Albert Adams: Exile and the Kingdom

  • Adams' work and impactful legacy has seen a significant growth in attention in institutional and academic circles, which include large-scale...

    Albert Adams seated in his London studio c.1960

    © The Artist's Estate

    Adams' work and impactful legacy has seen a significant growth in attention in institutional and academic circles, which include large-scale survey exhibitions at:

     

    Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Albert Adams: Journey on a Tight Rope, 2008
    SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, Albert Adams: The Bonds of Memory, 2016
    The Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch, Albert Adams (1929-2006): A Fractured History, 2017
    Wits Art Museum, An Invincible Spirit: Albert Adams and his Art, 2019
     
    More recently, a symposium was hosted by the University of Salford in Manchester, in 2022. As prominent art critic and cultural journalist Greg Thorpe has written, it was "part of a movement to recuperate the artist and establish a reputation befitting his extraordinary body of work".
     
    In Spring 2020 Dr Alice Correia, Research Fellow in Art History at the School of Arts and Media at Salford, received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to support research and a workshop in early 2021 to share Adams’ work with a wider sector audience.

  • 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 growing interest in his extraordinary oeuvre, both in the UK and South Africa. In particular, recent interest in his work by British-based art historians and curators such as Dr. Alice Correia, Dr. Elena Crippa, Cristine Eyene, and Dr. Greg Salter has contributed to marked growth in the attention and scholarly research.

    • 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...’

  • The Captive (1982) Dr. Elena Crippa states that Adams ‘was constantly reimagining, constantly bringing in new sources and new ideas....

    The Captive (1982)

    The Captive (1982)

     

    Dr. Elena Crippa states that Adams ‘was constantly reimagining, constantly bringing in new sources and new ideas. His painting and drawing is never static.’ Perhaps one of the most interesting works he produced in London in the 1980s is The Captive (1982). As art historian Alice Correia argues, the work references the police brutality of the apartheid period, with the figure to the left in brown. However, as Correia goes on to argue, the police figure in the black uniform seems to reference what was going on in Britain at the time. The work replicates much of the press photography of the police arrests during the Brixton riots of 1981. The work, of course, could also reference his own arrests in 1950s South Africa.

    The Captive sees Adams return to a less painterly style, to the more planure or flat surfaces that he experimented with in his youth. As several art historians have suggested, Adams was also influenced by the work of David Hockney. However, the theme is far more political in nature than that of Hockney. As Correia argues, the issues addressed in the rendering of The Captive are far closer to those of a much younger group of British artists, such as the BLK Art Group and Donald Rodney. The Captive is a perfect example of the work that Adams was producing in the 1980s.

    This composition is replete with three dynamic humanoid forms that fill the frame, dominated by the central figure in bright red, flanked on either side by the ominous shapes of uniforms. A strong effect of movement and force is created through the use of angular lines that run from the edges of the composition into a central point of the canvas, which have the result of drawing the viewer into the frame as the hasty figures simultaneously seem to move out of it. This masterfully creates a tension, both physical and implied, between the flat areas of bright complementary colours that seem to be pushing against each other. The menacing stance of the outside figures, authoritarian and domineering, seem to clamp the central figure. While the cool greys and greens of the background push the foreground figures forward so effectively it gives the sense of them running out of the frame into the same space the viewer occupies. To further confer suspended kinetic energy, the sense of anticipation is punctuated by the barrel of an assault rifle.

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  • Celebration Head (1996) The intensity with which Adams had painted in 1959, combined with the horrors of the growing violence...
    Celebration Head (1996)

    Celebration Head (1996)

     

    The intensity with which Adams had painted in 1959, combined with the horrors of the growing violence of apartheid, perhaps had a more profound effect on him than he would admit. In 1960, Adams returned to London. He claimed that he wished simply to return to his friends, but this was also, in many senses, politically motivated. As his friend and fellow artist, the British painter Harold Riley, said, Adams’ ‘painful experiences when he returned to South Africa marked him, and planted a seed that fuelled his work in London until he died’.

     

    Adams’ life in London was a reclusive one. He rejected the commercial art world and exhibited rarely. His art, however, reached a broader public in various other forms, including his cover designs for Heinemann’s African Writers series. One, Quartet: New Voices from South Africa, produced in 1963, would be an example of a reductive self-portrait with which he would continually re-engage for much of his life. Similarly, he had produced a print in 1960 of a distended egg-shaped head teetering on a stick-like neck which appears to draw on the same form.

