OBITUARY: Farewell to a master of SA art – Harold Voigt

What Harold Voigt painted was important.

“He worked in the age-old landscape tradition, but he came at it with a completely new angle — suggesting something abstract,” says Wilhelm van Rensburg, senior art specialist and curator at auction house Strauss & Co.

The vast plains, sweeping skies, massing clouds and rocky outcrops were unmistakably Southern African.

Mark Read, chair of the Everard Read gallery group,  says: “There simply hasn’t been a better painter wielding a brush during my era as a dealer.” The Everard Read gallery in Joburg has exhibited Voigt’s work since the late 1970s.

Born and educated in Joburg, Voigt briefly studied architecture and worked in the advertising industry before making painting a full-time career. In 1975 he and his wife, Leigh, and young sons, Max and Walter, moved to Schagen in Mpumalanga, where he built a house and studio. It was there that he lived until his death this month.

It’s no surprise that his hilltop complex, with views across the valley below, influenced his artistic response to nature — even as that space was itself captured in his paintings.

He experimented with these and other materials over decades — studying the methods of the old masters, painstakingly creating canvases and then building up artworks on them in layers, using oil paint, beeswax and combinations of  substances.

As a result, his paintings hum with colour and contrast and energy — “they simmer”, says Van Rensburg.

There’s an obvious visual reference to English Romantic painter JMW Turner in his landscapes, and their attempt to capture natural light and atmosphere, and Coetzee speaks of Voigt’s many other classical influences in his book.

From his early especially abstract phase to the later imagined interiors, he was deeply conscientious. “He should have been an artist 200 years ago, so that he could work with all those lovely tempera colours,” says Leigh.

Coetzee adds that, like an engineer, Voigt’s concern with structure was central to his method. 

Read says he “wouldn’t let a piece out the studio” until he was satisfied that areas in the surfaces resonated with each other.

“He was hugely elegant,” says Read. “He was considered and listened intently. People perhaps felt nervous of his silences, but he just didn’t feel the need to fill gaps.”

Over decades Voigt amassed a loyal following, with collectors tending to hang onto the pieces they’d bought. That said, Van Rensburg says the value of his work has increased tremendously on the secondary market in the past five years.

“He never painted for fashion or because he saw money in a particular part of the market,” says Leigh. “He was a man of integrity who thought long and hard about things.”