Dance is listed in Preller’s second exhibition at Glen’s Salon, Pretoria, in December 1936. If, as is probable, this is the present work, it demonstrates the young artist’s startling willingness to experiment. Preller was to visit Paris only in 1937 yet The Dance seems to show familiarity with Art Deco and the Jazz Age with its French icons of Josephine Baker and the Revue Negre that are suggested in both the subject and the almost caricatural style of the dancers’ faces: a similar, if more brutal stylization is apparent in the background figure in Preller’s Self-Portrait of 1939 that is obviously included to denote African ‘Otherness’ in contrast with the artist’s own fair features. Perhaps in The Dance Preller was inspired by his association with the younger, more ‘European’, artists on the Empire exhibition of 1936 – Walter Battiss, Wolf Kibel and Lippy Lipschitz – to explore new forms of ‘African’ expression. Similarly, unless it simply signifies that he could not afford to buy canvasses at this time, the unusual hessian ground of this work may also constitute a kind of formal experimentation: as a matter of fact, Preller did use hessian again to good effect, for example in Congo Figures (1939) and The Offering (1938).

Michael Godby

Sources:

Although Esme Berman and Karel Nel do not treat The Dance specifically in Alexis Preller: A Visual Biography, Shelf Publishing, 2009, they have written the definitive artist’s biography from which much of the information in this essay has been drawn.