Walter Battiss

Biography

The passport of Fook Island, issued by Walter Battiss himself, was taken seriously by more than his friends: it carries the stamps of border officials in Australia, Britain and Germany, a Fookian driving licence was accepted in America, and a Fookian banknote was once exchanged at Rome airport for ten dollars. Battiss invented the island in the early 1970s, after Greece, where he lived from 1966 to 1968, and the Seychelles, which he visited in 1972. The island had a map, inhabitants, plants and animals, a history, a currency, stamps and a language with a full alphabet; it was assembled from all the islands the artist had seen: Zanzibar, Madagascar, Fiji, Hawaii, Samoa, the Comoros and the Greek ones. “It is something that does not exist”, he explained, the island “that is inside all of us”.

Fook was also a reply to the Conceptualists of Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s: they held that art lived only in the moment of its making, while Battiss insisted that all art exists now, and his island was always “now”.

He was born on 6 January 1906 in Somerset East, a small town in the Karoo, into an English Methodist family. In 1917 the family moved to Koffiefontein, and there the boy became interested in archaeology and in the art of the African peoples; in 1919 they settled in Fauresmith, where he finished school in 1923. Then came work as a clerk in the Magistrate’s Court in Rustenburg from 1924, with study running alongside it: drawing and painting at the Witwatersrand Technical College from 1929, a teacher’s diploma from the Johannesburg Training College, lessons in etching and, at last, a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of South Africa, taken at thirty-five. He first went to Europe in 1938. Among the founders of the New Group he was the only one who had studied neither in Europe nor in North America.

In 1939 his first book came out, “The Amazing Bushman”: the rock painting of the San was for him not ethnography but art, and this view shaped his own manner; Ndebele beadwork and the calligraphy of pre-Islamic cultures were added to it. In 1949 he befriended Picasso. In all he wrote nine books and many articles and founded the journal “De Arte”. From 1936, and for almost thirty years, he taught art at Pretoria Boys High School; from 1953 to 1958 he was principal of the Pretoria Art Centre; in 1964 he became Professor of Fine Art at the University of South Africa and retired in 1971; in 1973 the same university gave him an honorary doctorate. The actress Janet Suzman, his protégé the artist Norman Catherine and the critic Esmé Berman shared the philosophy of Fook; the journalist Jani Allan, who interviewed him in 1982, also agreed to become a “resident” of the island.

In 1981 he gave all his work to the newly opened Walter Battiss Museum in his native Somerset East. He died on 20 August 1982 in Port Shepstone, in Natal.