Studies
1903: Briefly under Edward Roworth.
1915 – 1918: Slade School, London, under Henry Tonks and Ambrose
McEvoy.
1922-24: worked among German Expressionists in Berlin.
Summary Biography
Born on the farm ‘Bloublommetjieskloof’.
1897-1901: boarding-school at Bloemhof Seminary, Stellenbosch, then returned
to help mother on the farm; on a visit to relatives in Cape Town was introduced
to a circle of artists and musicians, resulting in the desire to study
singing later, painting.
1907: elected a member of SASA. C1912: visited Pretoria: subsequently
lived in the Transvaal; governess on a farm for a short while, later taught
at Ermelo.
1913: left for Europe, lived briefly in the artists’ colony at Laren,
Holland until outbreak of WW1; thence to London.
1915: brief visit to SA; returned to England, studied at the Slade; painting
trips to Scotland and the Midlands.
1918 – 1919: Lived in Antwerp; visit to Germany.
1919 – 1920: Lived and worked at Torri bel Benaco and San Vigilio
on the Garda Lake, N Italy.
1920: Returned to SA; met Irma Stern on the voyage home.
1921: The facts are uncertain, but probably a short stay in Italy broken
by a visit to SA.
1922 – 1924: Lived in Berlin; no formal studies, but contact with
the German Expressionists, encouraged by Karl Schmidt-Rotluff; produced
a number of wood- and lino-cuts – unlocated; (four monotypes in
possession of Dr H Silberberg, Tulbagh, Cape Province).
1924: Returned permanently to SA; lived in seclusion on family farm at
Oortmanspost, near Klipheuwel, Cape Province; made working trips to Tvl,
OFS and Natal – many drawings and paintings of African and Indian
women; exhibited regularly; began to develop her distinctive pastoral
style. 1936: She served on the selection panel of the Empire Exhibition
(the convenor was Prof Martin du Toit, long one of her most sincere supporters);
a trip to Gansbaai with May Hillhouse resulted in her famous paintings
of the fishing village; member of the New Group.
1944: Subject of a monograph, Maggie Laubser, by Johanes Meinjtes; moved
to Strand.
1946: Awarded Medal of Honour for Painting by SA Akademie – the
first woman to receive it.
1953: built her cottage ‘Altyd Lig’ at Strand, where she lived
until her death.
1959: Elected Hon Member of SA Akademie.
1968: Awarded Medal of Honour of SAAA (Cape Region). Has signed her work
in three ways: Maggie Laubser (early), M L (particularly during 190s)
and M Laubser. Canvases seldom dated: where dates appear they have often
been added later, with possible errors of memory.
1974: Subject of a monograph by Johan van Rooyen
Exhibitions
1924-1970: One-man exhibitions in all centres of SA.
1936: Empire Exhibition, Johannesburg.
1948: Overseas Exhibitions of SA Art, Tate Gallery, et al.
1952: Venice Bien; Van Riebeeck Tercent Exhibition, Cape Town.
1953: Rhodes Cent Exhibition, Bulawayo.
1956: First Quad of SA Art.
1958/9: SA Art Touring Netherlands, Belgium, Germany.
1960: Second Quad of Sa Art.
1963: Retrospective Exhibtiion, Egon Guenther Gallery, Jhb.
1964: Third Quad of SA Art. 1966: Rep Fest Exhibition, Pretoria.
1969: Prestige Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery,
Cape Town: Pretoria Art Museum: Jhb Art Gallery.
Public Collections
SA National Gallery, Cape Town; Jhb Art Gallery; Pta Art Museum; Durban
Art Gallery; AC White Gallery, Bloemfontein; Hester Rupert Art Museum,
Germany: William Humphries Gallery, Kimberly; Rembrandt Art Foundation;
University of Wits Galleries; UNISA; Sandton Munic Collection.
Maggie Laubser, the shy and rather lonely figure who slowly gained the
deep affection of viewers all over South Africa, led a secluded and relatively
uneventful life from the time of her permanent return from Europe in 1924.
But everything she was and all that motivated her is traceable to her
youthful background amid the quiet pastures of the Cape. Her identification
with the land and with her farming forebears, her empathy with earth and
nature were the constant inspiration of her painting.
She grew up in a sprawling gable farmhouse, where from an early age she
carried out her share of household chores and assisted with the simpler
farming tasks of attending to the ducks and geese. She was nine years
old when her father presented her with her first horse and, thereafter,
during solitary dawn canters through the veld to watch the sun rise, she
would immerse herself in the peaceful beauty all around her.
The family’s limited resources permitted her four years at boarding-school;
at the age of 15 she returned to make way for the younger members. Restless
longings and unsatisfied ambitions made her moody. Her greatest pleasure
came from daydreams and the hours spent in the company of children of
the coloured farm-labourers – idling in the pasture-lands; setting
rings of stones around the stumps of the ‘Maartblomme’ which
would erupt in autumn into brilliant and unusual blooms; scaling trees
and chasing geese; escaping into an idyllic, urchin world, half real –
half make-believe.
