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Page, Frederick

Page, Frederick Hutchison (Fred)
Born: 1908 Utrecht, Natal

Died: 1984 Port Elizabeth

 

A painter of landscapes, cityscapes, architectural studies, interiors and still life. Used tempera and after 1967  polymer-acrylic and ink. Worked in a whimsical manner with the use of stark white on a dark background. A series of District Six, Cape Town. A graphic artist.

 

Studies:1945 took an art course by correspondence; 1946-47 part-time at the Port Elizabeth Technical College, under John  Muff-Ford and Jack Heath, where awarded a bronze medal.

 

Profile:1947 to the early 1960s worked as a display artist in Port Elizabeth.

 

Exhibitions: Participated in group exhibitions from 1948 with the EPSFA and in West Germany, the UK and Greece; 1960 Port Elizabeth, first of numerous solo exhibitions held throughout SA; 1965 Grosvenor Gallery, London, exhibited with 10 other artists; 1968 Durban Art Gallery, solo exhibition entitled “Artist Retrospective Exhibition; 1979 SAAA Gallery, Cape Town,  70th Birthday Commemorative Exhibition; 1983 Carriage House Gallery; Johannesburg, Retrospective Exhibition. 

Represented: Hester Rupert Art Museum, Graaff-Reinet; King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth; Pretoria Art Museum; Sandton Municipal Collection; SA National Gallery, Cape Town; University of the Orange Free State; William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley.

 

References: Art SA; SAA; 20C SA Art; SSAP; BSAK 1 & 2; SA Art; Oxford Companion to 20C Art (under SA); 3Cs; AASA; LSAA; Artlook April 1968 & December 1975/January 1976; Gallery Summer 1983; Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, 1975; Catalogue,1975, King George VI Art Gallery. Port Elizabeth.

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Literature: Wright J. and Kerbel, C. (2011). Fred Page Ringmaster of the Imagination. Port Elizabeth: Cecil Kerbel and Jeanne Wright, illustrated in colour on p.vi.

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Provenance:

Private collection, Johannesburg.

Notes:

Fred Page’s paintings always challenge the viewer. Working in relative isolation in Port Elizabeth between 1947 and 1980, his works are stylistically and technically unlike anything in South Africa at the time. His compelling and fantastical paintings are marked by a reduced monochromatic palette and dramatic contrast and portray strange, eerie scenes with a sense of oddness and disquiet.

Page has often been pigeon holed as a surrealist and there certainly are similarities between the 20th century avant-garde movement’s illogical, often dream like scenes and Page’s bizarre and irrational juxtaposition of images. The artist, however, resisted labels, dismissing perceptions of himself as deeply intellectual and rather describing himself as “a very normal person” who simply put his thoughts and fantasies “out there where people can see them”.[1]

The artist refused to offer concrete explanations and this, in many ways, is a great gift. Interpretation remains open, each image resonating with possibility as Page invites us to explore and interrogate his pictorial world.In Tomorrow Belongs to Us (1973) a solitary figure cloaked in a white robe appears to hover on a balcony between two wide open ornate doors, while they look out at a coffee cup seemingly floating in the distance and dark clouds on the horizon. Page has been described as very withdrawn, according to art historian Esmé Berman, he lived an “isolated existence as a recluse in a single, darkened room in a Port Elizabeth boarding house”.[2]

Viewed in this light, one may understand the painting as depicting the fraught inner world of a lonely artist? But the title, Tomorrow Belongs to Us may allow or encourage other interpretations of the figure – as contemplative, hopeful or even insightful. As Marion Arnold succinctly noted in her exhibition opening address of Fred Page’s 1992 exhibition at UNISA, “His images are compelling, not because they are macabre but because they resonate with possibility, seeming to contain truths about moments of existence which can be expressed only in visual equations”.[3]

Sarah Sinisi

[1] Wright, J & Kerbel, C. (2011). Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination. Port Elizabeth: Cecil Kerbel and Jeanne Wright. p.xi.

[2] Berman as cited in Schoolman, S (Ed). (2007). Birth of the Modernist Body [Exhibition catalogue]. Johannesburg: Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. p.104.

[3] Wright, J & Kerbel, C. (2011). Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination. Port Elizabeth: Cecil Kerbel and Jeanne Wright. p.128.

Collections:

The artist is represented in numerous local collections, notably, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch.; University of Cape Town.; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth.; Javett Art Centre, Pretoria and Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.

What Happened to Aunt Gerty?

Fred Page endured a miserable childhood marked by fatherly abandonment and the death of his mother when he was ten. He drifted between relatives and orphanages before entering a farming trade school; thereafter variously jobbing as a shepherd, barman, gold miner, tyre maker at Firestone and military serviceman. In 1947, aged 39, Page entered art school in Port Elizabeth. Tutored by Jack Heath and Dorothy Kay, his drafting capabilities were given focus. He held his debut solo in 1958 at age 51. Page is well known for his austere and unsentimental compositions depicting architectural features of the Central and South End - historical suburbs of Port Elizabeth. The Powell Collection, however, focuses on his category-defying
fantasy works, notably works in oil. Early on Page settled on a reduced palette of black, white and matt ochre. In 1967, he switched from tempera to quick-drying acrylics and inks, and only occasionally worked in oil. “Colour activates the picture and that I don’t want,” Page said in 1971. “I want silence and stillness.”1
Page admired the technique of painters William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich and René Magritte, but derived creative inspiration for his dreamlike scenarios from literature – notably Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allen Poe. “If I had to state a definite ambition in my painting, I think it would be to emulate the literary achievements of these men to the highest degree possible within the limited sphere of my own media and abilities”.2 Although frequently characterised as a surrealist, his work more closely resembles the theatricality of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. Jeanne Wright persuasively argues that his psychological work is “an idiosyncratic form of magical realism overlaid with parochial and autobiographical details from his
personal environment.”3

1. Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel (2011) Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination, Port Elizabeth: Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel,page 60.
2. Ibid, page 126.
3. Ibid, page 82.

 

PROVENANCE

Johans Borman Fine Art, Cape Town, 21 April 2007.

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

LITERATURE

Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel (2011) Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination, Port Elizabeth: Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel, illustrated on page 70.

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