(Author: Frank Startz, Vol. 67, No. 1, Pesach 2012)
Sidney Goldblatt was born in Johannesburg, of Lithuanian Jewish parents, in 1919. He grew up in Johannesburg and attended Parktown Boys High School. After matriculating, he spent ten years in business and was employed by the O.K. Bazaars, where his maternal uncle was Managing Director. Goldblatt was never happy in the business world, however. He always longed to be an artist, and so during this time attended evening art classes at the Johannesburg Technical College.
In 1946, Goldblatt forsook the business world to devote himself entirely to art. He took this decision after a painting holiday in Sabie. His first one-man exhibition was held in 1948 in the Jewish Guild Memorial Hall in Johannesburg. At this early stage he was hailed by art critics as “a gifted artist with a strong feeling for line and form”.
After this early success, Goldblatt studied overseas for some eighteen months. Through the recommendation of Maurice van Essche, he enrolled at the Anglo French Art Centre in London, studying there until 1950. While in England, he became interested in the early works of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist.
Prior to his arrival in England, Goldblatt had not been much interested in abstract art and contemporary ideas. Having visited art galleries there, however, he came to the conclusion that contemporary art was an extension of the classical and consequently drastically changed his attitude towards modern art.
Between 1950 and 1951, Goldblatt was in Paris, where he was tutored by Fernando Leger and Andre Lhote. It was here that he derived his greatest inspiration. During his period at Leger’s studio, Goldblatt became acquainted with many artists and students from all parts of the world. On his return to London, he studied sculpture at the Sir John Cass Academy in London’s East End.
In 1951, Goldblatt returned to South Africa, visiting Italy and all its art treasures en route. Once back, he once more established himself in Hillbrow. This suburb, which had developed during his childhood into a vast steel and concrete jungle, had left a lasting impression on him and to it can be traced his cubistic approach and the division of some of his work into facets or planes.
Goldblatt’s second one-man exhibition was held in 1952 at the Whippmans Gallery, Johannesburg. In this exhibition, he showed his love for subjects from his own surroundings landscapes, city scenes, and the people around him.
In May 1955, Goldblatt married English-born Wendy Webster. At the same time, he moved to a larger flat, where the main room became his studio. From here, he supplemented his income with teaching and was able to paint without being influenced by public demand or popular concepts. His art school continued until his untimely death in 1979.
At this time, Goldblatt began to make use of linoleum. While he was on honeymoon, the Lidchi Gallery held an exhibition of his early lino-cuts.
In 1957, Goldblatt and his wife went overseas for a year. They lived for more than six months in Spain, where they imbibed the atmosphere and color of the Spanish landscape and peoples. They lived for a while in Marbella, a small Southern Andalusian fishing village, and also spent some time in Toledo, Seville, Ronda and Cordoba and in the little harbors in that area. Goldblatt drew fresh inspiration from his sojourn in Spain, reveling in the light of the sharp Andalusian sun. He especially loved to paint the villages, boats and fishing scenes and their bright colorful palette as reflected in the strong Spanish sunlight.
After leaving Spain, the couple motored through Southern France, Italy and Switzerland. They ended up in London, where they spent three months. There, Goldblatt drew inspiration from the big art galleries and their wonderful collections. During the same year Goldblatt showed two oil paintings and two lino-cuts at the exhibition of South African art in London.
After returning to South Africa in 1958, Goldblatt took part in several exhibitions, with his Spanish paintings dominating. This won him recognition both locally and abroad. At the invitation of the SA Art Association, he sent three paintings to the Venice Biennale. They were acclaimed by overseas art critics, one of whom wrote in the Manchester Guardian, “South Africa has only one painter, Sidney Goldblatt, who gives one a rich feeling of the crowded predicament of his country. Goldblatt’s work sang from the canvas…”
Goldblatt’s work was slowly changing in style with every exhibition and a non-figurative element came to the fore, showing more sensitivity to color, more compact compositions and an ever increasing freedom of technique. He used linoleum in his paintings for the first time as a collage into which he engraved, painted and molded the medium. One of these paintings won the Cambridge Shirt Art Award on the Art SA Today exhibition, held in Durban in 1967.
Goldblatt believed that it was essential for local artists to acquaint themselves with artists in Europe and elsewhere abroad. In November 1969, he went overseas for six weeks, visiting Israel, the Greek Islands, Athens, Istanbul, and London, and taking with him paintings to show the art galleries there. In 1972, he took a further trip, visiting Toronto and the USA. In the American galleries, he was stimulated by the contemporary art scene, and the visit had a profound effect on his subsequent work.
