Gerard Sekoto

Biography

In 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery bought a painting by the twenty-six-year-old Gerard Sekoto. It was the first work by a black artist to enter a museum collection. Which painting it was I have not been able to establish, and I will not guess.

He was born on 9 December 1913 at the Lutheran mission of Botshabelo near Middelburg in the Eastern Transvaal (now the province of Mpumalanga), then part of the Union of South Africa. His father, Andreas Sekoto, a prominent man among the new Christian converts, became a minister and a teacher and founded a school at Wonderhoek, where his son also studied. Music was part of mission life, and the boy sat down at the family harmonium early on. He drew with chalk and coloured pencils.

The teacher training college near Pietersburg known as Grace Dieu was, for its time, a rare school that taught drawing and crafts; it had woodcarvers who made sculpture on commission and for competitions. There the sculptor Ernest Mancoba became Sekoto’s close friend. The two of them dreamed of going to study in Europe, and Mancoba urged his friend to take art seriously. Sekoto had no wish to carve according to the college’s canons, and drew and painted on his own.

After qualifying, he taught for four years at the local Khaiso secondary school, hiding his paintings and showing them only to three close friends. In a competition held by the University of Fort Hare he won second prize; first prize went to George Pemba.

In 1938, at twenty-five, Sekoto left for Johannesburg to live by his art. He lodged with relatives on Gerty Street in Sophiatown, a district that was later demolished, and, according to some accounts, learned to paint in oils from the artists Alexis Preller and Judith Gluckman. His first solo exhibition was held in 1939. From that year come “Poverty in the Midst of Plenty” and “Interior, Sophiatown”, and from 1940 “Migrant Workers”, “Yellow Houses” and “The Soccer Game”. In 1942 he moved to District Six in Cape Town, lived with the Manuel family and there, apparently, met George Pemba. In 1945 he moved to Eastwood, a district of Pretoria, to live with his mother, stepfather and brother. The Eastwood years were later called the “golden” years of his painting: “Song of the Pick”, “Sixpence a Door” and “Portrait of Anna, the Artist’s Mother” were painted in 1947, the last year before he left.

In 1947 Sekoto left for Paris and never returned to South Africa. The reasons usually given are the lack of political freedom and of prospects for work. The first years in Paris were hard, and music came to the rescue: almost by chance he was taken on as pianist at the nightclub L’Échelle de Jacob (“Jacob’s Ladder”), which had reopened after the war. He played jazz and sang spirituals and the French songs of the day, and that paid for his lodging and his studies. In all he composed twenty-nine songs, mostly about the ache of exile; between 1956 and 1960 some of them were brought out by a music publisher, and he recorded several on disc himself. Alongside this he drew in charcoal (“Eye Glasses”, “The Black Beret”, 1949) and photographed himself at the guitar or the piano.

International attention first came to him through an exhibition of South African artists at the Tate Gallery in London. From 1953 he exhibited regularly in Paris, and later at home as well; his paintings were also shown in Stockholm, Venice and Washington. In 1966 Sekoto went to Senegal for a year. His late works include “Jazz Band” (1961) and “Homage to Steve Biko” (1978). In 1989 the University of the Witwatersrand awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Gerard Sekoto died on 20 March 1993 at Nogent-sur-Marne near Paris. He left his works and possessions to the art education of South African children, and a foundation bearing his name was set up for the purpose. In 2003 he was posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold.