PRESS RELEASE-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------JANUARY 2010

                                                            Lot 677

                                                            Maggie Laubser (South African 1886 - 1973)

                                                            PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN WITH HEAD SCARF

                                                            R700 000 - R900 000 

This portrait was painted soon after Maggie Laubser returned home after spending ten years studying abroad. She had spent the previous two years living and painting in Berlin, but due to financial constraints, had returned to live on the family farm – Oortmanspost – 45 kms outside Cape Town. Although she had always regarded herself as a simple farm girl, the initial homecoming plunged her into social and cultural deprivation. Whereas in Berlin she had been surrounded by artists, poets, musicians and performers with whom she socialised, she now found herself far removed from any such activity. Her artwork was misunderstood and unappreciated by the South African public and art critics alike and even her family found her new style difficult to appreciate. From being in Berlin, where her life was steeped in either creating or absorbing art, she now had to fight for even a space where she could set up studio, and was eventually given an old disused harness room with dirt floors and low light from a small window opposite the stable door. The struggle to fit back into farm life and the isolation she felt has been transmitted to this fine portrait, executed in the manner of her Berlin works such as Prostitute, Berlin[1] and Portrait of a young singer (or woman with hat)[2]. These portraits show the influence of pre-war German Expressionism and also refer back to the influence of Matisse in his Fauve period in works such as Portrait of Madame Matisse: The Green Line (1905) in the use of her colour and loose, quick paint application.

Laubser had pronounced herself a portrait painter on her return to the Cape, most likely in the hope of generating an income from commissions. The then long distance from Cape Town and her modern style, so different to the prevailing popular Academic realism, meant that not much work came her way. It has been noted by Marais that in her commissioned portraits of white people, she dealt with the subject far more conventionally than in her portraits of the coloured labourers on the farm. Laubser felt “that her forceful penetration and modern method are not generally accepted here”[3]. The artist immersed herself in the subject matter of the farm and aside from scenes of daily farm life and the surrounding landscape; she painted many portraits of the labourers themselves. Many individuals are recognisable, as she would request them to sit for her repeatedly, until she could paint them from memory – often returning to the same faces many years later in her symbolic, re-created scenes. It is well documented that Laubser did not hold the predominant European and German Expressionist view of the exotic ‘other’ as the ideal, but perceived the people around her with a humanist understanding and compassion, sensing that they shared the same needs.

The particular woman in this painting was a favourite model or muse of whom the artist painted many portraits. In other portrayals of the sitter painted from a frontal view, we may see that her oval face, almond shaped eyes, long straight nose and well-defined, curved full lips became the archetype that she based many of her imagined or idealised faces upon in her later work. Of her mature work, Laubser explained to van Rooyen that she liked to observe her subject until she had memorised the shapes and forms so that she could re-create it later in her studio, unhindered by reality. However, this particular portrait is a study based on observation then rendered in a bold, simplified and confident manner, and comes close to the Expressionist ideal of art as an act of exposure.[4] It is obvious that Laubser felt a connection with this woman, for in each portrayal, while her face remains an impassive mask; her eyes always convey an emotional intent. “Maggie’s early Oortmanspost paintings are pervaded by a sense of loss and melancholy resignation. Ochre, sienna and umber, the earthbound pigments, were set against the symbolic longing of deep blues. The effect was sombre and chastened.”[5] Laubser has used what van Rooyen describes as a “forceful painterly analysis of structure.”[6] The angular planes of the face are composed of triangular forms, which interplay with the rhythmic, curved lines of the eyes, eyebrow, mouth and the more flowing lines of the garments, leading the viewer repeatedly to the focal point of the eyes.

Cate Wood Hunter BFA (R.U.) MFA (U.S.)