Cobra Museum
27.01 - 14.05.2023
A major retrospective of the work of Ernest Mancoba and his partner Sonja Ferlov is on exhibition now at the Cobra Museum in Amsterdam. We spoke to the curator of the show, Winnie Sze, about Mancoba, Cobra, the humility it takes to admit you don’t know, and the pleasure it is to find out!
How did you first encounter Ernest Mancoba’s work?
I first saw his work at a Stevenson show (CT) in 2014. I had moved to Cape Town 2 years prior and the South African art scene was new to me. But it still struck me that Mancoba’s work was different to contemporary South African works at the time, which seemed to me to be literally figurative and overtly political. Later I would come to realise that Mancoba’s work was also figurative but abstracted, and he had a humanist objective behind his work. Mancoba’s work was also different from those of his contemporaries, like Sekoto, Pemba… (I was not to know at the time that Mancoba and Sekoto were friends). In short, I was intrigued!
What drew you to put together the Ernest Mancoba symposium in 2020 and, now, curate this major exhibition at the Cobra Museum in Amsterdam?
In 2017, I had an opportunity to do a research fellowship at the VanAbbe Museum (Eindhoven). I was looking into why Mancoba’s work was not in the Dutch public collection when he was said to be a “founding” member of Cobra whilst other non-Dutch Cobra artists were represented. But the real issue became how difficult it was to see his work, not only in person, but even in reproductions. How can you talk about an artist without talking about his work? Yet writers were writing about him. Then I realised their writings focused on one work or few works, so it was the same few images that were circulating and being written about.
Whilst I was in the Netherlands, I approached the Cobra Museum of Modern Art (Amsterdam) as part of doing my research, and I also asked them if they would consider an exhibition on Mancoba. So we’ve been discussing this since 2017! I’m glad it’s finally happening.
The 2020 symposium you mentioned was held in Cape Town. The audio recordings of some of the talks are still available for anyone to listen to courtesy of the A4 Arts Foundation who hosted the symposium. You can find them on the website, www.ernestmancoba.org (which I created as an appendix of my research paper for the VanAbbe; there are also many images of Mancoba’s works). I organised the symposium because I came across a book called Paris and South African Artists: 1850-1965 published by the South African National Gallery. I expected to find something on Mancoba, but the only mention was that the author had heard that Mancoba had survived the second world war! To be fair, the book was published in 1988, but even in 2020, South Africans seem to only know about Mancoba – if they knew about him at all – through the Hans Ulrich Obrist interview (published 2001) and indirectly through a work by Kemang Wa Lehulere in which he incorporated footage of the Obrist interview and a Mancoba print into one of his works. It seemed to me that South Africans should know and be proud of the work of one of their own.
In a 2014 review for ArtThrob former editor Matthew Blackman observed: “Ernest Mancoba, in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist a few years before Mancoba died, referred to himself as being some kind of ‘invisible man’. His life of living in exile in Paris certainly contributed to this perception, but there was something more to it than that. As many have pointed out… Mancoba is one of the most underappreciated and unacknowledged artists not only in South Africa, the country of his birth, but in the world.” Do you think this assessment is still true? Or do you think, almost ten years later, that Mancoba has received some appreciation?
I think that Mancoba is not widely known, but he is known by the global art world cognoscenti. His work was first re-introduced back into the art world by Okwui Enwezor in The Short Century touring exhibitions (2001-2002, USA and Germany), but even then, one of the three works included was actually not Mancoba’s; it was by his Danish wife, who was also an artist, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. So the reintroduction was (if you’ll allow) not as well-researched as it could have been. (I’m a huge fan of Enwezor’s work, but in this instance, it was a bit sloppy – it was 2001, Mancoba was still alive, or if Enwezor knew about Mancoba’s work through the South African art historian Elza Miles, she was still reachable even if retired.) Then came the interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. That set off more attention, such as from Rasheed Araeen. And in 2017, Mancoba’s work was included in documenta 14. But despite all this, writings about him still centred around one or few of the same works, and the Obrist interview included no images of works. It just seemed to me that Mancoba – the man – had become “visible” but that his work remained “invisible”. It made me wonder about the agenda of the identity politics that promoted Mancoba, the man, but left out his art. It is only if we judge his work to be relevant that he will be remembered, otherwise the attention is likely to be temporary.
Mancoba and his partner, Sonja Ferlov, who is also included in the exhibition, were involved at the founding of the Cobra movement, albeit from the sidelines. Can you tell us what exactly the Cobra movement was, and how Mancoba and Ferlov were involved?
