Ernest Mancoba
Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba (29 August 1904 – 25 October 2002) was an avant-garde artist, born in Transvaal Colony, who spent the majority of his life in Europe.
[1] Mancoba enrolled at Diocesan Teachers' Training College, Grace Dieu, near Pietersburg for his secondary schooling after suggestion from his maternal uncle, Rev.
Paterson, a recent art school graduate preparing for the ministry, introduced wood carving and gained a following among those at Grace Dieu who were artistically inclined.
Two years later, Mancoba was offered a job by the South African government's Department of Native Affairs during the spring of 1936 to craft purchasable souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg later that fall.
After leaving Grace Dieu to attend the South African Native College at Fort Hare on scholarship, he quit carving for several years.
When his funds ran out, he dropped out of Fort Hare and survived by producing religious sculptures on commission, operating out of the Rhodes University Art Department.
In 1935 he decided to pursue art full-time and moved to Cape Town, where he associated with a group of Trotskyite artists, including Lippy Lipshitz, who had a strong impact on his emerging sculpture style.
[5] He left South Africa for Europe in 1938 when he received a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris, where he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.
Although the “sad” representational impact in his sculpture wasn't his primary goal; Mancoba understood that due to Africa's long struggle of breaking free from western colonialism, African art was perceived in European museums as “primitive” and dismal.
An excerpt from the thoughts Ernest Mancoba read as “People there could hardly understand it, that a black man could have had anything to do in the place, and, even less, that he should have been asking for such a recently known French author.
While absorbing what I found in it, which astonished me very much, I began to think about how enriching it would be to have an exchange of ideas with such an open mind, who spoke with such deep respect about the expression of Africans, when I wasn’t even considered as a full human being in my own country”.
[7] Mancoba’s Composition and other paintings he did in Paris demonstrate his familiarity and ease with contemporary European modernist styles and aesthetics.
19) “This Oguibe illustrates by showing the turning points in Mancoba’s work and by tracing what he understands to be the sensibilities underlying those turns, that is, “from a concern for the mere liturgical within European traditions to an interest in the mechanics and syntax of African sculpture and eventually a personal resolution of the divergent historical trajectories that constitute a colonial or postcolonial modernity, including expatriation and nostalgia.” This, he argues, made Mancoba arrive at a stage of resolution analogous to the emergence of modern individualism in African consciousness”.
As Morton notes, Mancoba was one of the few mission-trained African artists "to have consciously eliminated all traces of his mission style from his work."
“For a time he was what I can only call passionately absorbed in the primitive art of his people, the carved stools, the figures of fighters, of great tribe-leaders, of women and children.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hosted Constant and Corneille's Cobra exhibition called the “Exposition Internationale d’ Art Experimental, in 1949.
[13] Although Mancoba was an active participant with Cobra members and in later artistic movements, his role received little attention in art historical scholarship.
[15] Ernest Mancoba's style is composed of line movement often encompassing a central figure-like form that dissolves into the surrounding abstract atmosphere of colorful oils, charcoal, ink or pastel marks.
