John Koenakeefe Mohl South African, 1903-1985
John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985) was one of the major figures of the ‘Sophiatown Renaissance’ of the 1940s and 1950s. Born in 1903 in Zeerust in the Transvaal, Mohl was educated at the Wesleyan Baralong missionary school and at the Tiger Kloof Institution. After finishing his teacher training, he was sent to study art in South-West Africa.
In the late 1920s, Mohl moved to Germany and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, possibly under the tutelage of Paul Klee. After the rise to power of Hitler in 1933, however, Mohl returned to South Africa, where he became a pioneer black art educator, influencing the work of Gerard Sekoto, Moses Tladi, and Helen Sebidi. In 1944, he set up his own art school in Sophiatown, known as the White Studio. He painted and taught there until the late 1950s, after which he was forcibly removed by the apartheid government and his studio and school demolished.
Stephen Sack argued in his catalogue for The Neglected Tradition that Mohl was the ‘father’ of black modernism in South Africa. However, Mohl’s idiosyncratic, colourful paintings of landscapes and of black rural and working-class people have often been interpreted as simple realist depictions of South African life.
Despite having studied in the Weimar Republic in the modernist heyday of Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz, most art historians have not seen a significant thematic or representative connection. Prof. Neil Parsons argues that Mohl’s work has far more in common with that of the English working-class painter L.S. Lowry. However, this is to overlook the Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Objectivity) realist movement of the Weimar period and, as art historian James Malpas puts it, their 'sardonic reflections on street-life and social turpitude.’ With this in mind, Mohl’s modernist credentials and practice must be reevaluated.
Mohl painted several works for the Botswana royal family, many of which were burnt in a fire. After his return to South Africa he exhibited regularly at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), while some of his works were selected for the famous 1936 Empire Exhibition. But his career was severely curtailed by apartheid. As a response, he formed ‘Artists under the Sun’, a group of black artstist who provocatively exhibited on the railings outside JAG. After his death in 1985, his work was exhibited in various ground-breaking exhibitions, including The Neglected Tradition (1988) and Land and Lives (1997).
Collections
BHP Billiton Collection, Johannesburg
Johannesburg Art Gallery
MTN Art Institute, Sandton
Iziko, South African National Gallery, Cape Town
South African Reserve Bank, Pretoria
UNISA Art Gallery, Pretoria
