Ernest Mancoba

Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba (29 August 1904 – 25 October 2002) was an avant-garde artist, born in South Africa, who spent the majority of his life in Europe. He was probably South Africa's first professional Black modern artist, and exhibited from the late 1920s onward.

Biography[]

Born in Johannesburg, the son of a miner, Mancoba grew up on the Rand and was eventually sent to Grace Dieu near Pietersburg for his secondary schooling by his uncle, an Anglican minister.^[1] After graduating, he was hired at Grace Dieu as a language teacher in 1924.

Mancoba's interest in art began in 1925 with the arrival of an adjunct teacher named Ned Paterson at Grace Dieu. Paterson, a recent art school graduate preparing for the ministry, introduced wood carving and gained a following among those at Grace Dieu who were artistically inclined. Initially Mancoba produced decorated pieces of furniture in the school carpentry shop, using the school's bas relief style. In 1929, he tried his hand at freestanding sculpture, and produced a commissioned work called African Madonna using a model in a contrapposto stance. African Madonna is probably the first modern sculpture produced by a Black South African, and is now on permanent display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Ernest Mancoba, African Madonna, 1929.

In 1934, Mancoba sculpted Future Africa (Africa to be)—two youthful African figures as a representational appearance of Africa's bright future. Two years later, Mancoba was offered a job by the South African government's Department of Native Affairs during the spring of 1936 to craft purchasable souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg later that fall. He initially considered, but eventually refused. ^[2] Along with other Grace Dieu carvers, Mancoba began exhibiting at the South African Academy annual competitions. By this point he and his friend Gerard Sekoto began to dream of attending art school in Europe, for which they needed a B.A. After leaving Grace Dieu to attend the South African Native College at Fort Hare on scholarship, he quit carving for several years. When his funds ran out, he dropped out of Fort Hare and survived by producing religious sculptures on commission, operating out of the Rhodes University Art Department. In 1935 he decided to pursue art full-time and moved to Cape Town, where he associated with a group of Trotskyite artists, including Lippy Lipshitz, who had a strong impact on his emerging sculpture style.^[3] In 1937, Grace Dieu rehired Mancoba to teach English at an affiliate, in Pietersburg. The goal was for Mancoba to earn a living while completing received his undergraduate degree from the University of South Africa by correspondence. With encouragement from Gerard Sekoto, Mancoba succeeded. Mancoba took up woodcarving, which he would specialize in until moving to France in 1938.^[4] He left South Africa for Europe in 1938 when he received a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris, where he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.^[5]

Once in Europe, Mancoba continued his expedition in art; visiting art museums and attending exhibitions. When viewing other African art in European museums, he was given a new perspective—including his very own work. In his sculpture "Future Africa", the two figures appear dismayed and hopeless, with dispirited eyes and their heads lowered. Although the “sad” representational impact in his sculpture wasn't his primary goal; Mancoba understood that due to Africa's long struggle of breaking free from western colonialism, African art was perceived in European museums as “primitive” and dismal. In an effort to ascend pass the western perception of African art, Mancoba pursued painting abstraction. Mancoba consciously abandoned the religious artistic tradition he had started out in and permanently transitioned from sculpture to painting. His first painting, Composition (1940), figuratively modernizes a Congolese Kuba mask by merging colorful geometrical shapes and sections that reestablish the human form in a profound new configuration created by appropriating figural and design aspects from the African canon. ^[6] His increasing interest in abstraction has been interpreted by Elizabeth Morton as a conscious attempt to negate the paternalistic approach to art he had learned as an Anglican student. As Morton notes, Mancoba was one of the few mission-trained African artists "to have consciously eliminated all traces of his mission style from his work."^[7] While in Paris he met fellow student Sonja Ferlov. In 1940, shortly after Germany occupied France during WWII, Mancoba stayed in Paris along with Sonja Ferlov during Germany's western front. Despite being under curfew and German control, they later married in 1942.

Taken as a British subject, Mancoba interned while in a POW camp until 1944. Allied forces, accompanied by U.S. troops, pushed German forces out of France and ended the war in 1945.^{[8] [9]} In 1946, they had a son named (1946–2015) who would also become a respected artist.^[10][11]

In 1947, Mancoba moved with Ferlov to a small town village outside of Copenhagen. There she introduced Mancoba to Asger Jorn who was a part of the Host Artist's Association and a founding member of Cobra. For the next annual exhibition (1948), Asger Jorn invited Mancoba and Ferlov to attend and meet two other Cobra artists; and Corneille Guillaume Beverloo (most commonly known under his pseudonym Corneille). The exhibition came to be known by art historians to be the first Cobra exhibition since the CobrA manifesto had been written and signed several days before. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hosted Constant and Corneille's Cobra exhibition called the “Exposition Internationale d’ Art Experimental, in 1949. Constant and Corneille invited seven other Danish Artist, including Mancoba who did not participate. Due to his absence, Mancoba wasn't listed within the exhibition's catalogue and perhaps resulted in his exclusion from the list of Cobra artists. Although no known reason stands for Mancoba and why he didn't participate, personal complications between members may have had an impact on his involvement with the group. ^[12] Although Mancoba was an active participant with Cobra members and in later artistic movements, his role received little attention in art historical scholarship. Leading artist and scholar Rasheed Araeen to argue in 2004 that the erasure of Mancoba was the result of racism and ethnocentrism.^[13]

In the 1950s, Mancoba returned to Paris, where he became a French citizen. In 1957, Mancoba painted "Untitled 1957". An oil on canvas painting bearing bold colors and energetic gestures of demanding lines. He sought transparency in his painting process while depicting a freedom of expression through abstraction.^[14] Ernest Mancoba's style is composed of line movement often encompassing a central figure-like form that dissolves into the surrounding abstract atmosphere of colorful oils, charcoal, ink or pastel marks. In the late 1980s and until his passing, Mancoba shifted his format to landscape and strayed from one central figure to many calligraphic strokes with various mediums. ^[15] He died near Paris in 2002, aged 98.

References[]

External links[]

• Themba ka Mathe, "The artist who died far from home".