Notes
- The analysis carried out in this essay is taken up in greater detail in my book, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
- “Grey Areas” is also the title of an anthology of writing on race and representation in art after apartheid, edited by Candice Breitz and Brenda Atkinson. The volume does not explain the official use of the term during the apartheid years, it only discusses work by black artists in a cursory fashion, and it does not speak significantly of the history of art before 1994. The primary concern of the volume is a defense of Breitz and a number of her white female artist colleagues (primarily by various friends, colleagues, and former teachers) against accusations by critics (primarily Okwui Enwezor, Kendell Geers, and Olu Oguibe) that their aesthetic appropriation of the image of the black body was insensitive. The art and controversy discussed, though important, belongs to the postapartheid era and falls outside of the scope of my own study. Ironically, an earlier version of the present essay was proposed for the anthology but was rejected on the grounds that it was “too historical.” See Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz, eds., Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999); Olu Oguibe, “Beyond Visual Pleasures: A Brief Reflection on the Work of Contemporary African Women Artists,” in Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists, ed. Salah Hassan (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1997); Kendell Geers, “Dangers inherent in foreign curating,” Star Tonight 19 March 1997; and Okwui Enwezor, “Reframing the black subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Art,” in Contemporary Art From South Africa (Oslo: Riksutstillinger, 1997).
- Leslie Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989), 21–23. See also Luli Callinicos, Working Life: A People's History of South Africa, Vol. 2, Factories, Townships and Popular Culture on the Rand 1886–1940 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).
- Bob Nixon, “Harlem, Hollywood, and the Sophiatown Renaissance,” in Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994).
- Spiro remarks that the drawing lessons for students at Grace Dieu included the study of geometric counterchange patterns similar to designs seen in Pedi and Ndebele art. Spiro, Gerard Sekoto (footnote 131), 67. Here she cites an interview between Elizabeth Rankin and the artist, in Paris during June 1988.
- Miles, Land and Lives, 77.
- Spiro, Gerard Sekoto, 33.
- Miles, Land and Lives, 78–79.
- Ib?d., 80–81.
- Ibid., 78; Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, 19.
- Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, 19.
- For a sociological analysis of this small but influential class of black intellectuals and professionals, see Leo Kuper, An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).
- Roland Barthes, “The Blue Guide,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 74–75.
- Spiro, Gerard Sekoto, 33 and 42.
- Work by Sekoto was also selected for the annual exhibitions in 1939, 1941, and 1942. Other black artists, including John Mohl, Moses Tladi, and Job Kekana were also included in Academy shows, but usually in special categories, as “Native Exhibits” or “Native Crafts.”
- See Elza Miles, Lifeline out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994); and South African National Gallery, George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba (Cape Town: SANG, 1996).
- Cited in Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, 150. Sekoto's comment also contains a hint of the Négritude philosophy of Leopold Senghor, whom he knew in Paris.
- When he first arrived in Paris, Sekoto worked at a piano bar where he was sometimes mistaken for an American jazz musician.
- During 1995, I watched the excavation of the ground for the future stadium at Ellis Park, east of downtown Johannesburg. Each day teams of black laborers could be seen working, and white foremen perched on ladders shouted orders.
- Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- Ivor Powell, “.us blacks…—Self-construction and the Politics of Modernism,” in Persons and Pictures: the Modernist Eye in Africa, ed. Ricky Burnett (Johannesburg: Newtown Galleries, 1995), 18–19.
- In two earlier essays I discuss the idea of a “dilemma of opportunity” further, in relation to African American and African neo-diaspora art. See John Peffer, “The Diaspora as Object” in Looking Both Ways, Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, ed. Laurie Farrell (New York: Museum for African Art, 2003); and John Peffer, “The Burden of Global Art,” in Global Priority, ed. Susan Jahoda, a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism (November 2003).
- Jean le May, “Reform Without Change: A Special Nat Party Skill,” Weekly Mail, 8–14 August 1986, 15.
- David Goldblatt, “Introduction” in Sharp: The Market Photography Workshop, ed. Brenton Maart and T. J. Lemon (Johannesburg: The Market Gallery, 2002).
- “Art Under Apartheid,” New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1965.
- Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 198–199.
- Paul Stopforth, interview, 29 July 2000.
- Ibid.
- Nat Nakasa, “Johannesburg, Johannesburg,” in The World of Nat Nakasa, ed. Essop Patel (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 7. The essay was originally published in The Classic 1, 3 (1964).
- Sholto Ainslie, personal communication, 24 July 2001.
- Letter to Elizabeth Rankin, 22 September, 1994. Cited in Rankin “Teaching and Learning,” 74.
- Steven Sack, “Introduction,” Common and Uncommon Ground (Atlanta: City Gallery East, 1996).
- Paul Stopforth, interview, 29 July 2000.
- Ezekiel Mphahlele, “Remarks on Negritude,” cited in Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor's Shadow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 34.
- Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Cult of Négritude,” Encounter 16, 3 (March 1961): 51–52.