54 - ALEXIS PRELLER (SOUTH AFRICAN 1911-1975)

ALEXIS PRELLER (SOUTH AFRICAN 1911-1975) STUDY FOR URN HEAD signed Preller lower right pencil and gouache on paper 29.3 x 24.1cm (50.9 x 48.8cm framed) Property from a Private Collection, Cambridge Provenance Guna Massyn Estate Sale, Strauss and Co, Johannesburg Purchased from the above by The DinksFãStan Private Collection Born in Pretoria in 1911, Alexis Preller left a clerical career to study at the Westminster School of Art, London (1934), and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris (1937). A voracious reader and inveterate traveller, he drew on ancient Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan art, the early Italian Renaissance and the cultures of southern and central Africa, forging an idiom that was neither traditionally European nor avant-garde Modernist, but wholly his own. His mature style fused nature with African masks and art, as in Basuto Allegory (1947), while visits to Ndebele settlements introduced the ‘Mapogga’ women and their geometric murals into his work. The influence of Piero della Francesca and Egyptian murals is evident in Hieratic Women (1956), and his later work grew increasingly abstract, inspired by space travel and the universal. Often likened to Expressionism and Surrealism, a label he rejected, and described as South Africa's Gauguin, Preller resisted easy categorisation and remains a significant presence in the South African art market. Preller died on 13 December 1975 and was buried at Dombeya, his estate designed by Norman Eaton. Days later his partner and studio assistant, Guna Massyn, was killed in a motor accident while arranging the funeral. As Massyn died intestate, Preller's estate, including a substantial archive of his work, passed to Massyn's mother, who released the collection to the market. The present work was formerly in the Guna Massyn Estate.