Before his premature death in 1989, South African artist Bill Ainslie had established a reputation in the country as a fine abstractionist. He was also an influential educationist: he established the multi-racial Johannesburg Art Foundation in the days of apartheid, and was instrumental in the founding of the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), Johannesburg’s Alexandra Arts Centre and the annual Thupelo Artists’ Workshops. For a fuller appraisal of Ainslie’s life and car

Celebrated South African artist Jill Trappler has been exhibiting recent work at Art Central, in Woodstock, Cape Town. I was commissioned to write a review of the artist’s work. See below - also available at the exhibition site. __________________________________________________________________________________ In a contemporary art world so often marked by declamatory and topical statement, Jill Trappler’s art moves quietly against the current and remains true to long-held va

The nineteenth century was a time of major archaeological discovery in Egypt and the near East, but it is striking that the European discovery of Egypt’s past preceded that of the region’s oldest civilization, that of Mesopotamia (Iraq), by some years. Why was this? The remains of ancient Egypt had always had a place in Western consciousness. Collected and written about by the ancient Greeks and Romans, they had found their way into Europe from the earliest days. The remains

For the archaeologist-excavators of ancient Egypt and the near East, all hidden treasures were of interest - but the collectors of these treasures were often particularly interested in those artefacts that contained textual remains. These seemed likely to reveal far more detail about their societies than mute images and architectural elements. Thus the Rosetta Stone of ancient Egypt was highly coveted when it was found by the French in 1799, and was chief among the trophie

A new exhibition, curated by printmaker Fritha Langerman, charts the centenary of Michaelis, the University of Cape Town’s school of fine...

The Elgin marbles are today perhaps the most notorious of the ancient art collections taken from foreign lands in the nineteenth century...

Boris Tietze in the 1950s... ...and 1980s Boris Tietze (17/2/1928-15/2/2024), my father, died in early 2024 after a long life dedicated to art. From the earliest days he had felt that art was his vocation and, having completed his training in the 1950s, he was to devote the next 70 years of his life to teaching and practising in the fields of painting and sculpture, working up until just weeks before his death. He was born in the Lancashire town of Chadderton, to parents of

The Moleskins is a biography of Cecil Michaelis (1913-1997), son of the Randlord Sir Max Michaelis, and in his own right an artist,...

The question of authenticity is a vital one within the art world. Correct identification of the producer of an artwork has major...

Azaria Mbatha, The Revelation of St John (1965), linocut print on paper, 376x680mm. With the South Africa Act of 1909, the various...

Many public art collections have depended heavily, in their early years, on gifts from private collectors and this was certainly true of...