Hugo’s Flowering Namaqualand

The Flowering Namaqualand of Hugo Naudé – Nick van der Leek searches for the springtime of the artist’s soul…

Pictures: Nick van der Leek and Supplied

I’m looking at a modest-sized painting, 13.5cm x 17cm. Namaqualand Daisies is a masterpiece but it’s hard to say why. Pieter Hugo Naudé, a contemporary of Volschenk, has a gorgeous Van Gogh-like style. His simple brushstrokes and courageous palette imply a slumbering genius. But if this is more than mere Impressionism, what is it?

In Namaqualand Daisies, the field of flowers rises almost imperceptibly to the left, while simultaneously there’s a deepening intensity of colour, as subtle, guiding lines move the viewer towards the horizon. What secret lies beneath these compelling, open-air, perpetually springtime scenes?

To solve this puzzle we must start from a great distance away, and then we must look at individual pieces. All artists worth their salt have territories. Pierneef (1886-1957) had the monumental thunderstorm skies, arching camelthorn trees and geometric strata of the Northern Transvaal.

My great-grandfather Tinus de Jongh (1885-1942) luxuriated in the sun-drenched Cape Dutch homesteads and gold-plated mountains of the Western Cape. Claerhout (1919-2006) captured the sweaty, earthy characters inhabiting the sunflower fields of the Free State. WH Coetzer (1900-1983) assailed the Drakensberg, the rural backwoods and their local inhabitants, and the Great Trek.

For Pieter Wenning (1873-1921) it was the overgrown pioneer farms of early South Africa, for Boonzaaier (1909-2005) the streets of Cape Town, Bo Kaap and the coast, and for Keith Alexander (1946-1998), the shipwrecked dystopias of Namibia. There was occasionally an overlap, but for the most part, our legacies of original art were not just distinctive in their own right, but targeted to specific landscapes.

While Volschenk (1853-1936) was staking his claim on the lovely Langeberg around Riversdale, his next-door neighbour (not only geographically but historically) was Hugo Naudé. He was born in 1869 on the farm Aan-de-Doorns, and bred in the towering orchards of the Hex River Valley, and his world was the world of the farm. And what’s the most blessed time of year on a farm? Springtime, of course.

After attending school at Overhex and in Worcester, the 20-year-old Naudé joined the celebrated writer Olive Schreiner in 1889 on a trip to Europe. Schreiner not only recognised Naudé’s talent, but was actively involved in introducing her charge to an excellent network of artists, patrons and intellectuals.

One of these was Havelock Ellis, an English writer (and physician) who co-authored the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality, in 1897. Ellis recommended that Naudé attend the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. Naudé also studied portraiture at the Kunstakademie in Munich under Franz von Lenbach. And so it goes on…

Of course there’s only so much you can learn about an artist in books. To really get to know these creative heads of state, we have to invade their territories. We have to have a first-hand experience of some quintessentially South African scene, and that means driving out into their distinctive territories, armed to the teeth with curiosity, our hearts and minds flung open.

It’s only once we’re outdoors and far from our domestic concerns, out of context as it were, that we’re awakened to some slippery but exquisite essence. Something resides here and only here. But where’s Naudé’s magical ‘here’? Worcester?

Naudé’s countless farmyard scenes were painted around this Western Cape town perched on today’s N1. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this is where he grew up and where he settled with his wife. But I’m looking for a world that Naudé would have still recognised. It’s not here; it’s beyond traffic lights, parking lots and strip malls glowing beneath the stern faces of Worcester’s looming purple mountains.

If he were driving with me in the car, where would he have demanded we stop? Where would he have bathed in the absolute beauty of the countryside? And so I drive north, leaving behind the Cape and its grapes, its towers and its traffic, towards drier, dustier climes.

I spend the night at my aunt’s home in Velddrif, beside the Berg River. An artist herself, Joan Schrauwen finds the constant fluctuations of light on the water, on the sedge, and the liquid tides of birds, a kindling for her creativity. The next morning, equipped with instructions on where the best swathes of flowers are hiding, I set off.