Cobra was a pan-European art movement: the “Co” stands for Copenhagen, the “B” for Brussels, and the “A” for Amsterdam, the cities where the 5 artists and 1 poet who wrote and signed the original Cobra manifesto came from. It was important in European art history as the first international movement after World War II. The artists believed in art not being a high brow, academic thing, but something that would speak to everyone; they believed art could help us find sustainable peace. The “Co” artist, Asger Jorn, was a member of a Danish art association called Høst. He invited his fellow Cobra signatories to participate in Høst’s 1948 annual exhibition. Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov were also invited. That is how they all met.
What does it mean to be a “founder” as some have labelled Mancoba? As the 1948 Høst exhibition was the first time that the 6 signatories to the Cobra exhibition showed together, some have called that exhibition the “first” Cobra exhibition. But whilst some artists were in both, Høst and Cobra were also distinct and separate. Cobra was both intentionally “organised and disorganised.” They didn’t keep a members’ list; anyone who ascribed to their philosophy could be a “member,” loosely speaking. But at the same time, exhibitions were organised – mainly by Jorn and the Dutch artist, Constant. For instance, the following year, 1949, the first exhibition in a public institution was organised at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Mancoba was invited but did not attend, for reasons unknown. I would say his non-participation was a bad career move in hindsight (!) because subsequent Cobra retrospectives left him out because he was not in that seminal exhibition.
For me, the interesting question is, what did that relationship contribute to Mancoba’s work? He became friends with the Cobra artists – the Ferlov-Mancobas lived 40 km from Copenhagen and had a small child, so they didn’t participate in all the collaborations and shenanigans the Cobra and the Danish avant-garde artists got up to. But Mancoba did visit some of the Danish cultural sites with them, and this was to leave a lasting artistic impression. It changed his sculptures to more parsimony of form. Then he gave up sculpture for painting. Eventually, the friendships fell away because Cobra was only a short-lived movement (1949-1951 or 1948-1951, depending on if you begin it with the Høst or the Stedelijk exhibition).
For those who write about Mancoba for identity politics’ sake, their interest is in an ambiguous comment Mancoba made in his interview with Obrist, that he had been marginalised because of his race. A more careful reading would point out that Mancoba combined or confused Høst and Cobra. I have no evidence that the Cobra artists had anything but respect for Mancoba. It should also be noted that, elsewhere, Mancoba called the Høst/Cobra artists his “spiritual tribe.” Having said that, it is a fact that an important Cobra art historian did not believe that Mancoba should be included in the canon. This was for various reasons, including not finding his work spontaneous or childlike, like the works of others in Cobra. But she also said that his work “betrayed his African origins.” I won’t reveal who made that comment, but she came to the exhibition at the Cobra Museum. She told the Director that she had never seen those Mancoba works in person before. I’d like to think that Mancoba would have been satisfied that she came – she didn’t have to – and that she was finally willing to take a real look at his art.
As a scholar of Mancoba, what do you think people still misunderstand about him and/or his work?
I’m not sure “misunderstand” is the most appropriate word. It seems to me that Europeans see “Western aspects” about his work – the handling of the paint, the colour field as interrogation of perspective, for instance – and Africans identify with Mancoba’s palette and the subject of the kota (West African reliquary) in the kota-esque paintings as aspects of “African spirituality.” So people understand the aspects they know, but what some might struggle with is that in Mancoba’s work, BOTH Western and African aspects are simultaneously present. It’s a kota but painted partially abstractly and using Western painting language; it’s a Western colour field painting made using African colour tones. Mancoba’s work is not a pastiche of either culture. This is what makes his work interesting and unique, but also may be why it’s so difficult to fit into an art historical canon.
I am asked why I titled the exhibition “Je est un autre, Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov.” The phrase je est un autre is French and comes from the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Mancoba quoted it and translates it with its intentional grammatical error as “I is another.” I think, for Mancoba, it summarised his belief in the role of art. That art allowed us to see “the other.” To see others in ourselves, and to see ourselves in others.
Do you have a favourite work on the exhibition? If so, what about it speaks to you?
I took the longest to answer this question. Since it’s about my favourite, I will say it’s a textile work. It is currently attributed to Mancoba by the Museum Jorn (Silkeborg) but a Danish scholar and I have reason to believe it was by Sonja Ferlov Mancoba with Ernest Mancoba. Some might find this an odd choice because I’m saying it’s not Mancoba’s work and it’s textile, a medium for which he’s not best known. But that is why it’s my favourite. There’s so much to try to understand about it. Art shouldn’t be simple. It flatters my ego when I think I know something, but that feeling is transitory. It’s much more rewarding in the long run to admit I don’t know something, but that it’s going to be fun to find out.