The Wake ,
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Notes : According to legend the Shaka panels started life as a wine-fuelled idea for the decoration of a door in the luxuriously restored house of collector and close friend of Skotnes, Vittorino Meneghelli, owner of the famous Totem Gallery in Johannesburg. Each panel, as Skotnes recounts in what one suspects was a favourite anecdote, was affixed to the door accompanied by a bottle of fine wine throughout much of the 1960s.Subsequently, Skotnes expanded the visual and conceptual parameters of the theme, elaborating in woodcut prints and accompanying, evocative short poems by Stephen Gray, an entire mythology of the great pre-colonial Zulu king.This particular panel is a fine example of Skotnes’ characteristic amalgam of European Modernism with African sensibilities and concepts. Titled The Wake, it depicts the grieving over the deathbed of Shaka’s mother Nandi. Expressionism, and the influence of Cubism, are unmistakable, though Skotnes himself disavowed the woodcarving techniques in those European movements, preferring to focus on African material and techniques, and relishing pointing out the influence of African carving on Picasso. This approach, of which the Shaka series is perhaps his own crowning achievement, is also evident in the then-contemporary Amadlozi group Skotnes helped found.The Wake panel, as with its companion piece depicting Shaka himself, also on auction, has a subsequent woodcut print version, published in the 1973 portfolio The Assassination of Shaka. The collaboration with Gray extended to a further show, later in the decade, of wood panels and a landscape portfolio at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. The delicate incision and sombre, considered palette of The Wake make it a convincing medium for its epic subject matter, and a fine example of this influential artist’s panel work.
James Sey
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