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  • 'Intersectional tools of understanding gifted to us by Black scholars may also help (re)position Adams through new frames of sexuality, post-colonialism, abolitionism and race.'
    – Greg Thorpe

    Elza Miles states, in her monograph An Invincible Spirit: Albert Adams and His Art, ‘the Self Portrait (1960), consisting of ovals, ellipses, and vertical rectangles, served as a blueprint for Celebration Head (1996)’. Miles further suggests the wheels that appear at the shoulders intimate another work, simply titled Celebration (2002), depicting a crumpled man on a wheelchair. Celebration Head is certainly another attempt to investigate himself and his elusive identity. As Adams himself would state, he was always seeking to unpick just who he was:

     

    I think identity is something that I find very difficult to pin down — just who I am. I think if you were involved with painting or with any of the arts, then that really becomes crucial, central. And I don’t know if you ever find out who you are. I think that is a theme in my own work. It’s not only, I think, in a national context, but also, of course, in very much more personal context too. The conflicts that arise within one’s own being has to be resolved. And indeed painting, pictures of conflict, resolves one’s own conflicts at times.

     

    Simultaneously exploring the personal as well as the political, Adams produced a lifelong series of self-portraits, considering his own African-Indian heritage and identity. Reading his work today, against the backdrop of post-colonial theory and identity politics, demonstrates how avant-garde his thinking was, and how relevant it is today.

  • Blue Head (1999) 'Blue Head is a requiem in blues and greys with flashes of white and mauve. Every feature...

    Blue Head (1999)

    Blue Head (1999)

     

    'Blue Head is a requiem in blues and greys with flashes of white and mauve. Every feature of the countenance embodies the effect of torture, as symbolised by the sinewy electric lines in contrast with the blotches of blues and greys. The eyes are without sight, while the mouth stutters wordless sounds.' — Dr. Elza Miles

     

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Adams returned to Cape Town to work on a new body of work. As a result, his work reflected on South Africa, and in many senses, it re-evoked his practice from the late 1950s. As he stated in an interview, he wanted to create a body of work that ‘people of this city [Cape Town] could identify with’. He would go on to confess that, in coming back to the city in which he had grown up, he could not avert his eyes from the downtrodden and those that had suffered during apartheid. It was their experience of oppression and violence that he felt most deeply: ‘It was those visual experiences that formed the basis of my work, it still does,’ he commented.

     

    One of the themes Adams concentrated on during this period was incarceration and torture. He collected images, mainly from Africa, of incidents of human rights violations and internment. As he admitted in an interview, one of his cousins had been imprisoned on Robben Island during apartheid. Blue Head, which appeared in his show at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 2002, was one in this series.

     

    As Alice Correia observes: ‘Throughout his artistic career … Albert Adams sought to confront the realities of human cruelty. He was deeply moved by, and responded to the horrors of war and genocide perpetrated across the world — from South African apartheid to the Iraq War.’

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  • 'Through his training and volition Adams was a modernist and expressionist, but he remained – till the last – spiritually and politically contemporary.'

    — Marilyn Martin, former director of the South African National Gallery

  • The Art Career of Albert Adams

    Double Portrait Rudolf von Frieling and Siegbert Eick (c.1950), Irma Stern Collection

    The Art Career of Albert Adams

    As a young man, Adams’ talents were clear. Double Portrait: Rudolf von Frieling and Siegbert Eick, (right) painted around 1950, is a work of remarkable maturity and originality. The work borrows from Toulouse Latrec's Divan Japonais, which appears in the background, in both style and palette, with its flat dark areas of colour, as taken from Japanese print influence. As British artist and curator Isaac Benigson points out, the portrait is ‘one of the few examples of queer-coded paintings from the period in South Africa; the two men standing together, with Von Frieling's hand on Eick's left shoulder, poised in an intimate moment.’ While studying to be a teacher at Hewat Teachers Training College in Athlone, Adams experimented with various expressionist styles. In these works, he played with non-realistic colour and the use of planure or flat plains.

