Description

Exhibited:       South African Association of Arts, Exhibition of Contemporary S.A. Art, sponsored vby the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival, 1952, cat no 125

J.H. Pierneef was an accomplished draughtsman whose talent for conveying the essentials of a scene is most evident in his many depictions of buildings. It could be argued that Pierneef’s graphite drawings of buildings, notably those depicting the Union Buildings under construction circa 1910–13, together with a contemporaneous suite of pastel drawings describing Pretoria’s vernacular architecture, now in the collection of the University of Pretoria, distil his understanding of art as the record of direct encounter. It was philosophy cultivated by his mentor, sculptor Anton van Wouw, who counselled him to observantly draw from nature. Pierneef remained steadfast in this approach throughout his career, wherever he roamed.

The revisionist art historian N. J. Coetzee has characterised Pierneef as predominantly a Transvaal painter who nonetheless found “affinity for scenes of deserted farmyards, dry landscapes and rock formations” elsewhere, notably in the southern Cape and Namibia. These landscapes far from home rarely presented a challenge to Pierneef’s linear approach to composition and “pale pastel harmonies” of his colour palette, to quote Esmé Berman. This is evident in his composition Fishermen’s Cottages near Struisbaai (1948). Pierneef was familiar with this fishing village in the Overberg region, near where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet, from his numerous travels to the Cape Peninsula in the 1920s. He painted a smaller work depicting the same row of cottages near Struisbaai at dusk.

Weather rarely interferes in Pierneef’s compositions, and yet the acute Cape winter light plays an active part in illuminating the worn facades of these sturdy, self-contained cottages. The artist invests considerable attention in the three cottages, in particular the yellowing texture of the cement walls and the silhouette of their underlying blocks. An essential solitude characterises much of Pierneef’s output, even when he presents homesteads and human-scale buildings used in social industries like farming and fishing. He shares something in common here with the precisionist American painter Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), who also revelled in line and geometry in his unpeopled modernist portrayals of American industrial life. Where Sheeler’s vision was urban, Pierneef remained committed throughout his life to portraying the out-dated and far-off. The outcome is work characterised by its “spaciousness and majestic simplicity,” to quote Pretoria Art Museum director Albert Werth from the catalogue accompanying a 1980 tribute exhibition devoted to Pierneef and Van Wouw.