On my way out of Velddrif I can’t help thinking there’s a clue to this mystery of Naudé’s Namaqualand Daisies in Joan’s fluid twilight scenes. The medium is different, but there’s something going on here that’s both deeply tangible and frustratingly intangible. What is it?

As I make my way up the West Coast, past Elandsbaai and the mountain cauldron of Vredendal, I feel a sort of slippage. Not just the day slipping but a lifetime, not just a lifetime but an entire generation. As I wander into the fringes of Namaqualand the day becomes a daze of flowers. The world transforms into a natural Garden of Eden, endless blooms stretching on and on for miles.

I drive all the way to Kleinsee over several days (about 100km short of Port Nolloth and the Namibian border) and, as each new floral landscape unfurls into view, I find myself struggling to fit it all into the camera viewfinder. That rich intensity of colour – even the world’s most powerful cameras struggle to comprehend such penetrating and pervasive lavishness. Surely it’s not real?

Increasingly I want to know Naudé’s technique for capturing these lovely scenes. This is the first time I’m seeing the Namaqualand flower show and it truly is a wonder. While I’m using a wide-angle lens, Naudé reduces the size of his canvas to something small and manageable. Then he infuses this with nature’s buzzing, oozing, beautiful diversity. This seems an almost mischievous trick, but it’s really a master craftsman, who has transferred his skill at portraiture to this loveliest of all landscapes. Instead of obsessing over technicality, instead of working within a particular school of art, Naudé focuses on the quality of what’s in front of him. His art goes beyond Impressionism and becomes intuitive.

Like in the face of a supermodel blown up, where we suddenly see freckles, pores, the curve of a nostril, and beneath her eyes a few tiny wrinkles. But none of that matters. What matters are the lines of her face, the light in her eyes. And so Naudé dispenses with details and finds the essence in the simple brushwork – colour, liveliness, the ebb and flow of the underlying fields.

There’s a turbid quality to some of his work. It speaks to the soul about how these flowers are suddenly here, there and everywhere, and then disappear entirely from the landscape. They must die in order to leave behind seeds that will bloom again next year.

The road lifts, revealing seams of colour. I find myself in high spirits here. I wonder, was Naudé a particularly happy artist that he loved these landscapes so? As struggling artists go, he was one of the luckier ones; his talent was recognised early and supported.

Others, like Pierneef, Tinus, Claerhout, Wenning, Baines and arguably even Keith Alexander, didn’t have it so simple or so easy. If it wasn’t parents who objected to the artistic dreams of their progeny, it was catastrophic setbacks, sabotage, fire or premature death that made life hard for most of them. Even Naudé’s neighbour Volschenk voluntarily sacrificed decades to a career before resuming his artistic journey.

In Esmé Berman’s excellent encyclopaedia, Art & Artists of South Africa, we see that ‘there were probably few artists in South Africa who were more popular as individuals than was Hugo Naudé. Even in his youthful days, pupils and friends would cluster around him and often in the evening he would entertain them at the piano, singing in a soft, melodious voice. As an artist he was more solitary, following his own direction and divorcing himself from current… practice’.

Naudé’s convivial personality also meant he would naturally gravitate towards people and portraiture. Some notable commissions included President Marthinus Steyn, General Louis Botha and Reverend Andrew Murray. But despite Naudé’s hoity-toity schooling in Europe, and even though he could easily have settled into high society when he returned to Cape Town, he preferred to paint farmyard scenes, especially the Cape coloureds going about their everyday chores.

What makes Hugo Naudé a standout star among the nine or so artists we’ve highlighted in COUNTRY LIFE so far, is he’s one of precious few (Naudé died in 1941) whose work has sold for well over R1 million. In 2011, a typical, bright, beautiful 40cm x 55cm oil called Namaqualand in Spring was auctioned by Strauss Art in Johannesburg for R1 559 600. Two years later a different scene, the smoking, darkly domestic Cape Kitchen Interior brought the hammer down at R891 200. Only one other landscape artist is comparably expensive, in my view, and that’s Pierneef.

