Man On Bull
Provenance :
Notes : Sydney Kumalo’s Man on Bull is a bronze sculpture by one of the leading creatives to emerge from the seminal Polly Street Art Centre. He enrolled at the historic art school in 1953.The sculpture uses a recurrent motif and trope in the late artist’s work. There is a stone sculture of the same name dated 1977, and works like Mythological Rider (1970), which recently fetched a world record price for the artist at Aspire’s November 2017 auction in Johannesburg, are variations on the theme.The force of Kumalo’s work derives in part from his mix of old and new cultures in Southern African life. Growing up in the vibrant urban experience of Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and thanks to the forced removal which demolished the area, his family moved to Diepkloof in Soweto. Kumalo was raised with a deep awareness and pride in his family’s Zulu traditions. This all means Kumalo could draw on multiple cultural pools to enrich his art.This convergence of the value systems of various worlds explains the tendency of Kumalo and his generation of African artists to negotiate the values and strictures of their African heritage against the possibilities of their modern realities. This is an imperative felt even by South African artists of European descent like Cecil Skotnes, who was working at Polly Street Art Centre too.In this piece, Kumalo’s choice to depict a figure and bull registers notions of the centrality of the bovine in the African sense of identity and ideas of providence, what American anthropologist Melville Herskovits calls the African Cattle complex. Kumalo’s man and bull are morphed into one anthropomorphic form through the trick of abstraction – a modernist visual language. It is almost impossible to see where the man begins, and where the bull begins. Abstraction allows Kumalo to turn his image into a shorthand for a complex economy of intercultural meaning.
Percy Mabandu
