This fine oil painting on canvas board depicting four children presenting a basket of fruit is most likely to emanate from Gerard Sekoto’s formative Sophiatown period (1939-42). This supposition is supported by its provenance, combined with the handling, technique, colour and treatment of the painting, and the fact that it is painted on a Windsor & Newton “Rathbone” Canvas Board. In consulting Lesley Cohen’s seminal catalogue publication for the artist’s first exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1989-1990, there is a comprehensive listing of the artworks included. Here it demonstrates that Rathbone canvas boards appear overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively apart from a few rare exceptions, in his Sophiatown period.[1]

In 1938 Sekoto’s father died, and he no longer had an obligation to fulfil his father’s wish for him to be a teacher.[2] The 25-year-old left his teaching post at the Khaiso school in then Pietersburg (Polokwane) and, at the beginning of 1939, went to Johannesburg. He moved to Sophiatown and found accommodation with cousins on Gerty Street. Living with his cousins he was, for the first time in his life, able to devote his undivided attention to his art and, during this period, he undertook a process of experimentation with technique and medium which contributed to his later success as a pioneer of South African Black Modernism.

In Sophiatown, Sekoto was introduced to Brother Roger Castle, a teacher and well-known patron of black artists. Brother Roger introduced Sekoto to his network of artists and gallerists including Joan Ginsberg, the owner of Gainsborough Gallery, with whom the young artist would later exhibit in 1939 and 1940. This came to be a pivotal moment in Sekoto's career as his reputation in Johannesburg began to grow following his first solo exhibition at the highly regarded gallery in 1939, which was met with great success, both critical and commercial. That same year he was selected to participate in the South African Art Academy's annual exhibition and, in 1940, he achieved the prestigious accolade of becoming the first black artist whose work was acquired by the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Sekoto’s decision to leave teaching in rural Pietersburg (Polokwane) and move to the cosmopolitan urban environment of Johannesburg was a definitive one. According to Lesley Spiro, curator of Sekoto’s first major retrospective at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1989, “Sekoto’s sojourn in Sophiatown was, from an artistic point of view, an extremely broadening and productive time. He produced a large number of works and expanded his repertoire of media to include poster and oil paints. It was also during this time that he first began exhibiting his works professionally”. [3]

The introduction to Joan Ginsberg proved to be a fortuitous encounter for the young Sekoto, connecting him with his contemporaries in the form of influential New Group painters such as Alexis Preller (1911-1975) and Judith Gluckman (1915-1961). These artists guided Sekoto in the technique of mixing oil colours on the palette and using the palette knife.[4] Both Preller and Gluckman played a crucial role in shaping his artistic journey: Preller generously gifted Sekoto his initial tubes of oil paint, while Gluckman trained him on applying this new medium to canvas.[5] Prior to this exposure, Sekoto had been working with 'poster paint' or body colour on brown paper because of the limited access he had to materials and formal training.

In Gluckman's studio, Sekoto learned about Western painterly techniques she had acquired during her education at the Witwatersrand Technical School in Johannesburg. Armed with these newfound skills and materials, Sekoto found inspiration in the inhabitants and architecture of Sophiatown in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This Johannesburg suburb's vibrant streets were predominantly populated by an impoverished black working class. Sekoto found the area's vitality to be a tremendous stimulus, a stark contrast to his rural upbringing in Botshabelo. He vividly described the scenes which created compelling backdrops for his artistic expression: “…the vitality of the area was a great stimulus. It was a theatrical scene seeing all these various types of people: women with baskets of shopping, some carrying baggage either on their heads or shoulders. Men of various styles of walking and clothing, some bicycle-riding or driving cars, although in those days car owners were rare in Sophiatown. There were also many children of varied appearance in attire and expression”.[6]

Legendary inhabitant, Nelson Mandela, recalled: “It was convenient and close to town. Workers lived in shanties that were erected in the back and front yards of older residences. Several families might all be crowded into a single shanty. Up to 40 people could share a single water tap. Despite the poverty, Sophiatown had a special character; for Africans, it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate”.[7] This is where Nelson and Winnie Mandela are said to have met.

Sekoto's understanding of the compositional potential of light is a technique he honed during this Sophiatown period. Fruit sellers is a fine example from that time, comparable in technique and treatment, colour palette, tone and texture, as well as compositional structure, to other important, early Sophiatown works such as Three figures with bicycle (Lindop, 1988: Dictum. pp.66-69):

Here one sees a similar use of light, and the surface texture of the painting is virtually identical to Fruit sellers.

Other comparable examples include Interior with woman Sophiatown (Ibid. pp.70-73); Four figures at a table (Ibid. p.75); The evening at home (Ibid. p.76); and The nursing mother (Ibid, pp.98-99).

Earl­­y works from the Sophiatown and District Six periods are typically characterised by a darker palette in contrast to the gentleness that emerges later in his Eastwood period, as the artist himself describes.[8] The early technique gives rise to the use of chiaroscuro in the depiction of dramatic light and shadows that Sekoto utilised with such good effect. His mastery of this technique is particularly evident in seminal works such as Song of the Pick; Yellow Houses, District Six and Mine Boy, and are all indebted to the techniques he honed since his earliest works in Sophiatown.

The works above, though later than Fruit sellers, demonstrate Sekoto’s mastery of the use of strong light and shadows to accentuate form and give an overall dramatic effect to the foregrounded objects emerging from a darkened background.

In Fruit sellers, the vertical orientation of the composition is dominated by the central figure of a young girl in a bright red dress, presenting a basket of yellow fruit. Flanked on either side by two accompanying, supporting figures in the form of two more girls, and a young child in the foreground in the process of eating one of the fruit. The two larger, central figures preside over the scene and appear to be older than the other two who look respectively younger. The figure on the right pushes a trolley of sorts, possibly containing additional offerings of fruit and other stock. The centrally positioned figures are enclosed behind by an indication of structures which generate the shadows from which their forms emerge, conveying the sense of the close confines of the built environment of Sophiatown. The figures are unified in their consistent gaze to their left, to an undefined point somewhere outside the right margin of the painting. This early work is dominated by the three primary colours of blue, red and yellow, which is probably a result of those being the first colours that the young artist was able to purchase.[9]

Similar to aforementioned comparable works of the period, Sekoto employs stark shadows and strong angular light to give depth to the picture plain and form to the foreground subjects. The chiaroscuro creates a dramatic effect resulting in the appearance of the foreground figures emerging from the dark background and coming towards the viewer. The bright accents of red, yellow and blue in the girls’ dresses that dominate the foreground is beautifully accented against the dark background in the rest of the composition. This effectively accentuates the form of the foreground figures and creates depth between the four girls with their basket of fruit, and the dark backdrop of shadows and structures behind. The strong light source from the right side of the composition warms the left side of the figures, while the tightly compressed composition conveys a sense of the cramped conditions of the environment.

[1] Spiro, L. (1989). Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. pp.72-93

[2] Lindop, B. (1995). Sekoto: The Art of Gerard Sekoto. London: Pavilion Books Limited. p.12

[3] Spiro, L. (1989). Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. p.18

[4] Ibid p.21

[5] Manganyi, N.C. (2004). Gerard Sekoto: I am an African. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. p.32

[6] Lindop, B. (1988). Gerard Sekoto. Randburg: Dictum. p.19

[7] Mandela, N. (1994) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Little Brown. p.134

[8] Lindop, B. (1988). Gerard Sekoto. Randburg: Dictum. pp.25-26.

[9] Spiro, L. (1989). Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. p.18