"Grey Areas" and the History of Black Modernism in South Africa

John Peffer

From the first stirrings of modernism at mid-century until the 1990s, black South African artists had difficulty gaining access to art historical knowledge, advanced education, art world influence, and exhibition venues. A legacy of informal training combined with paternalistic market pressures with the result that many black artists conformed to a repetitive, sentimental, self-regarding, and limited set of styles collectively, and pejoratively termed "township art." Paradoxically, the development of black modernist art during the decades before 1994 occurred within a social and intellectual setting that was more multiracial, more multicultural, and more internationally inclined and intellectually curious than most of the rest of South
Africa’s polarized black and white society. The following pages examine how conceptually, socially, aesthetically, and geographically black modern art in South Africa was a "grey area," a space for interactions of the sort not permitted in the larger society under apartheid. As the State’s segregationist program became more onerous after the 1950s, the black art scene preserved the promise of a future nonracial South Africa.