George Pemba
In the Mood is an unusual painting from an artist given to social realism. It illustrates Pemba’s brief sojourn into abstraction, a flirtation with Cubism by then out-of-date. Such were the many gestures of South African modernism, which – removed from the European avant-garde not only geographically but ideologically – were more often a step or two behind. Pemba’s painting is named for the jazz standard and invokes its music with the improvised lines and forms of a compositional ragtime. In the bottom left-hand corner of the scene, the artist’s signature becomes the signage above a building, as if announcing the main act of a variety show. Ladies and gentlemen, George Pemba!
b.1912, Gqeberha; d.2001, Motherwell
“I have almost throughout my life,” George Pemba wrote in an undated journal entry, “been in the wilderness.” Like his contemporary Ernest Mancoba, Pemba went largely unrecognised as an artist in his lifetime; his paintings passed over as ‘township art’. He persisted despite his relative obscurity, persisted even in times of great personal hardship. Many black South African artists of his generation left for Europe, among them Pemba’s friend Gerald Sekoto. Such a journey, however, was beyond Pemba’s means. Instead, he stayed and witnessed in paint the country’s transition to high apartheid and then to freedom. His paintings, the artist insisted, were never political but rather studies in life’s minutiae. But then politics had a way of staining all life under apartheid, of colouring even those scenes which first appear innocent. History has since turned to Pemba’s paintings to understand something of those times, to gain insight into the lives of ordinary people under the regime’s oppression. Recognition has posthumously granted Pemba pride of place in the South African canon. He is remembered as a pioneer of South African social realism and is counted among the country’s most influential artists. “I have to thank myself,” Pemba said in an address given in 1991, “for holding on with the hope that one day the sun will also shine on me.”