​Contemporary South African Art

Cecily Sash

She believed that there is a conscious awareness of the African background in all South African artists. For many years she worked as a muralist, especially in mosaic, a medium in which her manner took on a dry glitter, and she latterly designed tapestries woven in Aubusson and South Africa. Neither of these media was allowed to obscure the linear character of her technique.

In the 1970’s she experimented with spatial ambiguity of a somewhat unusual kind,

achieved by a linear and modelled forms,

usually with very brilliant colour’.

Heather Martienssen
(summarising the work of Cecily Sash to the end of the 1970’s in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art)



Cecily Sash's studio teaching at 'Wits' University laid great emphasis on drawing - both an important element of her own practice, and always pertinent in South Africa. However, drawing was seen as different from traditional 'drawing from life'.

In Sash's words, once art had been "removed from reality" it could be submitted to the manipulations of the "language of art: space, colour, line, compositional dynamics". Partially based on Paul Klee's Pedagogic Sketchbook, this formal syntax allowed both abstraction and figuration to be subjected to a rigorous form of analysis, and

to be reassembled according to a strictly

canonic programme.

South Africa might have been geographically marginalised during the Cold War period, but

it was not as culturally isolated as it was to become under the excesses of apartheid in

the next decades. (After 1968, South Africa

was excluded from participation in the Venice Biennale, for example, and the academic

boycott radically affected universities.)



The Fine Art Department of the University of Witwatersrand, under architect and historian Heather Martienssen, the first woman professor

at the university, located itself firmly within Corbusier-inspired international modernism and Sash's teaching (refreshed by visits 'abroad',) established a modernist orthodoxy which held sway at 'Wits' art department and other South African art schools for a long time.



In the 1960's and 1970's, Cecily Sash's work swung between figuration and abstraction, between internationalism and preoccupations with South African themes. A key work of 1955, 'Platteland', depicts bare-footed, long-legged country youths

in front of dry maize stalks; the thin scraped paint and angular linearity are perceived as part of an African style, but also arise out of Sash's fascination with the French artist Bernard Buffet. She made numerous bird studies during these years - spiky birds of prey, which have returned again and again as both formal subject matter,

and an expressive embodiment of emotional crisis during her artistic career.
​

In 1974, Cecily Sash, found the tensions of apartheid in South Africa unbearable, and she

gave up her highly successful teaching career,

and a buoyant exhibiting and commissions market for relative isolation in the English countryside. Cecily's mother had been born in Scotland, and although her artistic practice had been formulated in relation to South African landscape and themes and a High Veldt palette, the British experience had always beckoned.
Deanna Petherbridge 1993