Esmé Berman has it right when she says, “It’s somehow always springtime in Naudé’s small canvases.”Perhaps this is because Naudé was the first South African artist to adapt his style to the idiosyncrasies of the local landscape – in other words, the sunlit atmosphere, the vivid colours, the penetrating blue skies and expansive, heartbreak-beautiful vistas. It takes great courage, of course, to do this, and a lot of nerve to take on flowers en masse as he did.

A Maggie Laubser still life of a flower in a pot or a vase is one thing; a field of flowers is a sort of sensory overload that requires a special eye, and a special soul to capture it in an authentic way. If Hugo Naudé was the first to adapt his style to the sunlight, others soon followed, but none could do Namaqualand quite like he could.

Now I’ve left Namaqualand and her unbelievable fields far behind, yet they linger in me like a dream, like a good meal. On my way back, when I reach Langebaan, the emerald lagoon – with its flamingos in the shallows and flowers bobbing on the adjacent peninsula – calls to me. I stop. I look and listen. And then come the nagging questions, ‘This is more than mere Impressionism, but what is it? What secret lies beneath these open-air, eternally spring scenes?’ When the answer steals on me there’s no pang of revelation, just a soothing sense of knowing, after a long and eventful journey.

What is it in Naudé’s art that’s more than Impressionism?

Besides intuition, there’s beauty in modesty. There’s beauty in telling without embellishing. The best photo needs no enhancements; it is perfectly what it is. When the unembellished can’t be improved on and yet its beauty is unparalleled, that is something rare. And that’s what I think Naudé found here, in heartbreaking abundance.

Reality inspires us more eloquently than anything else, and art that is true to the inner as well as the outer landscape evokes this inspiration best. It calls to us. It says come out here into the world and see; see for yourself, and see yourself here. See how beautiful the real world can be just as it is, and see how beautiful you are in the world, just as you are.

What secret lies beneath these scenes?

The soil of simplicity. Naudé’s Namaqualand is down-to-earth, sunlit and spacious. It doesn’t need to be more than that to be majestic. What can be more magnificent than the bursting of spring in full blush?

Naudé didn’t take weeks to complete his masterpieces but made them in a flourish at a single sitting. He allowed a fleeting moment to overtake him, to awaken him. And in a single energetic session he put it all in there, the oozing life, the subtle, guiding lines, the distant mountains and elevated horizon. What he’s doing is evocative rather than imitative, but it’s sufficiently imitative that if you went in search of his intuitions, you’d find them, just as I have.

I think that, because Naudé was a happy artist who led a good and fruitful life, Namaqualand as a muse made absolute sense. What Naudé recognised was the springtime inside himself, inside everyone. It comes and goes and yet its seeds are always there.

Irma Stern in her Own Words

South Africa’s most valuable and, arguably, gifted artist spent a lifetime searching throughout Africa and the world. But did she find what or who she was looking for?

Words: Nick van der Leek

Pictures: Nick van der Leek and Supplied

I’m hoping to get a sense of what’s so ‘outstanding’ about Irma Stern at an auction. Hobnobbing with the haut monde, mixing with aristocrats – isn’t it going to be a fool’s errand? This is not only the first artist I’m going to meet at an auction, it’s my first time at an art auction anywhere, ever. I doubt it’s going to be enough, but I have to start somewhere.

As I arrive the auction kicks off. Behind the auctioneer is a small square painting. I see first-hand the white tannie in a green jacket wearing a Basuto hat produced in 1943. I’m surprised none of the artists are introduced, nor is there any backstory to their works. There’s just a mercenary naming and selling.

Well-heeled millionaires lift their numbers to timidly add tens or hundreds of thousands to a bid. I suddenly wish I had brought a few odd thousand for some of the artworks. Well, to be honest, I wish I had a few hundred thousand lying around so I could afford them. Some lovely Hugo Naudés and Boonzaiers are snapped up by some lucky bloke.

Two Pierneefs and a Tretchikoff go for half a million and more than a million. The Stern is by far the most expensive artwork of the evening, and goes for five times the second-most expensive Pierneef, bringing
the hammer down at R5 115 600.

On my way out, I take a close look at the original Basuto hat in a glass case, and then emerge from the egg-yellow cocoon of the Wanderer’s Club into the cold Joburg night. As I thought, the auction wasn’t much help.

