Walter Whall Battiss

(South African, 1906-1982)

The Hunt, 1962

Footnotes

Provenance
Adler Fielding Galleries, Johannesburg;
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1962.

Painted in 1962, The Hunt superbly encapsulates the unique pictorial imagery of South African artist Walter Whall Battiss which synthesises the dual influences of South African rock art and European modernism. Born to an English Methodist family in 1906, Battiss first encountered the rock art of the Stone Age cultures of Southern Africa as a boy in 1917 when his family moved from Somerset East in the Cape to Koffiefontein. He began his formal art training at the Witswatersrand Technical College, Johannesburg in 1929. However, it was not until the artist's first visit to Europe in 1938 that he began to investigate in earnest how the prehistoric art of his native country might be incorporated within his own practice.

In Paris and Florence, he engaged with the work of Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Gaugin, and Pablo Picasso (whom Battiss would later visit in the Spanish artist's studio during a trip to Paris in 1949). This experience prompted the South African artist to turn away from the orthodox impressionistic landscape paintings that constituted his early oeuvre to embrace the change in representational conventions he observed in the work of the European modernists. As Andries Walter Oliphant describes, '[f]or the European modernists, this change was facilitated by the non-naturalistic conventions gleaned from West African and Oceanic masks, Japanese prints and Polynesian decorative design. For Battiss, Southern African rock art was the catalyst' (Walter Battiss: gentle anarchist, 2005: p. 21).

The Hunt epitomises Battiss's artistic experimentation with techniques responding to Western modernism including abstraction, perspective, and simplification of form. Inspired by his deep knowledge of the prehistoric hunting scenes represented in South African rock art, he depicts two groups of stylised figures: one forms a border around three antlered animals, while a second line of figures march across the top of the canvas. In turn, the artist's use of thick impasto to sculpt abstract forms atop the surface of the canvas evokes the formalist experimentations of Western modernism. Inspired by his interest in graffiti and Southern African petroglyphs, The Hunt also evidences Battiss's incorporation of sgraffito technique in his works of the 1960s. Scratching images through wet paint, he incises two stick figures into layers of white and pink pigment and drags a series of vertical lines through thicker points of the green impasto.

Battiss's painterly investigations of the 1960s anticipate the development of his imaginary artistic construct, Fook Island, which flourished in the 1970s. He populated the imagined world with a devised material culture that draws heavily on the iconography of the same prehistoric rock art that informs the present work. The Hunt can consequently be contextualised as a key precursor to this later culmination of Battiss's unique engagement with South African visual culture.

Bibliography
Walter Battiss: gentle anarchist. A retrospective exhibition of the works of Walter Whall Battiss, exh. cat., Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 2005.