HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Landscape artist lost ground to apartheid’s ravages
Landscape artist Moses Tladi’s uncritical reproductions of white tradition partly aided his success
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 Wi...
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