Moses Tladi (18 April 1897 – 1959) was a self-taught South African artist who was the first black painter to hold a formal exhibition in South Africa and the first black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery. He worked as a gardener in Parktown, Johannesburg, painting the landscapes he saw around him, and stopped painting after being forced from his home under the Group Areas Act in 1956.
Early life
Moses Tladi was born on 18 April 1897 at Lobethal, Ga-Phahla, in Sekhukhuneland, in the northern part of South Africa. Many later accounts give his birth year as 1903. He was the son of Selaoane, a traditional healer who made a living by working creatively in iron, and Rekiloe, a gifted potter. His parents converted to Christianity under the influence of the Berlin Missionary Society, and he was educated at the mission school at Lobethal, in what is now Limpopo Province. He spent his early years herding cattle.
The Land Act of 1913 denied black South Africans land ownership outside the small "native" reserves and helped create the migrant labour system that drew men such as Tladi to the cities. Like many young men of his time he went to Johannesburg in search of work, arriving in 1927. He found employment as a gardener for Herbert Read (1875–1942) at Lokshoek, Read's house in the fashionable suburb of Parktown.
Career as an artist
Tladi began painting with leftover commercial house paint and a stick. According to his daughter Mmapula Tladi, Read's children found him drawing in the garden with discarded paper and pencils and told their father, who then provided him with proper materials. Read gave him the use of a carriage house in which to paint and encouraged him to paint the garden at Lokshoek. He also introduced Tladi to the collector and philanthropist Howard Pim, a former mayor of Johannesburg who had played a leading role in the establishment of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Read and Pim promoted Tladi at public exhibitions from 1929 onwards. Pim described him in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu in 1928 as a "Native genius".
Tladi exhibited for the first time in the Tenth Annual Exhibition of the South African Academy in 1929, held at the Selborne Hall in Johannesburg, in a section titled "Special Exhibition by Native Artist". In 1931 he took part in the First Annual Exhibition of Contemporary National Art at the South African National Gallery, showing Witwatersrand Winter and Spring; he is thought not to have seen the exhibition in person. At the Grahamstown Arts and Craft Festival Exhibition in March 1932 he won first and second prizes in the open section for landscape and seascape painting, and his Landscape with Trees, which won second prize, is now held by Museum Africa in Johannesburg. He exhibited at the South African National Gallery again in 1933, showing Manako Sekhukuniland and the now-lost Winter near Mooikraal. In 1938 he held his first solo exhibition, at the Swedish Hall in Johannesburg, and the following year he exhibited with the South African Academy and at the Gainsborough Galleries. In 1939 he was also the first black African artist to have his works exhibited at the National Gallery in Johannesburg, where his paintings received acclaim.[citation needed]
Style and reception
Tladi had no formal art training, although it has been suggested that he may later have received some instruction at the "Bantu" School of Arts or the Polly Street Centre. He was a close observer of other painters, and was particularly drawn to Le Printemps by Claude Monet and The Last Days of Summer by Henri-Joseph Harpignies, both of them painters who worked en plein air; Tladi was himself largely a plein-air painter. His paintings are small and intimate, mostly in oil and watercolour, with a muted palette, and he returned repeatedly to trees as a compositional device and to paths and roads that lead the eye into the picture. He painted the hills and mountains of Sekhukhuneland, Driefontein and the Magaliesberg, and left roughly forty works.
Hayden Proud, curator of historical paintings and sculpture at Iziko Museums, wrote of the work:
...in looking at primarily the landscapes of Moses Tladi, one can sense that he was looking very hard at the work of other artists such as Pierneef, Volschenk and many others. But there is a kind of sincerity and a kind of integrity to the work... that honesty and directness of vision and expression that is so individual to certain artists is something that gives his work a kind of quality that is unpretentious.
Family
Tladi married Sekhubami More (1899–1981) in 1931. They had four children: Rekiloe (1931–2014), Selaoane (1934–1981), Mmapula (born 1936) and Ramotebele (born 1942). The family first lived in Sophiatown before Tladi built a home for them in Kensington B, near Ferndale, Johannesburg.
War service and forced removal
Tladi served during the Second World War and was stationed at Kroonstad in the Free State. On his return to Johannesburg he continued to paint until 1956, when he and his family were forced to leave their Kensington B home under the Group Areas Act and moved to Soweto. His daughter Mmapula later recalled:
He had grown a wonderful orchard in Kensington B and some jacaranda trees which turned out to be our playground. And I remember my father took an axe, went into the orchard and he chopped and chopped... It took days, but every day he got up and chopped a tree. From the day my father was moving from Kensington B, he never ever picked up a brush. That was it.
He died in 1959.
Moses Tladi Unearthed
Moses Tladi Paintings- The House in Kensington BMoses Tladi Paintings - Lokshoek JohannesburgMoses Tladi Paintings - Morning at Magaliesberg MountainsMoses Tladi Paintings - Manako Sekhukuniland
The first major exhibition of Tladi's work, Moses Tladi Unearthed, opened at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town on 23 September 2015 and ran until 14 March 2016. It was curated by Andrea Lewis, who had found very little written about the artist apart from Angela Read Lloyd's 2009 book, and brought together about thirty paintings from the Tladi family collection, the Read Lloyd family collection, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and private collectors in South Africa and overseas. An "in context" approach presented his work alongside other artists working in a similar vein or at the same time. The exhibition was funded by Iziko Museums, the National Arts Festival and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town. It moved to the Albany History Museum in Grahamstown in June 2016 as part of the National Arts Festival, and was later shown at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg.
Rediscovery and legacy
With the end of apartheid, Tladi's work began to resurface: some of it was included in the Land and Lives exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1997, and in 2010 there was an exhibition at South Africa House in London. Angela Read Lloyd, Herbert Read's granddaughter, published The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi (Print Matters, 2009), the first book-length account of his life, which became the main source for the 2015 retrospective. The Moses Tladi Charitable Foundation was registered as a charity in England and Wales in 2019.
Notes and references
↑Lloyd, A. R. (2014). "Moses Tladi, Landscape Painter: South Africa's First Black Artist Working in the Western Tradition". Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. 2013 (33): 20–37. doi:10.1215/10757163-2352884. ISSN1075-7163. S2CID194086491.
↑Caccia, Angela (2000). "Rediscovering Moses Tladi: recent findings concerning the work and life of South Africa's first black landscape painter". de arte. 35 (62): 20–39. doi:10.1080/00043389.2000.11761313.
Coetsee, Ydi (2013). "Transvaal Romantic: an exploration of Romantic elements in the landscape paintings of Moses Tladi". South African Journal of Art History. 28 (3). hdl:10520/EJC149231. ISSN0258-3542.
