Flamingo - Art, Craft & Culture - One Namibia – four visions
These four individuals attempted the almost impossible. Why did they aim for the unreachable? Because their trained eyes saw more than most eyes see.
A famous visitor to the country in the 1860s, Thomas Baines, would probably not have painted a single stroke if he’d had a camera at the ready.
Pierneef came and stayed for a year in 1923 and produced a few Namibian landscapes. He found it difficult to accommodate the brutal light that assailed his retina relentlessly to the point of blindness.
The artists who became hooked on the hard rugged panoramas felt there was another reality dancing behind the far mirages. They watched the spirit in the dust devil. Smitten they fell in love with a terrible mistress of extreme contrasting moods, generous but unforgiving and intolerant of the weak. With her, the strong inherited the earth.
On the Namibian expanses, one can agree that no European country demands so much architecture for its scenic art and offers so little romanticism, while demanding so much relentless clear-sightedness.
In Namibia, as in developing countries such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the landscape was the predominant motif in the first half of the twentieth century. In the beginning, artists took up their tools and tried to romanticise the vistas. Using the classic compositional elements, they attempted to tame the landscape as if it were a wild creature. They chose to paint nature, usually at dusk, in soft and sweetly palatable colours. In a word, sentimental.
Carl Ossmann 1883–1935 To a large extent Carl Ossmann was steeped in this tradition, but he was the first to break the mould and portray the landscape from a less Eurocentric viewpoint.
As most of the landscapists had gained their formal training in Europe during the years following the establishment of Impressionism, the local artists were captivated by the philosophy and stylistic elements of the movement and reflected it in their works. The 30-year-old Ossman, who came to the territory in 1913 for health reasons, was exposed to Impressionism and Jugendstil during his years in Germany. His last works, focused on the portrayal of trees, were lyrical oils that can stand as independent works of art, rising above being mere botanical studies.
Seduced by the hazy early morning or late afternoon colours, his feeling for atmosphere became so strong that line and form began to fade. In one oil painting, or rather portrait of a tree, the yellow blossoms are ripe to detach themselves and float off in the hazy light.
Johannes Blatt (1905–1973) Weaned on the romantic glorification of the rugged landscape, Blatt experienced colours that vexed his spirit. Battling with a forbidding inbred sense of realistic draftmanship, he broke with difficulty into impressionist expressions in his oil paintings.
But colour, especially the hues that most were blind to, haunted him. He saw the complementary impressionist tones and slowly they came to dominate in his work. Behind his dynamic brushwork, in one of his southern midday landscapes, the cicadas are screeching in the heat. In his last works Blatt began introducing angular lines and the expressionist use of saturated colours.
Adolph Jentsch (1888–1977) During his lifetime he was considered the odd man out, but Jentsch lifted the sentimental veil off local landscape painting with a hard philosophy that was as unremitting as the Namibian veld. He was originally tutored in Germany’s Dresden School where realism was expounded. Once he arrived in Namibia, at the mature age of 50, he realised that the landscape called for an unconventional new approach that he had not been taught in Dresden.
Jentsch’s mollification of his art education evokes what Einstein said on tuition: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one has learnt at school.” Jentsch proceeded to do just that and applied it successfully to his ‘new’ art.
He controlled the sales of his last watercolour works like an astute businessman. It was once reported that his studio had burnt down and that some of his irreplaceable work had gone up in flames. Whether the rumour was deliberately spread or not, it immediately increased the market value of his work. A source close to him was sceptical of this reported cultural loss. Jentsch was far too meticulous and careful a planner to leave his work exposed to a possible fire hazard.
It did result in some watercolours appearing on the circuit with fire-damaged paper edges. This so impressed his imitators that they began producing Jentsch-styled watercolours resplendent with fire-damaged borders! Fortunately the candle-scorched fashion fizzled out quickly.
Nico Oswald Roos (1940–2008) As one of Jentsch’s academic and serious emulators, Roos developed a personal vision born from an intimate insight of Jentsch's works. He incorporated, developed, and transformed what the old artist revealed to him. From this contact grew his unique personal landscape calligraphy. Today he is challenging Jentsch’s unspoken status as the master landscape artist of the country.
Roos’s passionate interpretation of the landscape almost managed to tie the elusive dancing dust devil down. However, the landscape spirit will only allow a fragment of its beauty to be captured and held for a short human lifespan.
If Ossman rang in the glorious summer of Namibian landscape art, Blatt acted as autumn and began to strip away the romanticism from the subject matter. Jentsch isolated the essential landscape elements like bones on the winter plains.
And Roos? He proclaimed the new dawn of a fresh spring that burst forth, wild and full of promise.
Will the twentieth century be known as the golden age of Namibian landscape art? The above artists are all represented in the national art heritage collection currently on show at the National Art Gallery of Namibia in Windhoek. Go look and look again. You will see more than you saw before.