Participation in the wedding of a young aunt in Cape Town brought her
into contact with an entirely different ethos. The company of cultured
writers, artists and musicians intensified her yearnings for some form
of self-expression. She persuaded her parents o allow her to take singing
lessons in Cape Town, but encouraged by a friend to paint, she switched
her classes to the studio of Edward Roworth. These lessons were disappointing
and only lasted a few months, copying picture-postcards and resuming her
earlier unsophisticated pastimes.
However, a certain restlessness had begun to erode her former tranquillity.
Seeking a change of surroundings, she visited relations in Pretoria and
as new independent phase began with her decision to remain in the Transvaal.
The most significant developments in her career resulted from a subsequent
holiday taken with an old school-friend in Durban. There she made acquaintance
with JHA Balwé, the cultured, influential Consul for the Netherlands,
who was to foster her career and expose the unsophisticated farm-girl
to a stimulating, metropolitan environment.
Her mentor persuaded her parents to allow her to study in Europe and
she departed shortly before the outbreak of WW1. During the next few years
her horizons were considerably expanded. Some of the period was spent
in formal classes at the Slade, but although McEvoy was encouraging and
wished to see her concentrate on portraiture, she found the academic atmosphere
constricting, the outlook of her fellow students uniform and dull, and
she preferred to escape into the freedom of the countryside to paint.
On the rare occasions when she turned up for classes at the School, she
confined herself to drawing.
When the war ended she lived for some time in Antwerp. In 1919, following
a visit to Germany, she left behind the active social environment with
which she had become familiar, to work alongside Lake Garda in N Italy.
Here she painted prolifically; but very little of her earlier work was
brought back to SA and it is uncertain whether the sombre scenes with
cypresses and the studies of sailing boats that exist in several private
SA collections stem from this or from her later stay in Italy.
When she returned to the Cape in 1920, Maggie Laubser had, in fact, had
very little formal training. Her personal artistic inclinations had made
it necessary for her to unlearn the lessons taught by Roworth, but the
teaching at the Slade had not been any more attractive. Her unorthodox
ideas on colour and the almost brutal vigour of her forms were qualities
which stemmed from inner emotional requirements. They were anything but
acceptable among the tame academic standards of the Cape.
After another period of work in Italy, she chose to make a visit to Berlin.
There for the first time she found herself among painters who saw nothing
odd about the way she worked. Through Irma Stern she met several of the
leading Expressionists, but she enjoyed closest sympathy with Karl Schmidt-Rotluff,
who, of all of them, was the one who felt the strongest bonds with nature's
brooding forces.
In Berlin she blossomed into a painter of authority and commitment. There
are, in SA collections, several paintings from the period which demonstrate
her close emotional accord with Expressionist idioms and her particular
skill at adapting those idioms to serve the subjects she portrayed. Ambrose
McEvoy had undoubtedly been correct in trying to encourage her talent
as a portraitist, for among the best of her German works are some striking
portrait-studies, which exemplify her ability to recreate the individual
personality and mood of each sitter in a powerful and positive co-ordination
of brushwork, form and colour.
The course of Maggie Laubser's life following her return from Germany
in 1924 was not marked by dramatic milestones or specific formative events.
She endured the poverty and hardship which overwhelmed farming communities
during the depression years and suffered the added hurt of ridicule and
critical rejection of her painting. Inevitably she withdrew into an introspective
world in which she recreated the idyllic serenity of her pastoral childhood.
With a combination of passion and engaging simplicity she projected images
of farmyard animals and scenes of shepherding and harvest - and for the
sincere exposure of her emotional accord with nature she earned reviews
such as the following from Bernard Lewis, in 1932: "…atrociously
unattractive landscapes, in which not one colour, not one shape …
has any similitude with nature!"
Slowly the pattern changed. As time wore on, it became apparent to the
public - at it had been conspicuous to her small circle of admirers -
that Maggie Laubser, for all her so-called 'foreign modernism', was more
South African than any other painter in the country; that she alone had
crystallised her people's identification with the soil and their simple,
holistic view of nature; that behind the apparent naiveté of her
forms there was a devout appreciation of the spiritual unity which binds
all living things. But she was 60 years old before her contribution was
formally acknowledged and she was not unscarred by long years of rejection.
Analysis of Maggie Laubser's oeuvre reveals a sequence of stylistic developments,
which fall into phases of roughly ten years' duration, bounded by the
mid-points of the calendar decades. The relatively extensive account of
her life provided above offers a key to the nature of the changes.