In 1973, Goldblatt took a group on an art tour to Europe, visiting France, England, Italy and Greece and spending many hours, lecturing to the group in leading art centres and museums. He visited Scandinavia in 1975, and was impressed by the high standard of the crafts in those countries.
Goldblatt was a graphic artist, sculptor and oil painter. The medium he used for his graphics was linoleum, into which he carved and then took a print. After his visit to America, he also used acrylic paint and found that mixed media gave him interesting results. From 1966, he created compositions consisting of a combination of linoleum, oil paints and hessian in which his spontaneous use of textures was strongly expressed. He often used one color in these works, for example brown or silver. Initially, Goldblatt used pieces of linoleum as collage elements in his compositions. Two years later linoleum developed in its own right into panels, upon which the artist carved or cut out a design. These works depict a strong linear element.
Goldblatt’s sculpture is influenced by his paintings and lino-cuts, and also by African sculpture and cubism. When he started a sculpture, he had no preconceived ideas about the end result, allowing shapes to emerge naturally as he progressed. He never made these works on a big scale, and the work is non-figurative, yet the artist holds that they elicit images of perhaps a knight’s helmet or the body of a woman. His sculptures were cast in aluminium or in green and black bronze.
Goldblatt, who always sought to improve with every exhibition, did not hold any complicated art theories. He painted as he felt and his later paintings consisted of non-figurative compositions in which he concentrates on the relationships and the arrangement of color planes on canvas. He strove for a balance between tradition, abstraction and reality. In his earlier period, he was inspired by nature, but latterly it was more a question of seeing and feeling. He used natural shapes as symbols, retaining a feeling for realism, yet expressing it in the modern idiom.
Goldblatt used often to work on two or three canvases simultaneously. He would put uncompleted works aside and continue working on them at a later stage until he was satisfied that they were finished. His method of working is essentially a process of analysis; he often used his older paintings to build on and serve as an inspiration for newer ones.
In contrast to his earlier work, Goldblatt did not give his non-figurative work titles, because he maintained that these often evoke the wrong images rather than being open to interpretation. Sometimes, he was influenced by world events as, for example, during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Listening to his radio in his studio, he was very moved by the needless massacre that was taking place and did a series of paintings which reflected the turmoil in the desert.
In 1977, Goldblatt was invited to design a label for wine by a leading liquor distributor. This was the first time in South Africa that a label had been designed by an artist, and followed in the wake of those designed for Chateau Mouton Rothschild by Picasso, Chagall, Motherwell and Dali. Towards the end of his life, he was also often commissioned to do portraits.
Goldblatt lived, worked and taught in Abbotsford, Johannesburg, with Wendy (a potter who runs her own studio for teaching and producing ceramics) and their four children, Amanda, Lisa, Paula and Simon. He tutored many pupils, upon whom he exerted some measure of influence. Several of his pupils have been successful in both group and one-man shows.
Sidney Goldblatt died in 1979 following a heart attack. His sudden passing was a tremendous shock to the art world and to all who loved him. He still had had so much to contribute to the art scene in South Africa.
REMEMBERING SIDNEY GOLDBLATT: FRANK STARTZ IN CONVERSATION WITH WENDY GOLDBLATT
FS: Wendy, how and when did you and Sidney first meet?
WG:I first came to South Africa from England for a month’s holiday to visit my aunt in 1953 – I was only twenty. I left for South Africa as a young girl on a boat all alone and landed in Cape Town. After three weeks, I flew up to Johannesburg, where my mother’s sister lived.
I had a South African cousin, Catherine, who was taking art lessons with Sidney. He had just come back from overseas and started the Giotto Art Academy in Hillbrow with a German artist. Catherine said, “You have to meet my art teacher. He’s too old for me, but he’s just right for you”. Her then boyfriend, Kurt, arranged for the four of us to go on a date. Sidney was 34 or 35 at the time, which to me was ancient. He told me that he had never before met anyone that he felt he could marry but that if he had money, I’d be the one he would marry. So he started to teach more earnestly, broke away from the Giotta Art Academy and started teaching in his bachelor flat. We then married and rented a small two-bedroom flat. It was really minute but we envisaged it as a means to an end.
I worked for the French Bank (at that time I spoke fluent French) and Sidney taught and we saved as much as we could manage for about two years. We then went overseas because Sidney very much wanted to paint in Spain. We finally settled in the south of Spain, which was very cheap in those days, and we lived there for about five months in idyllic surroundings. Each day, Sidney would go out to paint the local scenes – and there were so many to choose from.
