Peter Clarke

Biography

Peter Clarke’s first solo exhibition, in 1957, was not held in a gallery: the works were hung in the newsroom of the Cape Town paper The Golden City Post. It was arranged with the help of his lifelong friend, the poet James Matthews. Clarke said afterwards that before the exhibition he had been just another coloured man, and that his people took it for granted that only whites could do such things. Now, in his words, they were beginning to realise that they could do them too.

He was born on 2 June 1929 in Simon’s Town, a coastal town near Cape Town, and lived there until 1972; the town would appear again and again in his work. In 1944 he left school and worked in the docks until 1956; in 1948 he studied at the Technical College on Roeland Street in Cape Town. He became an artist in 1956, at twenty-seven, when he spent a three-month holiday in Tesselaarsdal, a small farming village near Caledon in the South Western Cape. Forty years later, in 1996, the Caledon Museum exhibited his drawings of Tesselaarsdal.

He was recognised as a writer first. In 1955 he won Drum magazine’s international short story award, and in 1975 he became an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa. I think this sequence is worth keeping in mind when he is described primarily as a printmaker.

He studied in snatches, and only after he had already become an artist: in 1961 he attended etching classes at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, in 1962–1963 he studied printmaking at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and in 1978–1979 he worked at the Atelier Nord graphic workshop in Oslo. His prints began travelling abroad early: in 1961 to the São Paulo Biennial, in 1963 to the graphic arts biennial in Ljubljana, in 1964 to Venice, and in 1965 he had solo exhibitions at the Mbari cultural centre in Ibadan and the Chem-Chemi centre in Nairobi. That same year, 1965, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence made him an honorary academician.

In 1972, under the Group Areas Act, Clarke was evicted from Simon’s Town to Ocean View.

He is best known for his prints, above all his woodcuts. In later years he turned to collage and worked with leather, glass and found objects. “October Landscape” is done in oil pastel. He was called a quiet chronicler: over sixty years of work, his prints and drawings built up a critical record of South Africa’s social and political history. One of his exhibitions in Cape Town in 1977–1978 was called “Our World is a Ghetto”. He had more than seventy solo exhibitions from 1957 onwards: in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Australia, the United States, Norway, Israel, Austria and Britain. In 1973–1974 he showed at Fisk University in Nashville, and in 1976 at the Kuumba Workshop in Chicago. In 1992 the Natale Labia Museum in Muizenberg held a retrospective, “The Hand is the Tool of the Soul”.

In 2000 he received the Molteno Award for services to the visual arts, in 2005 President Thabo Mbeki presented him with the Order of Ikhamanga in silver, and in 2010 came a lifetime achievement award. His 2011 exhibition at the South African National Gallery was called “Listening to Distant Thunder”, and in 2013 a large retrospective, “Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats”, was shown in London. Clarke’s work is held by the Library of Congress, the South African National Gallery, the District Six Museum in Cape Town and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

Peter Clarke died on 13 April 2014 in Ocean View. In 2016 the Frank Joubert Art Centre was renamed the Peter Clarke Art Centre.