b.1935, Sophiatown; d.1988, Johannesburg

In a deft gesture of unanticipated re-appropriation, the artist Sydney Kumalo considered European modernist sculptures the primary influence in his aesthetic development. That many of these modernist sculptures were in turn inspired by ‘primitive’ African art objects led to some confusion in the reception of Kumalo’s work. Many recognised an innate African-ness to his sculpted forms, an inherited tribal tradition, disregarding his works’ modernity and imagining it instead to exist in some timeless vision of the ‘dark continent’. That Kumalo was an urban rather than rural artist, and that his art education rested almost entirely on the reproduction of works from Western art history books, sorely undermined this romantic reduction. His forms were not primitive but primitivist. While his South African context no doubt influenced his sculptures in subject and image, they remain resolutely modern in style. Kumalo was one of several black artists trained at the Polly Street Art Centre (later the Jubilee Art Centre) in Johannesburg under the tutelage of Cecil Skotnes and Eduardo Villa, who went on to garner fame nationally and abroad. Kumalo later became a senior art instructor at the Centre, before pursuing his career as an artist full-time in 1964.