Norval Foundation
01.04 - 30.11.2023
In her non-fiction writings spanning the 1960s till the 2000s, We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think, Shirley Hazzard noted that “it is always tempting to impose one’s view rather than to undergo the submission required by art — a submission, akin to that of generosity or love.” Art, she suggests, evokes a private response rather than an authorised one, what she refers to as “an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience and a way of communing with the dead.”
On a visit to Norval Foundation recently, I spent an afternoon communing with the dead. Through the exhibition, Maggie Laubser: Portraits and the Landscape: 1886 – 1973, the modernist painter led me to 19th-century artist Edward Roworth who mentored Laubser and whose style influenced her, along with Jan Toorop and Henri Matisse who were Laubser’s favourite artists. Traces of Matisse’s oeuvre — a bright palette, flat areas of pure pigment and fluid composition — are present in Laubser’s work. So too is Toorop’s rejection of pure realism, opting for the romantic, the picturesque and the dramatic. The exhibition also brings to mind Laubser’s contemporary Gladys Mgudlandlu to whom she is tied through a visual language — often described as innocent and escapist — as well as a shared affinity for painting birds.
Maggie Laubser, Landscape with mountains and two birds, South Africa, 1924-28. Courtesy of the Stellenbosch University Collection.
It is difficult to say with certainty whether painting has a responsibility, and what that responsibility is. Sontag called into question the idea that the role of the artist is to please and to educate. This feels true for painting. Truer for Laubser’s painting. Unlike literature (whose purpose might be the creation and expression of meaning), photography (whose goal might be to document) or poetry (a tall order to intimate the divine), painting (outside of the genre of history painting) seems more timid in declaring its purpose. Although its sensuousness produces pleasure, we can still question whether this is enough to justify its existence. Laubser’s paintings, characterised by a resplendent palette and sometimes stylised to emanate naivety, are filled with textures of fantasy and ease — women with rose-blushed cheeks, men in sleek suits, verdant rolling hills… so many rolling hills she painted (Pastoral Landscape, undated, Landscape with house and tree, 1920 and Basutoland Hills, undated). These are simple images, often intensified by colour. They are not perfect, but they approximate some perfect state. Laubser, of course, is known for her scenes depicting rural life drawing from her Anglo-Flemish farming roots. Her work is full of references to land, animals and people she has encountered, tinged with dreams and folklore.
In the aforementioned text, Hazzard tells the story of the Italian painter Paolo Veronese whose rendition of the Last Supper included people with nosebleeds, others scratching themselves and chaotic passers-by (that is, things not to be expected in a sacred painting). When asked why he added these into the frame, he responded: “I thought these things might happen.” In Laubser’s painting too, it seems enough to paint something just because it might happen. In the work Cypress (1921-22), three men work in a field, small white buildings are tucked under a thick forest and, in the distance, a white cloud hangs above them. I suspect that, if we asked her why she painted this strange, unrealistic, billowing cloud, Laubser too might respond, “Because these things might happen.”
Maggie Laubser. Cypress, Italy, 1920. Courtesy of the Sanlam Art Collection.
Through sunrise, a tall and dark tree emerges; a few more miniaturised trees surround it. Yellows, greens and blues turn periwinkle and mauve (The harvest, 1938-39). Light pierces through soft clouds, inducing a nostalgic sense of a time that never was. And place! Laubser’s places rarely feel charged or marked in response to movements in history. They are idyllic, charming and display astute technical skills. Her figures, too, do not contest modelled identities. They seem innocent, naive and childlike. Unreal but true. Reflecting on how best to achieve a sense of truth in writing, poet Paul Valéry wrote “of two words, we should always choose the lesser.” Here, lesser can be thought of as simple, straightforward, the opposite of ornamentation, effective. Similarly, Laubser’s images are lesser in that they express feeling through simplicity. On a Johans Borman webpage cataloguing her work, Laubser is quoted to have once said, “The privilege of bearing witness to these things in my simple way deeply satisfies me.” Simple. Uncomplicated. Effortless.
On the one hand, I see Laubser lost in her own world, and I recoil. On the other hand, I see her daydreaming through brushstrokes and I am seduced by it. I see the unnamed Japanese woman donning a floral garment (Japanese Girl, 1924) and immediately feel both the pleasure of Laubser’s mastery of brushwork but also the ferocity of her gaze. Who is this Japanese woman? Why is referred to as a girl? Why did Laubser create a portrait of her? And why is that portrait so pleasurable to look at? Poet William Empson asserted that life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. Of course, my reading of Laubser’s paintings is encumbered by history, but it is also embroiled in the mystery of how to analyse and articulate the very personal pleasure they produce.
Maggie Laubser, Japanese Girl, Germany, circa 1924. Maggie Laubser. Courtesy of the Sanlam Art Collection
To look at a work with a complete disinterest in grand narratives of history and politics surrounding it is nice. I use nice deliberately for its delicacy and frivolity. To look at a work with a complete disinterest in grand narratives of history and politics is also, as Laubser herself says, a privilege. But it can also be dangerous if it means a free pass to follow one’s curiosity without considering its effects. Because surely beauty can not only be about phenomenologies of pleasure and categories of taste. Because of the tensions it produces, the exhibition, Maggie Laubser: Portraits and the Landscape: 1886 – 1973, forces me to undergo a submission, to take seriously my private (not authorised) responses. At the same time, the work requires me to be self-reflexive in ways that it itself is not.
