​Contemporary South African Art

It is highly possible that the watercolour portraits painted by Arthur Butelezi were of people that he knew very well. This would distinguish them to some extent from the colonial ‘native studies’ by most white artists at that time which usually lacked a direct relationship with the sitter.

 

Like the great pioneer of western art in West Africa, Aina Onabolu (1882–1963), Butelezi wanted to abolish notions that: ‘… no African – not even a culturally Europeanised one – was endowed with the creative ability to produce art like white people’. 

 

The sensitivity with which the people are depicted in Butelezi’s works often contrasts with the titles that they have been given by their white owners; titles that seem too non-specific to have any meaningful relationship with the subject.

 

The ‘colonial studies’ produced by most white artists differ from Butelezi’s art; they reveal the way that white artists tended to view black people – as subjects for superficial scrutiny rather than people with deeper identities and personalities.

 

The portable, framed painting had no earlier history in the Zulu or African tradition, and was thus a colonial import from Europe. This means that Butelezi, like many other aspirant black artists who adopted this form, was also one of the pioneering artists of modern portraiture in Africa.

 

As with the Nigerian artist Onabolu, who painted numerous portraits of the Lagos elite, missionaries and Yoruba Kings, Butelezi’s relationship with the people he painted may have been of greater importance than we realise.

 

He retains the nobility of his subjects in a respectful and sensitive manner, as in Sangoma (plate 33) or he animates the subject’s features to engage the viewer as in Portrait of a smiling young man (plate 34).

 

His Night scene in a Zulu kraal, (1947) (plate 32) is a rare painting which shows Butelezi’s skill in handling chiaroscuro. This work is, at present, Butelezi’s only known oil painting to have survived. It was rediscovered in someone’s garage where it had lain for 35 years.

 

In the press it was reported that Butelezi’s greatest ambition was ‘to paint large pictures like the great masters’.

 

http://www.revisions.co.za/biographies/arthur-butelezi/#.V8Sh-SzgaUl