Ernest Mancoba

Biography

In 1929 a language teacher at Grace Dieu school near Pietersburg carved a Madonna in wood, using a live model standing in contrapposto. The work was commissioned; it is called “African Madonna” and is now on permanent display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The artist was twenty-five.

Ernest Methuen Mancoba was born on 29 August 1904 in Turffontein, near Johannesburg, in the Transvaal Colony. His father, Irvine Jonas Mancoba, was a miner, and his mother was Florence Bandezwa; Ernest was the second child, and an older brother had died in infancy. The family moved about: first to Middleburg, where a white farmer allowed his father to farm on his land, then, after a drought, to Boksburg, where his father found work as a storeman at the Comet gold mine. Shangaan miners gave the boy the name Ngungunyana; under the sculpture “St Augustine of Canterbury” he later signed himself with the initials and surname “N.E. Mancoba”. He attended primary school at an Anglican church in Boksburg and, after the family moved to Benoni in 1915, an Anglican school there. On the advice of his maternal uncle, the Anglican minister Rev. Alvin Mangqangwana, he entered the Diocesan Teachers’ Training College at Grace Dieu, graduated in 1924 and taught languages there until 1929.

Art came to him in 1925. Sister Pauline, who set up a handicraft workshop, and a temporary teacher, Ned Paterson, a recent art school graduate, arrived at Grace Dieu. In 1925–1926 Paterson showed the woodworkers bas-relief and suggested a few designs. Mancoba learned carving from Sister Pauline; he carved and decorated church objects, often to other people’s designs. In 1934 he made “Future Africa”, two young figures standing for the bright future of the continent. With other Grace Dieu carvers he began sending work to the annual competitions of the South African Academy.

From 1930 to 1936 he studied on a scholarship at the South African Native College at Fort Hare, reading history and thinking of journalism. When the money ran out he left and lived on commissions for religious sculpture, working out of the art department of Rhodes University. In the spring of 1936 the government’s Department of Native Affairs offered him work making souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg; he hesitated and refused. In 1935 (the dates vary), he decided to devote himself to art alone and moved to Cape Town. There he fell in with a circle of Trotskyist artists, among them Lippy Lipshitz, and on his advice read the book by Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro on the sculpture of Central and West Africa. He began to move from his earlier social realism towards African plasticity.

In 1937 the Anglican Church took him on again as an English teacher at Khaiso Secondary School in Pietersburg, so that he could earn a living and finish a bachelor’s degree by correspondence with the University of South Africa; he did. It was then that he befriended Gerard Sekoto, and the two visited nearby villages together. In 1938 he received a scholarship and left for Paris, where he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.

In Europe he visited museums and exhibitions of modern art, as well as the newly opened Musée de l’Homme, which housed the art of non-European cultures. The Danish ceramicist Christian Poulsen introduced him to the Danish Surrealists Ejler Bille and Sonja Ferlov, who became his wife. His first known painting, “Composition” (1940), modernises a Kuba mask from the Congo in its own way: coloured geometric fragments come together into a human figure. Scholars often call him one of the first Black African modernists, if not the first. To my mind, what matters in this picture is that motifs from the African tradition are used as freely as contemporary European forms. Elizabeth Morton reads his move towards abstraction as a deliberate rejection of the paternalistic approach of the mission school, and notes that few mission-trained African artists so consistently removed traces of that style from their work.

During the occupation of France Mancoba stayed in Paris for Sonja Ferlov’s sake. He was taken for a British subject and held in two camps until 1944. In the milder of them, La Grande Caserne in Saint-Denis, they were allowed to marry, in 1942. In 1946 a son was born, Marc, known as Wonga (1946–2015); he too became an artist.

In 1947 the couple moved to the small Danish town of Kattinge near Roskilde. There Ferlov introduced her husband to Asger Jorn, one of the founders of Cobra. Jorn invited them both to the exhibition of 1948 and introduced them to Constant Nieuwenhuys and Corneille. In 1949, when Constant and Corneille organised the “Exposition Internationale d’Art Expérimental” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, seven Danish artists were invited, Mancoba among them, but he did not take part. He did not appear in the catalogue and, perhaps for that reason, is missing from the lists of Cobra artists. The reason for his refusal is unknown; personal relations within the group may have played a part. In 2004 the artist and scholar Rasheed Araeen argued that Mancoba’s neglect was the result of racism and ethnocentrism.

In Denmark he returned to woodcarving: “Sculpture” (1951), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the influence of Inuit art as well as African sculpture. It became one of his last sculptures. After that he worked on canvas and paper: fields of colour with sharp boundaries, in places with bare canvas that works as a colour. Perhaps the painted walls of medieval Danish churches had an effect on him.

In the 1950s he returned to Paris. The sources differ: by some accounts he became a French citizen in 1968, by others in 1961. “Untitled” (1957), an oil with bright colours and taut lines, dates from this period. He is best known for a later manner: line, movement, and in the centre a figure dissolving into a colourful atmosphere of oil, charcoal, ink or pastel. The Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town describes its “Untitled” (1965) thus: the head split into two wedge-shaped flags, the torso barely marked, the bent legs below. He worked on this motif for more than thirty years. From the late 1980s he moved to a horizontal format and, instead of a single figure, painted many calligraphic strokes in various media.

Mancoba died on 25 October 2002 in Clamart, near Paris, at the age of ninety-eight. In 2017 his work was shown posthumously at documenta 14, and in 2019 an exhibition was held at the Centre Pompidou.