Following our return Maurice van Essche, a good friend of Sidney’s, wrote to him that he was going on a protracted holiday and suggested that Sidney take over his position as head of art at the famous Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town. Sidney thought it a great idea, but then Maurice was taken ill and on his recovery went back to his old job. Later, when he retired, he offered the position to Sidney again, but by then Sidney had decided that he did not want to be an administrator – which, of course, was mostly what the job entailed.
FS: What can you tell us about the time when Sidney went to study art in the UK?
WG: It was a few years before we met and were married. I was at school at the time and still lived in London. He was in London for about two years, studying painting and drawing at the Anglo French Art School. It was a small school, but they had very good professors. Then he went for about six months to the Sir John Cass Academy where he studied sculpture. Next, he went off to Paris for a few months, where he studied in the studios of Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote. He said they were unbelievable. He used to go there and work and about once a week they would pop in, have a look around and give a crit. Their approach was never “hands on”.
Before he went overseas, he featured in some small group exhibitions and then held his first solo exhibition at the Whippman Gallery soon after his return from Europe. When I knew him, he’d started exhibiting at the Lawrence Adler Gallery and also at the Lidchi Gallery.
FS: Who was running the Lidchi at the time? Was it Harold Jeppe?
WG:Yes, and Harold wrote a couple of articles on Sidney. Then Joyce Fourie took it over. She and Sidney got on very well.
FS: I remember Joyce, as well as Harold Jeppe. He gave me my first professional break. Joyce correctly described Sidney to me as being a very earthy man. And she was right.
WG: Yes that’s true. Sidney and I were very friendly with Joyce. Sidney was also friendly with Bill Ainslee and Cecil Skotnes, long before Cecil went to Cape Town to work at the Michaelis (I still have a beautiful Jobst copper bowl he gave us for a wedding present). Other friends were Dirk Meerkoter and Ronnie Mylchreest. Another name from that period was George Boys.
FS: Boys was my first art teacher. I joined him after he’d left the Tech and set up the Visual Arts Lab. I remember he would physically impose his own work on that of his students. One time the committee from the Lichtenburg Art Museum came to look at some of my work and one of them remarked on a particular painting, “What a credible copy of a Boys work”. This is what precipitated my leaving Boys and joining up with Sidney, where I really came face to face with the bare basics of the craft. Those lessons have stayed with me ever since.
Sidney was never critically harsh. He would examine a student’s work and would never say “that is a cowardly solution” (you knew in your heart that it was in fact just that). He would rather say encouragingly, “You are a better painter than that”. I remember him once telling me that he painted out of necessity. He had this great urge to always be working.
WG: He used to get terribly frustrated when he wasn’t painting. He loved travelling because he liked the influences – great art and great architecture. But would always itch to get back and start his own work again.
What fascinate me was that Sidney would never agree to give lectures. If he had to do so, he would stumble over his words. But in the studio, the words would just flow. He could talk about all the artists and their lives and their work.
It took me quite some time to persuade Sidney to visit America. Somehow he always resisted it, but eventually I won him over and we went off to New York, Boston and Washington. Once there, he couldn’t get enough of it. The enormous buildings, the seemingly narrow streets running through them, the way the light reflected into these chasms – and as for the galleries, we visited them all. At last, Sidney was able to view in the original those artists whose work he so admired Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Rothko, Paul Klee, among others. You can immediately see the influences of the New York landscape in the work he did after his return.
FS: I recall that in 1981, some two years after Sidney died, you, Natalie Knight, John Brett Cohen and myself first got together to organise a major retrospective of Sidney’s work at The Pretoria Art Museum. At this meeting, John described Sidney as being the last of the great painters of the African landscape. How true this observation is.
Concerning Sidney’s Cape Town exhibitions, what do you remember of them?
WG: He had never exhibited in Cape Town, but one day he received a letter from Issie Cohen, principal of Herzlia School. He wrote that as a hobby he collected paintings, that he knew Sidney’s work, and that he would like to hold an exhibition of it in Cape Town. One of those Issie named as a reference happened to be a good friend of ours – Norman Eisenberg. And so, Issie arranged the first Cape Town exhibition. For the duration he and his wife, Reva, put our whole family up (all six of us) at their house in Oranjezicht – over two weeks.
In all, we had three exhibitions in Cape Town, one of which was Sidney’s District Series which was practically a sell-out. Then Issie achieved his life-long ambition by opening his own gallery, the Atlantic Gallery in Church Street. Sadly, he got cancer shortly afterwards and passed away. Reva took it over and has run it very successfully ever since.
FS: Joe Roff and I also exhibited there.