    • Slade and Kokoschka

       

      While studying at Slade, Adams was tutored by Lucian Freud although, as stated, his most marked influence was Oskar Kokoschka. As Marilyn Martin and Joe Dolby put it:

       

      The time spent with Oskar Kokoschka had an enduring influence on Adams’ philosophical and technical approach to his own creative expression.

    • Throughout his life, he remained true to Kokoschka’s words, contained in a taped speech, specially recorded for and played at the opening of Adams’ first solo exhibition in Cape Town in 1959: never to close his eyes to ‘the misery we create on earth’.

       

      As Kokoschka said in the same speech, ‘the role of the artist is to see’. And what Adams could see all around him was the misery of South Africa, something he could never stop seeing.

  • With his most famous work, the triptych South Africa 1959, he attempted to get to grips with the political situation...

    South Africa 1959 

    © Johannesburg Art Gallery

    With his most famous work, the triptych South Africa 1959, he attempted to get to grips with the political situation he was surrounded by. As Kokoschka said of this body of work that Adams produced for his first solo at the Argus Gallery:

    My young friend, the painter Albert Adams, felt the sensation of individual experience as a student in my School of Vision, which I hold every summer in Salzburg. He set his teeth into a kind of fruit, new to most of our contemporary artists. Now it is for the visitors of this exhibition at Cape Town to tell us how the fruit tastes.

    As several art historians have suggested, this ‘fruit’ was ‘visionary in its conception and imagery. The work anticipates the apocalypse of apartheid that would traumatise the country for another 35 years’.

    Many have compared Adams work in this period with that of Francis Bacon, in particular his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifix.
  • Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifix, 1944 © Estate of Francis Bacon
    • South Africa (Deposition) 1959

      South Africa (Deposition) 1959

    • The Three Studies certainly has some thematic similarities with Adams’ South Africa (Deposition) 1959. However, Adams’ two triptychs are more frenetic and fraught in their application of paint. They are also more politically and socially rooted in a direct, lived, experience of violence and racism in South Africa. Adams was still in the thrall of Kokoshka’s ideas and was acting on his role as seer with a visceral intensity.

    • Kokoshka had taught Adams that: ‘The artist must provide his fellow man with visual information. It must derive from individual experience if it is to be of any importance to others’.

      South Africa (1959), also references both Picasso and Goya, but it's distortions of the human body, the rawness of vision, and the authenticity of experience, create an image arguably more disturbing and gripping than that of Bacon’s.

    • African Modernism & Slade Art College, 1950-1960

       

      Between 1953 and 1956 Adams was a student at Slade with some of the most influential African and Asian modernists of the twentieth century. As Dr. Liz Bruchet and Prof. Ming Tiampo state in their exhaustive research into Slade:

       

      The Slade School of Fine Art occupies a complex place in the global history of art education, art practice, empire, and decolonisation. The Slade is both an art school and a department of University College London, an abolitionist institution and the first secular university in England. From its inception in 1871, the Slade accepted students regardless of race, gender, or religion, and trained students from throughout the British Empire and around the world. As such, it was both an institution of imperial education and a contact zone where imperialism and decolonisation existed cheek by jowl, co-constituting the futures of its students, staff, and their networks both in Britain and overseas.

    • In the mid-twentieth century, many future artistic and cultural leaders of the postcolonial world would graduate from the Slade. Adams studied with various other African artists, including the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930) and the Tanzanian-born artist Sam Joseph Ntiro (1923–1999). He was also there with Egyptian artist Menhat Helmy (1924–2005) and Khalid Iqbal (1929–2014) from Pakistan.

       

      Other artists of significance who also studied with Adams included Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego and British artists Michael Tyzack, Euan Uglow, and Adams’s friend Harold Riley.

       

      Among his most important teachers were William Townsend, Victor Pasmore, Lucian Freud, and Sir William Coldstream.

    • Albert Adams at Slade School of Fine Art - University College London

      Albert Adams at Slade School of Fine Art - University College London

  • Available Works
    • Albert Adams, The Captive, 1982
      Albert Adams, The Captive, 1982
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    • Albert Adams, Blue Head, circa 1999
      Albert Adams, Blue Head, circa 1999
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    • Albert Adams, Celebration Head, 1996
      Albert Adams, Celebration Head, 1996
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