By Hayden Proud

Well before his recent death at the age of 83, Cecil Skotnes had attained something akin to saintly status in the annals of South African art. Prior to his 70th birthday in 1996, he was already the holder of numerous awards. On reaching biblical age he was invested with many further honours. These included several honorary doctorates in Fine Art and the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold. The latter was bestowed in recognition of his work in the ‘deracialisaton’ of the fine arts in South Africa. His nimbus glowed even more brightly in recent years as greater art historical stock was taken of his role as a catalyst in the emergence of a significant urban black art movement in this country.

Skotnes’ role at the Polly Street Art Centre coincided with apartheid’s high water-mark in the 1950s and 60s. Although he had fought against fascism with the South African Army in Italy in his late teens in 1944-45, Skotnes was by nature more of a pacifist than a strident activist. His quiet, persistent example and gentle encouragement gradually opened conduits for dialogue between the separated and vastly unequal worlds of the white and the black South African artist. Serving the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged was a socio-religious imperative that he had been born to; his Norwegian father and his Canadian mother were both active social workers with the Salvation Army in East London. With their example before him, and with time, he realized the parable of the sower. The artistic harvest garnered from the seeds that he planted was great. In the roll-call of black South African artists of the Polly Street era, many also now dead, his tutelage and influence figures prominently.

Skotnes’ artistic imagination was always fired by his contact with original works of art. The work of Italian Renaissance masters such as Giotto, Masaccio and Michelangelo had deeply moved him when he was a young soldier in Florence. Back in Johannesburg at the fledgling Wits Fine Art department in 1947, he was inspired by the teaching of Dr Maria Stein-Lessing, a somewhat eccentric but highly professional art historian whose lively interests straddled Medieval, Modern and African art. It was through her that Skotnes was first introduced to the principles of the German Expressionist woodcut. At that time, printmaking was not yet a feature of the Wits Fine Arts curriculum, but the incised wooden block with the discipline of its planar limitations and its expressive potential was to become the abiding concern of his life’s work as an artist. In a leap of inspiration he decided to make the incised wooden block an independent work of art in itself, selectively colouring it with pigments. Such wooden panels became major ensemble art works, particularly when integrated within architectural settings, such as at the 1820s Settlers’ Monument in Grahamstown.

After his marriage to Thelma Carter in 1951, the couple toured Europe for nine months during which he gained greater appreciation of the implications of Cubism and Egyptian, pre-classical Greek and Assyrian art. A sojourn in England brought him into contact with the work of Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. The influence of the latter was profound, informing his interpretation of the South African landscape, which he was to revisit continually in his prints and paintings over the years that followed. It could perhaps be argued that in all of Skotnes’ oeuvre there is also something subliminally present that is redolent of his own Scandinavian ancestral heritage, which somehow always underpinned and inserted itself into his own efforts at producing an art that embodied the spirit and style of Africa. Herbert Read once referred to the extreme northern parts of Europe as “the preserve of an indigenous prehistoric style”. It was a style that was carried across vast oceans through small precious objects of impeccable craftsmanship, as well as through shallow, painted relief carving in the wooden sections which comprised the longboats of the Vikings. A limited range of motifs and forms was employed, creating patterns of amazing confusion and invention that always respected the forms that held them. In the life and work of Cecil Skotnes, something of that Scandinavian aesthetic persisted; its pioneering spirit enriching and fertilizing the artistic soil of South Africa.