An Introduction to three works
As art historians from Marilyn Martin to Dr. Alice Correia have noted, Albert Adams was a remarkable artist. However, much like Ernest Mancoba, Adams was marginalised, living a life on the edges of the South African and European art establishments. His work, up until his death, in 2006, remained under-researched and under-appreciated both locally and internationally.
However, since 2016, there has been a growing interest in his extraordinary oeuvre, both in the UK and South Africa. In particular, recent interest in his work has been taken up by British-based art historians and curators such as Dr. Alice Correia, Dr. Elena Crippa, Cristine Eyene, and Dr. Greg Salter. In South Africa too, a growing body of research has been developed by Prof. Bronwyn Law-Viljoen and Elza Miles that adds to the work of Marilyn Martin and Joe Dolby. This suggests a significant shift in Adams’ importance, both locally and internationally. As the head of exhibitions at London’s Whitechapel Gallery (and previously the senior curator at the Tate Modern), Dr. Elena Crippa says, Adams’ work ‘is still very new and very exciting to me.’
A biography of Albert Adams
Few artists have been touched by so many people of fame and influence: from Lord Leonard Hoffmann to Judge Albie Sachs to Irma Stern. Few have been so naturally talented and have been recognised and taught by so many renowned artists: from Lucian Freud to Oscar Kokoschka. And yet few have, in a sense, lived in a state of willing exile as Albert Adams did.
As a South African man of colour living in the 1950s, Adams chose to live in exile from his country. He also resolved to live in exile from the British society in which he moved, choosing instead to quietly love a man in a time when gay love could still not speak its name.
As a result, Albert Adams was overlooked, marginalised, and excluded from, what the French Algerian Albert Camus called, ‘the kingdom’. But in some ways, it was Adams who rejected it. Adams was in many ways an outsider in the sense of which Camus wrote about. He simply did not fit into society. His South African, half-coloured, half-Indian heritage always somehow left him on the margins. As British artist Greg Thrope writes, ‘Adams' political acuity and early life experiences, as a deeply marginalised citizen, never left him.’
Adams walked away from the commercial art world in around 1960, preferring to work quietly in his studio and to teach. Again, Thorpe expresses Adams’ sense of exile well when he offers:
A simultaneous celebration/defiance/transcendence of artistic category and practice is not a bad starting point for considering the work of Albert Adams, but it may also explain why he has sometimes been overlooked or side-lined through time. You will often find Adams missing from lists of significant British artists, Black and/or Indian artists, gay/queer/LGBTQ+ artists, post-war artists and so on.
And it is only now, in the last ten years, that people are beginning to rediscover what Stern, Kokoschka, and Adams’ teachers at Slade knew to be a remarkable and profound talent.
