Walter Battiss South African, 1906-1982
A dog and two free-spirited humans animate this life-affirming oil painting by Walter Battiss, which is set in a bright, blank harmonious place that could be anywhere. As in children’s books, the viewer is free to project into it whatever remembered or imaginary place they hold dear. The stippled blue strip at the top of the frame suggests a rippling river and the silhouette shape in the foreground, a mountain – together evoking a sense of nature or wilderness.
Like Paul Gauguin, Battiss often sought to portray humankind living in a utopian state of harmony with nature. This work was painted in the mid-Seventies, the decade during which Battiss conjured Fook Island – his fantastical, absurdist response to the repressive social realities of apartheid South Africa – and is informed by the same spirit of earth-loving irreverence. There is only a mild hint at the restrictive forces of state repression, bureaucratic control and Calvinist piety that Battiss endured in everyday life under apartheid. The brick-like shapes overlaid onto the granite of the mountain and the slatted gate cramped into the bottom-right corner of the painting are contrapuntal objects offsetting the predominant energy of freedom and delight.
In its affirmative pantheism, this painting is at home in the evolving field of ecological/environmental art. Although this preoccupation dates back into deep time, it has increasingly become a curatorial focal point as the world faces the polycrisis of mass extinction, climate extremes and environmental degradation.
Fervently childlike in its wide-eyed, candid style, Melle (is honey) communicates the artist’s enchantment with the natural world and interconnectedness with other species, biological systems, processes and phenomena. The dog is off the leash and the hair of the two characters flows untamed and wild. In a familiar gesture of interspecies subjectivity, the dog is about to be given a treat. The spirit of loving reciprocity brought into play by the three figures is amplified by the textual statement written into the rock, concluding with the words ‘cosmic creation is good’. The combination of figures and text within the same frame evidence the artist’s deep and abiding interest in the relationship of visual sign to verbal meaning and his study of the calligraphic detail of Arabic script, alphabets, hieroglyphic forms and pictographs.
Battiss became interested in archaeology and rock art as a young boy when his family moved from Somerset East in the Karoo to Koffiefontein, a small farming town in the Free State, in 1917. A family friend accompanied him to see ‘the ancient stones’ and this early experience of indigenous art would have a lifelong influence on his work as an artist.
‘When I came down from the mountains I was articulate and free,’ he later wrote. ‘For I had conversed with the white rocks and the lilac trees, the coucal and rhebuk… The twisted rivers and the endless veld spoke of animate and inanimate space. All this was my peculiar discovery but I had no desire to paint an anecdote about them, but rather to make pictures of them in such a way that I exposed the happy change they had worked within me’ (Battiss, 2005:88).
In form and content, this painting is realisation of that desire. With its simplified figures and absence of depth, it is an high-spirited pop rendering of the reduced shapes and non-receding perspectival plain of rock art.
Dr Alexandra Dodd
Sources
Walter Battiss. ‘Fragments of Africa,’ in Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist, eds. Jillian Carman and Susan Isaac (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2005), 88.
‘Walter Battiss (1902–1982),’ NLA Design and Visual Arts, 2013, https://nladesignvisual.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/walter-battiss-1902-1982/.
‘Walter Battiss,’ South African History Online, 2017, http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/walter-battiss.
Provenance
Private Collection, Cape Town.The Collection of Warren Siebrits.
The Collection of Linda Givon.
Exhibitions
Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon, 10 August to 13 November 2016.Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, Paintings – past and present, 26 July to 25 August 2006. (This painting was used as the poster image for the exhibition.)
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 40 Years: Mapping the Route, curated by Neil Dundas, 2006.
Literature
Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon. Catalogue. 10 August to 13 November 2016, colour illustration on p.24.Stevenson, M. South African Art 1800 – Now. Catalogue. 28 January to 14 February 2004. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Contemporary, illustrated plate 20.