oil on canvas laid down on panel

Artwork date: 1955
Signature details: signed and dated
Literature: Berman, Esmé and Nel, Karel. (2009). Alexis Preller: Collected Images. Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, colour illustration on p.149.

(1)

52 x 40 cm

Notes:

The title Celestial Twins does not appear in the list of any of Alexis Preller’s exhibitions around 1955, the year the present painting is dated. This, with the absence of a title from the
painting itself, suggests that either the work was not exhibited at this time or that it acquired the present title at some later time – or, perhaps, both. Significantly, the work is reproduced in the standard Esmé Berman and Karel Nel catalogue without any title. The point is important because Preller often used titles to indicate the meaning of his work. And doubt over the authenticity of the present title opens the possibility that Preller did not intend his two figures to be either ‘celestial’ or ‘twins’.Confronted figures are common in art history – in Europe, in Anglo-Saxon and Byzantine art, and in Africa, in ancient Egyptian, Yoruba, Luba and Malagasy art, for example – but these possible sources are not necessarily either celestial or twins. The symmetry of confronting figures lends them a certain authority, which might reinforce a symbolic meaning but their principal function is generally decorative. The present painting actually relates to Preller’s magnum opus of 1953–1955, the three panel All Africa that he had been commissioned to make for the offices of the Receiver of Revenue, Johannesburg. In December 1959, Preller described the theme of the central panel as the ‘triumph of the sun and light over Africa’. The left and right panels depict ‘formal towers built up of purely African forms and patterns’, sympathetic to the central theme. The so-called Celestial Twins derives from the tower in the right panel of All Africa and, considered without this title, is consistent with the artist’s concern for formal rather than iconographic matters. This sense is confirmed by the fact that the design was a relatively late addition to the painting. One of Richard Cutler’s photographs of the artist in his studio shows Preller in front of the right panel – from which the celestial twins detail is absent. The present painting may well have been a worked-up sketch for this panel. And the probability that it was not exhibited at the time suggests that Preller might have given it to a friend once he had incorporated the design into his painting.

Micheal Godby