Touring Africans

This week visitors to Washington's National Gallery were seeing South Africa as it looked to 53 of the Dominion's own painters and sculptors. For historical background there were a score of 18th and 19th Century canvases which showed glimpses of South Africa's colonial past. But most of the work was by contemporaries and reflected present-day Africa--its raw, green hills, adobe towns and sprouting cities.

Although the African artists stuck close to home for their subject matter, they had traveled far afield for their techniques. Like many a contemporary European and American painter, most of them had obviously been influenced by the Impressionists, by the simplified landscapes of Gauguin, and by such far-off painters as Winslow Homer. Among the more outstanding exhibitors were amateur Archeologist-Teacher Walter Battiss, whose paintings of grazing animals and intrepid hunters were deliberately patterned on prehistoric Bushman drawings, and ex-Medical Corpsman Alexis Preller, who combined something of the lurid colors and slick forms of the Mexican muralists with the subject-matter of his own South Africa.

Straight-Speaking Pictures. Also conspicuous in the show were the works of Gerard Sekoto, the only Negro artist included. Sekoto was born 35 years ago at a little hill station in the Transvaal where his father was the local mission teacher. As a child he had sketched on the sly, gotten occasional encouragement from schoolmasters, won his first prize in a school competition--a Bible and five shillings. In 1939 he set out for Johannesburg to seek his fortune as an artist. In a few years he had taught himself to paint vivid, straight-speaking pictures of fellow natives crowded in their tumbledown sub urban "locations" or moving through the rolling South African countryside.

Eighteen months ago, when the Union government launched the African show on the world tour which has already taken it to London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Ottawa, Sekoto had already left Johannesburg and was in Paris. There he hoped to get a look at the works of the great European masters he revered, learn more about his craft.

Accusing Voices. Paris hadn't been easy. Sekoto couldn't afford a studio, painted instead in his small, airless hotel room, laying his canvases on the floor where a small square of light fell. Three weeks ago he began hearing accusing voices repeating "You're no good, Gerard. Your painting is no good." To escape the voices, he tried to drink poison, hang himself. Friends rescued him, sent him off to the asylum of Ste. Anne.

At the asylum last week he was well enough to talk about getting back to his painting. He still had much to learn so that he could tell the world about his homeland. "I am an African," said Sekoto, "I would be stupid to want to become a European."

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