Walter Battiss: The Irrepressible Nudist

  • As an artist, Walter Battiss was not committed to any single form or mode of expression; he intentionally moved across...
    Walter Battiss, Female nude
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    As an artist, Walter Battiss was not committed to any single form or mode of expression; he intentionally moved across registers and mediums and did so with conceptual agility and formal dexterity. His early encounters with Southern African rock art, his pursuit of an island paradise (in his travels as in his compositions), and his sly refusal to be curtailed by apartheid-era censorship on charges of indecency have become touchstones in surveys of his expansive and prolific career.

     

    As an artist, Walter Battiss was not committed to any single form or mode of expression; he intentionally moved across registers and mediums and did so with conceptual agility and formal dexterity. His early encounters with Southern African rock art, his pursuit of an island paradise (in his travels as in his compositions), and his sly refusal to be curtailed by apartheid-era censorship on charges of indecency have become touchstones in surveys of his expansive and prolific career.

    Of the joyful irreverence that came to characterise his career, he offered the simple maxim: "An artist delights in life." As to the artist himself, Battiss is variably remembered as a "gentle anarchist", "irrepressible nudist", "paunchy painter-poet", and the benevolent monarch of Fook Island, a utopian island of his own invention.

  • Three Female Nudes

    • From the early 1970s onwards, Battiss’ pursuit of paradise assumed a tropical tone, with the artist travelling extensively in the Pacific and Indian Oceans throughout that decade. These three paintings—Female nude, Woman sunbathing, and Woman by a river—are characteristic of Battiss’ late style and most likely belong among the island works that populated that period. Seen alongside one another, they extend a comparative study of Battiss’ stylistic agility.

       

      While all three women are described with fluid brushstrokes in pronounced outline, cast no

    • shadow, and are without depth, they offer distinctly different variations on the same theme. Battiss rarely painted portraits; his figures are more often ideals that are lent a human likeness. They are archetypes rather than individuals.

      As such, the images are not lascivious or sexualised but, rather, the artist seems to delight in the interplay of colour and form. Such are these three women, their compositional lightness is that of a mature artist and confident colourist.

    • Battiss’ art knowledge was vast, and he was intimately familiar with the historic genre of the female nude which he plays with so effectively in these compositions. Loaded as they are with the weight of thousands of years of human creative development, we understand the first traces of depictions of female nudity to emanate from the 6th century BC, portrayed in everyday scenes painted on ceramic vessels. This is a trope that begins in ancient Greece, where sculptors paid homage to the gods by representing them in idealised human form.

  • Battiss was a keen historian, a life-long student, and a teacher. His artistic confrontation with a subject as historically charged...
    Walter Battiss, Woman sunbathing

    Battiss was a keen historian, a life-long student, and a teacher. His artistic confrontation with a subject as historically charged ‘the nude’ would not have been lost on him. And, true to character, he approaches this in what seems to be a light-hearted and ostensibly ludic manner.

    While the subject, at first reading, may seem banal, these paintings should be considered in the context of the environment in which they were created. This was most likely 1970s South Africa, a wholly conservative and generally ‘traditional’ country heavy with official and social censorship. It was a time when many of Battiss’ contemporaries were still painting hackneyed landscapes and still lifes, while other New Group founding members were painting scenes of Hout Bay harbour and abstract waterscapes.

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  • Within this context, and against the backdrop of his lifestyle, Battiss was free-spirited and avant-garde to an extent to which...
    Walter Battiss, Woman by a river

    Within this context, and against the backdrop of his lifestyle, Battiss was free-spirited and avant-garde to an extent to which few artists of the time can compare. His freedom and willingness to produce work that pierced the veil of South Africa’s reactionary society was an act of commendable courage.