WG: Yes, I remember. Then, after Sidney died, I arranged a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Irma Stern Gallery in Cape Town. His paintings also hang in The National Gallery. They are in fact represented in every major gallery in South Africa with the exception of The Johannesburg Art Gallery.
FS: I remember, before he died, that he also had a major showing at the then RAU gallery, together with some of his students. Thinking back, a number of students coming out of his studio achieved professional status, with none of us painting like the other, or even like Sidney.
WG: Maintaining that individuality was central to Sidney’s teaching philosophy.
FS: Sidney was so taken with his children – it was almost as if he couldn’t believe his own luck, he was totally besotted. And it was great to witness this relationship.
WG: I once asked a psychiatrist if he thought Sidney’s death would leave a permanent mark on Simon (our youngest) who was not yet 13 at the time. He assured me that because of the very close relationship that he had had with Sidney, the result could only be positive.
FS: Lisa (the eldest daughter) once told me that she regretted not having learned to paint under her dad’s guidance. Have any of your other children been involved in visual arts in any meaningful way?
WG: Lisa does draw and paint, but struggles with it. I would say they were all interested and appreciative of good art but perhaps it was too competitive for them, Sidney being well-known artist and my being a potter. None of them are really involved directly.
FS: Sidney came back very enthusiastic from his trip to the US – he couldn’t get over the scale and size of everything. He recalled meeting with Salvador Dali, who insisted on referring to himself in the 3rd person – what gigantic arrogance! Sidney himself was one of a very few non-expendable artists of his time, certainly in this country. He died far too early, leaving many of us with a feeling of having been robbed and cheated.
WG: He was only sixty at the time. What I always feel sad about was that he had so much more to contribute. In all our life together, we only had three big arguments. He was so kind and laid back, making him very easy to live with.
APPENDIX: SIDNEY GOLDBLATT EXHIBITIONS, 1948-1981
1948 Jewish Guild Memorial Hall. Johannesburg.
1952 Whippman Gallery Johannesburg.
1952 Santacade Zoo Lake. Johannesburg.
1955 Henri Lidchi Gallery. Johannesburg.
1956. 1st. Quadriennial Exhibition of South African Art.
1956 Whippman Gallery Johannesburg.
1956 Henry Lidchi Gallery Johannesburg.
1958 Lawrence Adler Gallery. Johannesburg.
1958 Kunstzaal Plaats. The Hague.
1959 Modern Homes Gallery. Johannesburg.
1959 – 1960 ZOA House Tel Aviv and artists house Johannesburg.
1960 Yugoslavia and Ghent.1960 2nd Quadriennale Exhibition of South African Art.
1960 Lawrence Adler Gallery Johannesburg.1961 Neil Sack Gallery. Durban.
1961 Gallery Walbrook. Adler Fielding Gallery. Johannesburg.
1961 Lawrence Adler Gallery. Johannesburg.
1962 Lidchi Gallery. Johannesburg. African Life Centre. Cape Town.
1962 Adler of of South African Art. S.A. Arts Association. Provincial Building Pretoria.
1964 3rd. Quadriennale Exhibition of South African Art.
1964 Adler Fielding Gallery. Johannesburg.
1964 Rembrandt Art Centre. Milner Park Johannesburg.
1965 Adler Fielding Gallery. Johannesburg.
1966 Republic Festival Exhibition. National Museum. Bloemfontein.
1967 Art – S.A – Today Exhibition. Durban.
1970 S,A. Association of Arts Gallery. Johannesburg.
1971 S.A. Association of Arts Cape own.
1972 Art Society. Durban
1973 S.A. Association of Arts. Pretoria.’
1974 International Gallery. Cape Town.
1974 Lidchi Gallery. Johannesburg.
1975. South African Art. Bologna. Italy.
1976 Tuis Gallery
1977 Atlantic Gallery Cape Town
1978 Atlantic Gallery Cape Town.
1978 SA Art Rhodesia.
1978 Graphic Work: Third Olympiad, Sao Paulo. Brazil. & USA; Travelling exhibition. Freschen West Germany
1978 Arts Fair Preview – Total Gallery. Johannesburg.
1979 Art from South Africa in Germany. Neuss, Mannheim, Baden Baden, Strassburg..
1979 Retrospective Exhibition at RAU with some of his earlier students.
1980 Atlantic Art Gallery. Cape Town.
1981 Retrospective Exhibition. Pretoria Art Museum (116 Works).
Frank Startz is an artist and a former student and long-time friend of the late Sidney Goldblatt. Wendy Goldblatt, the widow of Sidney Goldblatt, is a well-known South African potter.