I do have a secret weapon with me, a small paperback in my hand, Remembering Irma, by Mona Berman [Double Storey 2003].

On my way to Zululand the next morning, I begin thumbing through it while waiting in traffic at a tollgate. ‘Irma was extremely curious about the Mangbetu – who, she heard, ‘only one generation back had been man-eaters.’ She was determined to make contact with them. After meeting them and being allowed to paint them, she described the people with great admiration:

‘It was strange to plunge right among so savage a tribe and yet only to be aware of a rare artistic taste which had for years been exciting and stimulating the art world of Europe. Here were the creators of magnificent pieces of sculpture, carved out of wood, of fetishes and masks, grotesque and beautiful revealing primitive ancestral worship and its world alive with spirits…’

As banana plantations unfold around me, I begin to connect the first dots. Mona Berman used to be Mona Feldman, Freda Feldman’s daughter. Freda, the tannie in the Basuto hat, was a very close friend of Stern’s, and Stern wrote many letters to her over the years.

When Freda died Mona inherited a box of letters. At one stage Mona transcribed all the letters onto her computer, but when she updated her software, the computer was formatted and all the data lost. Another book was published at that time, so Mona decided to leave things at that, and Irma Stern’s own words were trapped, as if behind a locked door whose key had been lost forever.

My road along the N3 is never straight. It loops like a rollercoaster, at one point shooting through one side of a cloud and out the other.

But in 2001 it occurred to Mona that if she didn’t resurrect Irma’s letters to her mother ‘a chapter of her life’ would be lost. And so she did. Not only did this bring context back to Stern’s legacy, but Stern herself.

Mona introduces us to Irma, and Irma introduces us to Freda. What makes it authentic is Mona’s initial dislike for – as a teenager – and even embarrassment of, an abrasive, overbearing and increasingly overweight woman. Through Mona we see through the lurid expressionism; Stern suddenly becomes simultaneously less stern and more Stern, but also more Irma.

Mona’s dislike for Irma began with a drawing of baby Mona, nude of course, which Mona describes – not unreasonably – as ‘the insensitivity of the adult world invading the privacy of the young’. Mona as a young adult got the better of Irma, cracking jokes with her buddies about Irma’s bulk behind her back.

‘I showed little kindness to Irma. I could not see beyond her size, her eccentricities, her petulant manner and her egotistical lifestyle. Like most people I felt awkward and ignorant in her company. I did not know what to say to her, and when I found something to say she seemed to pay no attention’.

If Irma was a snob, Freda was not, and perhaps this partly accounted for the fierce loyalty the two women shared. When Irma visited the Feldmans, poor Mona described these visits as invasions too, for ‘she took over our lives, transforming my parents into people we did not know, who no longer had time for their own children, so busy were they attending to her never-ending needs.’ Other painters’ artworks had to be hidden away when Irma came to visit.

So Irma was high maintenance. But she was also fascinating. On one occasion, hearing the movement of furniture at dawn, Mona snuck downstairs and caught the artist painting their fireplace. She rushed to tell her mother, but Freda swore her daughter to remain quiet so as not to disturb Irma. Mona watched breathlessly as the large woman spun her magic wand. When she was done, she’d left behind something priceless, tethered permanently to the very fabric of Feldman’s home.

Mona also reveals amazing insights into Irma’s appetite. No sooner had Irma painted a still life (with food or fruit in it), ‘she would devour them’. Through Mona we find letters where Irma herself admits to her preoccupation with food, ‘I feel as though my face was made of fruit, my arms and breast are bananas and apples, my nose a prune, my hair lots of carrots’.

The most important member of Stern’s household was Charlie, the cook, who Stern apparently brought back from Zanzibar, along with a pair of hand-carved wooden doors.

On another occasion, Freda went to pick up Irma at a gallery in Eloff Street, with Mona cowering in embarrassment out of sight in the back seat. Irma climbed into the car exasperated with the gallery owner. “I feel like screaming,” she declared, to which Freda answered, “Then scream.” And so scream Irma did, a high-pitched shriek Mona writes she will ‘never forget’. Eloff street became Mona’s ‘Avenue of Shame’, but the stress relief worked because afterwards the artist was ‘quite cheerful’.