During and following her study period in Europe her works were almost
defiantly expressionistic. Her affinity with Schmidt Rotluff and his German
colleagues is clearly evident in the vigour of her landscapes and the
powerful, unconventional forms of her figures and still-life. Her style
during the 20s incorporated strong contrasts of dark and light, with flat
slabs of intense colour creating areas of vibrancy along the lines at
which they met. However, although often blatantly untempered, her colours
were never inharmonious. She simplified her images by stripping them of
details, retaining only the essential symbolic form - rather in the way
of a sculptor blocking out his subject in a cube of wood. Her pictures
were composed of irregular shapes, briskly painted and animated by subjective
distortion. She would also create a kind of visual shock by juxtaposing
unrelated forms, such as a cat beside a vase of flowers.
She completed many portraits during the late 20s and early 30s - strong,
positive portrayals - in all of which her sympathetic awareness of the
human being behind the features is a conspicuous aspect of the work. A
certain melancholy haunts these faces and suggests that they are as much
a portrait of the artist as of the individual sitter. Though Maggie Laubser
served her subjects well, portraiture conflicted with her working method.
She preferred to paint without the model in view, drawing on her memory
and insight in order to interpret more than mere physical appearance.
The 30s witnessed the crystallisation of the poetic folk-lore imagery
for which she is renowned: paintings in which the shepherds and their
flocks are one with the landscape, and those in which ducks and geese
are related to the growing arum lilies and the daisies as elemental symbols
of her appreciation of even the very simple and often amusing creations
of nature.
Her palette underwent a subtle change as the deep rich tones of former
work gave way to glowing, golden colours which reflect the influence of
SA sunlight. Oestyd - or Harvest - is an often-painted theme which epitomises
Maggie Laubser's pastoral conceptions.
A series of paintings of fishing life in the village of Gansbaai followed.
These works possess a fairytale romance: colourful, lopsided cottages,
gallant little boats flaunting brilliant sails, busy fisher-folk surrounded
always by the emblems of their livelihood - the fish, the gulls and the
sea.
By the mid-40s Maggie Laubser had staked out her artistic territory:
a world of simple images, in which the harmony of her unsophisticated
and untroubled youth survived. She no longer ventured beyond this territory.
Favourite themes and scenes are tackled time and again; but, with repetition,
the integration of shapes becomes less forceful, smooth curves replace
the animated irregularity of outline and the previously vibrant colour
dissolves into sweetened pastel tints.
Maggie Laubser was now over 60 years of age, but she was not satisfied
that she had conclusively communicated her concept of the spiritual unity
of all creation. The late 50s, therefore, saw a return to the simplified
bird and flower-forms of earlier work. Now, however, the images are overlaid
with fantasy and formalised into decorative motifs. Perhaps this development
was a concession to the growing incidence of abstract styles in local
art and an attempt to project her personal viewpoint in more contemporary
terms. Nevertheless, it shocked followers adjusted to her familiar style.
Surrealistic grouping, slick curves and psychedelic colours seemed to
conflict with the very essence of her singular achievement. Uncertain
herself of the efficacy of the style, and under constant pressure from
admirers to reproduce their favourite paintings, she desisted from attempts
at innovation, retaining only some of the more abstract surface-rhythms
in subsequent compositions. In her old age she wedded these to her well-known
personal symbols, using the abstract relationships of curve and line to
emphasise her life-long theme of the harmony and mutual dependency of
living things.
Maggie Laubser was 82 years old when the above lines were written. She
still spent every morning working in her studio - a room unchanged in
atmosphere for many years. There was the familiar smell of linseed oil;
a half-completed picture on the easel. Against the walls were propped
a range of the typical, small white boards on which she chose to paint;
along one side a wooden working-counter, crowned by the friend Wolf Kibel;
and, jutting from the open shelves below, the last few isolated items
which she still retained from the prodigious output of a life-time.
A visit to Maggie Laubser in February 1973 found her, at the age of almost
87, absorbed - as always - in a painting of a favoured theme. In an obituary
tribute to the gentle artist, broadcast on 23 May and published in 'Artlook'
Vol 6 No 6, June 1973, the author recalled that last encounter: "…She
was awaiting us with open arms when we arrived a little later at her cottage,
named so aptly 'Altyd Lig' - 'Always Bright'. We sipped the usual glass
of apple juice and spent an hour or so in animated conversation. She reported
on the continuing horde of visitors and correspondents still begging her
to paint just one more Oestyd for their collections. Then she took us
into the studio to see her latest work and she expressed her scorn for
those poor souls who asked her in amazement, 'Are you still painting at
your age?' 'If I were not painting, I'd be dead!' she stated…"
There was an unfinished canvas on her easel when Maggie Laubser died on
17 May 1973.
Reference: Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, An
Illustrated biographical dictionary and historical survey of painters,
sculptors and graphic artists since 1875; 1983 (260:261)
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Artist: MAGGIE LAUBSER
Title: Cow
Size: 12 x 19 cm
Media: Pencil sketch
Price on request
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