Historical Context
Moses Tladi's landscapes look serene. The country in which they were painted was anything but. These essays place the work in its world — then, and now.
Essay A
Landscape painting in South Africa has never been innocent. As the art historian Michael Godby has observed, it is not entirely coincidental that the country was settled by Europeans at the very time landscape painting established itself in Europe: the genre, he writes, “obviously represents a means of taking control of space.” For most of South African art history, that control ran in one direction — white painters framing a land that white law was busy expropriating.
The legal architecture of that expropriation was built in Tladi's own lifetime. The Natives Land Act of 1913 — the first great segregation law — restricted African land ownership to scheduled reserves amounting to roughly seven percent of the country; by the time Tladi first exhibited, it had been in force for nearly twenty years. The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 expanded the reserves only slightly, to about thirteen percent. In 1948 formal apartheid began. The Group Areas Act of 1950 zoned the cities by race; the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954 empowered the government to remove African freeholders from within, and beside, Johannesburg's magisterial district. In February 1955 the bulldozers came for Sophiatown — some 60,000 people moved to the new township of Meadowlands. In 1956 the same machinery reached a quiet three-acre holding in Kensington B, and the home of the painter Moses Tladi.
| 1913 | Natives Land Act: African ownership restricted to ~7% of the country |
| 1936 | Native Trust and Land Act: reserves expanded to ~13% |
| 1948 | Formal apartheid begins |
| 1950 | Group Areas Act: the cities zoned by race |
| 1954 | Natives Resettlement Act: removals empowered |
| 1955 | Sophiatown destroyed; ~60,000 removed |
| 1956 | The machinery reaches Kensington B |
Against this history, the paintings change their meaning. For African artists like Tladi, landscape painting was a quietly defiant act — taking possession through art at a time when actual land ownership and freedom in public spaces were under threat. Elza Miles describes the early twentieth century as a time when “African artists claimed a place with pencil, pen, brush and chisel” amid “conflict and deprivation.” Tladi's golden Highveld light, his affectionately observed storms and homesteads, are not escapism. They are assertions of belonging — made by a man constantly reminded, as the writer John Kane-Berman put it, that the landscapes, gardens, trees and mountains he painted so beautifully “were nearly all reserved for someone else.”
Essay B
Tladi did not paint alone, and the measure of his achievement sharpens against the company of his generation.
Moses Tladi (1897–1959) is recognised as the first Black artist to exhibit formally in South Africa, and the first to show at the South African National Gallery (1931, 1933). His self-taught talent as a landscape painter flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.
Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993), born at the Botshabelo mission and later a Paris exile, became the most famous Black South African painter of the era — the pioneer of urban Black art and social realism. His “first” is different from Tladi's, and precision matters: Sekoto's was the first work by a Black artist acquired by a public museum, purchased by the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1940. Tladi's first came nine years earlier and is of another kind: the first Black artist to exhibit formally in South Africa, and the first to show at the South African National Gallery (1931, 1933). Strauss & Co has framed the two men as a pair “who opened museum doors for black artists” — one through the gallery door, the other into the collection itself.
George Pemba (1912–2001) of Port Elizabeth, the “painter of the people,” brought social-realist watercolours of township and rural life; Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) carried South African modernism into the European avant-garde as a founding member of CoBrA, and was long almost erased from its histories; Gerard Bhengu (1910–1990) of southern Natal built a body of meticulous watercolour and ink work; John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985), Tladi’s senior by six years, became the “father of township art” — and, like Tladi, ended his days in Soweto.
Above them all, in the market and the canon of the day, stood the white establishment — above all J.H. Pierneef (1886–1957), the canonical painter of the Highveld whose stylised vistas defined how the interior was seen. Tladi shared his Highveld landscape — and painted the same mine dumps Pierneef would make famous. When, in November 2018, a single Strauss & Co sale set records for both men — R455,200 for Tladi's Mountain Landscape, R5.9 million for Pierneef — the thirteen-fold gap was itself a lesson in how the canon was built, and for whom.