I arrive in Durban at night with minibuses diving left and right like it is the Wild West. On a slim sliver of Zululand sandwiched between concrete highways and bridges, I notice a solitary figure making a small, bright fire for himself. After a long time behind the wheel, I drive along the beachfront in search of a hotel. Huge Indian Ocean waves pound the dark Earth.

‘I am at present just in a slight state of overwork and depression – suffer from terrible dreams and am taking it easy for a few days – getting my hats and shoes in order and so forth…’ But deeper things were nagging, as she wrote in 1935, ‘It looks to me – this is my last trip trying to find things that are dying out – thanks to ourselves.’

Sometimes it seems as though Stern was a European artist who belonged to and in Europe. ‘I do not know how I shall fit into African boredom again – I have re-acquired all my European habits of love for everything the best. Fashionable allures…red lacquered nails…the most fascinating hats and shoes are mine – If I think of Adderley Street I shudder. Maybe I go straight up to Zululand’.

The next morning, that’s exactly where I am, walking along the beachfront. It suddenly feels like another world – rich with faces, salty, summery. If Stern was a product of European finery, she was also part of an identity that was trying to survive in the world, especially in the 1940s.

If Stern was used to her refinements, Africa was worth letting go of them to find herself. In Africa she discovered the raw tribalism lacking in civilised Europe. This was a world rich with life, rich with idiosyncrasy and authenticity. This was a place where people thrived at simply being who they were. But Stern was also capturing the last flickers of a dying Africa.

In February 1955 Irma wrote about losing the ‘lovely fairy-tale outlook on Native life’ of her early work. ‘It can hardly continue when I see the most lovely people acting not like children but like devils… I can understand their sudden awakening and finding their land full of white raced people [she was referring to Kenya]…who have their foot on their necks…but still I cannot say I am looking happy and peacefully into the future of our South Africa. We are just passionately awaiting a huge blood bath….stoking on it daily – hourly – giving with the left hand and taking with the right… I am wondering where to go’.

It is on the boulevards of Durban that I see Irma Stern, not for the end of her journey but the beginning. Stern died an agonising death from complications of diabetes in 1966, just prior to an exhibition she believed would have ‘made her’.

What really made Irma Stern?

She was Jewish-German from a very wealthy family born in Schweitzer-Renecke. Stern’s father was interned in a concentration camp by the British during the Boer War because of his pro-Boer leanings. Irma and her younger brother were secreted to Cape Town by their mother. After the war, the Sterns returned to Germany and travelled constantly. This travelling lifestyle influenced not merely Irma’s work, but her identity.

She found her identity not in the finery of Europe or an extravagant lifestyle, but in Africa. In Africa she felt the loss and the threat upon her own identity and sense of self in the plight of Africa, and the Africans. It was Stern’s relationship with all these fading people and idiosyncratic tribal personalities that resonated with her. It was searching for the fairy-tale ending to the threat on her own identity, and the lingering threat on the Jewish identity.

Stern’s expressionism was a vivid and vivacious shield against the deprivations and invasions of a cruel world and the Natural Order. But rather than in her expressionistic opposition to the world, it was in those rare instances of dreamy impressionism that Stern found herself.

She identified so much with her White Lilies, painted in March 1941, that she chose to be photographed in front of them. A Cape Argus reviewer called the work ‘among the best things she has done’.

Three years later Stern did another painting, simply titled Lilies. Instead of abrasive they were sublime. Instead of a dark, meaty, tribalistic caricature there is subtlety, nuance and harmony.

The colours are crisp instead of cartoonish, creamy instead of saucy. The effect is one of concord, where the artist has unlearned what she had learned and, in so doing, has undone what she had been doing.

In Lilies, we see a softness and a quietude that speaks not only of the depths of Irma Stern’s relationship with the world and the people in it, but also of the relationship between the world and a person.

Sometimes what is broken can be restored, sometimes what is unforgiven can be healed. Sometimes what is lost can be found.