Judith Mason

Biography

Among Judith Mason’s major public commissions are two works for the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg: “The Man Who Sang” and “The Woman Who Kept Silent”; the second is also known as “The Blue Dress”. Several more of her works deal with the atrocities brought to light by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She had long reworked biblical stories and myths so that they spoke about the present day.

Born Judith Seelander Menge, she came into the world on 10 October 1938 in Pretoria.

Her childhood was spent close to the veld, and she came to know its animals, birds and plants well; they would appear in her work again and again. In 1956 she finished at the Pretoria High School for Girls, and in 1960 she took a BA in fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1963 she won second prize in a competition on the theme of “Labour” run by Gallery 101 in Johannesburg and the company UAT, and a year later her first solo exhibition opened at the same gallery. She worked slowly and was a strict judge of her own work: between 1964 and 1982 she held only fifteen exhibitions. For many years she taught painting: at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Pretoria, at the Michaelis School in Cape Town and, in 1989–1991, at the Scuola Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, and at several South African universities she examined bachelor’s and master’s students.

The objects in her pictures range from hard things, such as skulls, bones and fossils, to soft ones, such as hearts and human foetuses. She brought toys together in strange but exact combinations in which they took on new meanings. Religious symbolism is a constant in her work, and some pieces resemble modern icons; it is no accident that her large retrospective of 2008 was called “A Prospect of Icons”. She used collage, frottage, found objects and trompe-l’oeil. Her early works are painted in earthy colours, the late ones in lighter and more delicate tones. She was interested in fragments and everyday objects of ancient cultures: from them, she believed, one could learn a great deal about the civilisation itself. A separate part of her work is bound up with the book. In 1988 she illustrated Wilma Stockenström’s poem “Butterfly Hill, Butterfly Woman”, in 1990 her “A Dante Bestiary” appeared in New York, and in 2011, in Cape Town, the book “Walking With and Away From Dante”, with drawings and text both her own. There were also joint editions with the poets Patrick Cullinan and Ted Townsend and a collection of her essays, “Talking Pictures” (1989), and for the Great Park Synagogue in Johannesburg she designed stained-glass windows. Several large tapestries were made in collaboration with Marguerite Stephens.

To my mind, the geography of her exhibitions says most about her standing. She represented South Africa at the Venice and São Paulo biennials and took part in the Valparaíso Biennial (1979) and the Houston Arts Festival (1980). Her lithographs, paintings and drawings were shown at the Ombondi Gallery in New York in 1990, lithographs at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2010 and 2015, and tapestries and drawings at the Deering Estate near Miami in 2016. There were also exhibitions in Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. The retrospective “A Prospect of Icons” ran from 2 October to 6 December 2008 at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and from 14 January to 28 March 2009 at the Sasol Art Museum in Stellenbosch. Her work is held in all the major South African collections, among them the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Hester Rupert Art Museum in Graaff-Reinet and the art museums of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and abroad in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Yale University.

In 2016 her book “The Mind’s Eye: An Introduction to Making Images” was published, her artist’s books were shown in Washington in the exhibition “Artists’ Books and Africa”, and in June her last exhibition in her lifetime, “Undiscovered Animals”, opened. Judith Mason died in White River on 28 December 2016.