     

    Common to all three paintings is their unconventional framing: arms extend off canvases, legs are abridged, and a face is cleaved by the edge of the picture plane. In addition, all feature abstracted forms alongside the figure, some gestural and spontaneous (as in Female nude), while others are given a more intentional weight (as in Woman sunbathing). In both these works, the forms are ambiguous-either purely formal devices or signs of obscure significance. Some of these suggest the calligraphic notations that populated Battiss's paintings from the mid-50s onwards, which anticipate the alphabet he later invented for Fook Island.

     

    In Woman by a River, however, what first appear as black abstract lines are revealed to be the legs of swimmers. The composition, which is unusual in its spare application of paint, also conceals a visual pun. Half-hidden in the underpainting at the woman's pelvis is a pair of eyes, the shorthand of the woman's sex serving as a crude mouth and nose (an image, one imagines, of the artist and his "impish smile").

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  • Battiss and his practice

    • Battiss was unique in his deft synthesis of European Modernism’s influence and indigenous South African pictorial traditions, eluding the accusation of parochial ‘parroting’ so often levelled at his contemporaries (such as his fellow co-founders of The New Group, all of whom, with the exception of Battiss, had received formal training in Europe). His continued efforts to “enumerate the pleasures and consolations of nature,” as Sean O’Toole writes, further set him at odds with the ambition of international modernism to which his cohort aspired.

    • Battiss first found a recurring subject and formal grammar in his close study of San rock art, in which he became a noted authority. In petroglyphs and paintings found in caves and on rocky outcrops, he recognised not only distinct pictorial languages and experiments in abstraction, but also a sense of the human embedded in the natural world. Battiss’s ensuing preoccupation with nature extended from the living landscape, recalled in so many of his watercolours, to an imagined Eden—a timeless idyll of (more often erotic) communion.

  • Melle is honey...

    Melle is honey...
    Walter Battiss, Melle is honey…, c.1975

    Melle is honey...

    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.

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  • 'When I came down from the mountains I was articulate and free. 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.'

    Walter Battiss

    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.

     

    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.

  • Mrs Thomas

    Mrs Thomas, Mrs Thomas Leisure Bay – Ear listens to morning, midday, afternoon and evening sea

    Walter Battiss, Mrs Thomas Leisure Bay - Ear listens to morning, midday, afternoon and evening sea (quadriptych)

    Mrs Thomas

    Mrs Thomas Leisure Bay – Ear listens to morning, midday, afternoon and evening sea

    This small whimsical quadriptych was painted in Walter Battiss' winter retreat in Leisure Bay, on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. From the latter part of his career, this work is a poetic meditation on passing time, and the associated sensory shifts of sound, sense, colour and light.

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  • Available Works
    • Walter Battiss, Female nude
      Walter Battiss, Female nude
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    • Walter Battiss, Woman sunbathing
      Walter Battiss, Woman sunbathing
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    • Walter Battiss, Woman by a river
      Walter Battiss, Woman by a river
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    • Walter Battiss, Melle is honey…, c.1975
      Walter Battiss, Melle is honey…, c.1975
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  • Words by Lucienne Bestall and Dr. Alexandra Dodd

     

    Sources:
    Scully. L. (1963). Walter Battiss. University of Pretoria: Unpublished thesis. p.18
    Carman, J. and Isaac, S. (eds). (2005). Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery.
    Sampson, L. (2015). 'Eccentric artist Walter Battiss is back with a bang'. Sunday Times. 10 May. Available online.

    Battiss, W. (1979). Walter Battiss by Walter Battiss. Dawidow, D. and Eager, M. (eds). Produced by documents of South African Art in cooperation with Fook Mountain Press. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand
    O'Toole, S. (2017). 'Battiss in Johannesburg'. adjective. 1(1): pp.9-12

    Battiss, W. 'Fragments of Africa,' in Carman, J. and Isaac, S. (eds). (2005). Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery. p.88.
    'Walter Battiss (1902-1982)', NLA Design and Visual Arts, 2013. Available online.

    'Walter Battiss', South African History Online, 2017. Available online.

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