CHRIS THURMAN: Landscape artist lost ground to apartheid’s ravages

As a black landscape painter, Moses Tladi doesn’t quite fit into our standard national arts narrative.

South Africans expect to associate the work of black artists with the history of resistance to colonialism and apartheid – or, more recently, to various forms of social and economic injustice perpetuated despite the transition to democracy. According to this assumption, a black artist whose output is not expressly political may be viewed as a "sell-out".

Such critiques were more acute when the need for art to serve the liberation struggle was deemed urgent: consider Bessie Head’s condemnation in 1963 of Gladys Mgudlandlu’s "decorative" drawings of flora and fauna. According to Head, writing from exile in Botswana, Mgudlandlu’s "escapism" did little more than cater to the "white guilt" of a pseudo-liberal arts establishment without ever threatening its whiteness.

One wonders what Head would say in response to Tladi (1903-59), a small but significant exhibition of paintings at the Wits Art Museum. One could not tell, looking at his landscapes, produced in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, that during these decades, SA changed profoundly: with rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, the government increasingly legislated race-based persecution, laying the groundwork for apartheid.

The closest we come to a sense of human dynamics in Tladi’s oeuvre is the appearance of the mine dumps in No1 Crown Mines, as the curators of this exhibition note; however, Tladi paints tailings as if they were the Magaliesberg.

Perhaps, then, Tladi’s uncritical reproduction of a white or European tradition of depicting SA’s land – wide open spaces of veld and vlei, quiet farmhouses nestled under koppies, "wild" trees and "tamed" gardens – was partly what led to his early success.

Having worked as a gardener for Herbert Read (an English émigré in the mining business) in the 1920s and receiving modest patronage from Read’s social circle, over the course of the 1930s, Tladi was included in various exhibitions. In 1938, he had his first solo exhibition, a rarity for black artists at the time.

Tladi volunteered to serve during the Second World War and, although he wasn’t shipped to battle, his tasks in the supply lines on the home front evidently took their toll: soon after the war’s conclusion, he was admitted to hospital with tuberculosis. His wife Sekhubami, whom he had married in 1931 (and with whom he had four children), worked to support the family. Sekhubami’s father was a clergyman and owned a house in Kensington B – today a suburb of Johannesburg. The Tladis moved there and Moses began to paint again.

But the idyll could not last: the Tladis were a "black spot" in a designated white area, an abomination to the apartheid state. In 1956, the family was forced to move to Soweto. The House in Kensington B, Tladi’s lyrical tribute to the homestead he lost, was his last painting.

Once again a sickly man, he died from the proverbial broken heart three years later.

When we read Tladi’s biography alongside his paintings, as this exhibition encourages us to do, it becomes clear that he is not an anomalous figure. His life story is, on the contrary, an all-too-familiar tragedy.

Leaving Sekhukhuneland — now Limpopo — as a young man to find a place for himself in Johannesburg, Tladi was one of millions of black South Africans who moved – either willingly, seeking new opportunities, or forced by deprivation — to cities in the decades between the wars.

The artist’s evident attachment to the land was shadowed by the process of dispossession that was a direct consequence of the Native Land Act of 1913 and the system of migrant labour on which SA’s economy grew to depend.

Nevertheless, Tladi’s attempts to make his way as a painter in the 1930s and his brief success at establishing himself as a "country artist" in the early 1950s give us insight into the kinds of middle-class lives black South Africans carved out for themselves — even as the Union government hardened its stance on segregation and entrenched exploitation. Such possibilities were, however, shut down by apartheid.