Alexis Preller

(South African, 1911-1975)

Mapogga Women with a Child

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist;
By direct descent to the present owners.

Created in 1953, Mapogga Women with a Child was painted at the height of South African artist Alexis Preller's engagement with the 'Mapogga' theme. He had first encountered the people he called the 'Mapogga' (a term devised by the Boer settlers to name the Ndzundza group of the Southern Ndebele people) in 1935 on a sketching trip north of Pretoria. He came across a group of Ndebele women working in the fields and followed them to their village. Enraptured by the indigenous dress of the women, Preller embarked upon a career-long artistic project to capture his perception of the 'Mapogga' culture.

In his treatment of the theme, Preller was not motivated to produce anthropological studies of the indigenous communities he encountered in South Africa. Crucially, his depictions of the Ndebele women (who served as his greatest source of inspiration) were rather shaped by his desire to formulate an iconic symbol of the essence of Africa – a distinctly modernist enterprise out of step with contemporary attitudes. His female figures are consequently highly stylised with elongated limbs, high-set breasts, and small ovoid heads. In the present work, the arms, necks, and ankles of the women are encircled with the rings typically worn by the Ndebele and their clothing is reimagined as geometric forms that enshroud the figures. Through a process of formal simplification, Preller transforms the matriarchs into icons 'through which I can convey what Africa means to me' (Preller quoted in Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, 2009a: p. 146).

Preller conceived of his depiction of the 'Mapogga' people in relation to both his own situated experience and the avant-garde in Western art history. He described his painterly project as a means 'to identify myself with my age and place: Africa and the Twentieth Century' (Preller quoted in Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, 2009b: p. ix). The artist had left for England in 1934 where he studied for a year at the Westminster School of Art. In 1937 he continued his studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Here, he engaged with the paintings of French Post-Impressionists including Paul Gaugin and Vincent van Gogh, along with the work of twentieth-century modernists including Picasso whose paintings dominated the city's galleries in the 1930s. The stylisation of the figures in Preller's 'Mapogga' works resound with references to this European modernism along with the surrealist aesthetic of the Italian artist, Giorgio de Chirico.

While the first work on the 'Mapogga' theme was exhibited in 1936, the present work marks Preller's particular interest in the Ndebele women which he began to pursue with renewed vigour in the early 1950s. The compositional arrangement of the figures evidences the influence of the artist's trip to Italy made in 1953, the same year in which the current work was created. The central figure holds a child with one arm, emulating Western art historical imagery of Mary with the baby Jesus. Preller fuses his mythologising of the Ndebele people with the iconography of Christianity to present a reimagining of the mother with child in his distinctive painterly style.

Bibliography
Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, A Visual Biography. Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows (Saxonwold, Johannesburg, 2009a)

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel, A Visual Biography. Alexis Preller: Collected Images (Saxonwold, Johannesburg, 2009b).