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

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

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...