Gerard Sekoto valuation
Pioneer of South African urban painting, of Sophiatown and District Six, who spent his last fifty years in Paris.
Gerard Sekoto was born in 1913 at the Lutheran mission at Botshabelo, near Middelburg, where his father was a teacher and evangelist.
What a work by Gerard Sekoto is worth
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Bio
Gerard Sekoto was born in 1913 at the Lutheran mission at Botshabelo, near Middelburg, where his father was a teacher and evangelist. He trained as a teacher at the Diocesan Teachers' Training College at Pietersburg, where the sculptor Ernest Mancoba became a friend and mentor, and taught at Khaiso Secondary School before moving to Sophiatown in Johannesburg in 1938 to paint. He held his first solo exhibition in 1939, and in 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery bought his Yellow Houses, the first work by a Black artist to enter a South African museum. He painted the townships of Sophiatown, District Six in Cape Town and Eastwood in Pretoria, their streets, families, workers and prisoners, in warm colour. In 1947 he left for Paris, where he lived in exile, painting and playing jazz piano, until his death in 1993.
The South African paintings of the 1940s are the most important and the rarest; later works from Paris, including heads, figures and memories of home, appear more often. The Gerard Sekoto Foundation and the published literature are the references, and provenance matters, as copies and misattributions exist.
Sophiatown, District Six and Paris
In 1942 he moved to District Six in Cape Town and in 1945 to Eastwood in Pretoria, and the paintings of those years, Sixpence a Door and Song of the Pick among them, are counted among his finest.
His work is in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Iziko South African National Gallery and the Pretoria Art Museum.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
