​Contemporary South African Art

Eugene Labuschagne was born in Volksrust, in the then Eastern Transvaal. His introduction to art was as a pupil of Walter Battiss at Pretoria Boy’s High School, followed by a brief period of study under Lippy Lipshitz at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. Due to his non-conformist attitude, Labuschagne rebelled against the model of English academicism at the Michaelis School. He believed their approach to be irrelevant and outmoded in terms of European art developments at that time, and wanted to study the work of modern artists like Van Gogh, Cezanne and, in particular, Juan Gris, all of whom he admired greatly.

 

Labuschagne befriended Gerard Sekoto while in Cape Town, and was impressed by his work. Both artists left South Africa in 1947 for Paris, where Labuschagne planned to continue his studies, as well as his search for self expression. He spent four years in Paris, attending various teaching studios, but found he was learning more from the professional artists he met and the exhibitions he viewed. By studying the Cubist masters, he achieved a dramatic improvement in his technical skills, and his palette became far more sophisticated; evidence that he had “graduated”, all-be-it from his own auto-didactic “academy”. In 1951 Labuschagne returned to South Africa and settled on a farm in the Piet Retief district near the border of Swaziland. In an interview with Walter Battiss for an article in Lantern in 1952, he stated his vision: Juan Gris once said that painting was architecture on a flat surface. In his last paintings he succeeded in bringing perspective back to the surface of the canvas but his work remained unfinished. For us, the younger generation, he left an inexhaustible wealth of possibilities to continue the process of pictorial simplification to a point where our two-dimensional architecture can attain the highest aesthetic freedom and symbolic richness beyond the limitations imposed by the object and the surface .

 

Although Labuschagne did not exhibit frequently, his shows drew favorable attention, his works selected to represent South Africa at the Biennales in Genoa, 1953 and Sao Paulo in 1959. Esmé Berman comments on the artist’s work of this period: A typical Labuschagne painting of the late 50’s – when he was producing some of his most impressive work – is at the one and same time abstract in character and figurative in content – a condition which in itself provides a paradox .

In Labuschagne’s works of the late 1950’s, abstraction took precedence, and the earlier dualism and balance evolved into a more decorative, but less figurative, analysis of forms. A fine example is ‘Abstract’ (1957), where jagged surface planes are composed using a limited and restrained palette. Forms are simplified into silhouette, oscillating optically to function as volume and then as void . The green and red planes complement each other, partly breaking and being broken by the white angular shapes. The illusion of depth created by these solid layers of positive and negative space creates a continuous rhythm, making the work vibrate with intense energy.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHYEsmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa , Halfway house, 1983, pp 241 and 242Walter Battiss, Lantern, Volume 2 Number 2 , October 1952, pp 177 and 210Arnaud Labuschagne, The Art of Eugene Labuschagne: Stepping Stones: Twelve Distinct Phases of a Life in Art , Unpublished

 

Ref:  Johans Borman Fine Art