OBITUARIES 

Joe Maseko: Master of township scene [1938-2007]

By Chris Barron

Joe Maseko, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 71, was one of South Africa's most talented artists and might have been one of its greatest if he hadn't been such a compulsive boozer and party animal.

 

When he sold a painting and the money came in, he stopped working and threw open the doors of his house to anyone who wanted to party. 

There were always plenty of freeloaders not for nothing was he called "father of the fatherless"-and the partying didn't stop until he was broke and half comatose. 

Only when his financial circumstances became desperate did he drag himself to the easel to finish another, usually long overdue, work. One after the other, galleries dropped him.

Nevertheless, his work sold. -and for the past few years fetched increasingly good prices. At an auction in March this year, Sotheby's sold one of his oils for about R40 000. The Cherie de Villiers Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg. the most recent to exhibit his work, sold another of his paintings this year for R35 000. Maseko's work is probably not in the same league as that of the great Gerard Sekoto. But it comes close. 

As it is, his was a staggering achievement against enormous odds, 

Born in Soweto on December 26 1936, he was forced to leave school in Std 1 to help support his family. 

He became a delivery boy for a grocery shop and then an assistant window dresser for a clothing chain store. 

An early sign of his talent was a backdrop he painted for a shop window; it won third prize for the company in a competition. 

Maseko taught himself just about everything, from how to write and speak English-he spent hours practising with a tape recorder-to drawing and painting, initially with watercolours on every bit of paper that came to hand. 

Drawing was his "main form of communication", he said. 

Every spare minute was spent at municipal libraries reading books about art. 

In 1959 art became his sole means of existence. 

He sold paintings at open air exhibitions in Johannesburg's Joubert Park and Zoo Lake. 

In 1961 his work was noticed by Johannesburg gallery owner Adler Fielding who included some of it in his Artists of Fame and Promise group exhibition that year. 

Maseko's first solo exhibition was at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1970. 

His big break was a solo exhibition in Denver, Colorado, in the US in 1973. Thereafter came several more solo exhibitions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, West Germany, Israel and Canada, 

In 1974 he and Lucky Sibiya represented Johannesburg at the Swaziland Trade Fair and won first prize. 

In the late '70s, the art department at the University of Natal invited him to be a guest student. 

This was his only formal art training and he used the opportunity to learn silk screen printing and etching. 

In 1982 Maseko became the first African to own an art gallery in South Africa when he opened Art in the Mart in Johannesburg. 

Due to a combination of factors, including a propensity to live it up when he got half a chance, financial pressures and an inability to sustain the administrative side of running a gallery, it folded in 1983. 

In 1994 he was part of a group exhibition, Windows on The New South Africa, at the World Trade Centre in Toronto, Canada. This was followed in 1995 by an exhibition at the New Horizons show, also in Toronto, 

Among his major commissions was a mural for Standard Bank and the design of a throne for King Goodwill Zwelethinl. 

Although he did a variety of things, including portraits and abstracts, Maseko is best known for his paintings of township scenes. 

“I see pictures everywhere I look ," he said. "Children playing in the street, housewives at their wash tubs, a strolling penny-whistle player, the charred shell of a burnt-out building. There is beauty everywhere if you want to see it." 

He worked in oils, watercolours, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, airbrush and pastel, on canvas, paper and board. 

Maseko was an exuberant, gregarious character who looked, in his own words, more like an underworld gang boss than an artist. 

But as warm and likeable as he could be, he was a hard man to live with, two marriages ended in divorce; a third ended when his wife died. 

He lived on his own for the last 17 or so years of his life. although he was never short of company when he was in the money. 

When he was in work mode he painted all night, in a small, chaotic room in his house, and went to bed at about six in the morning for a few hours. 

His body was discovered at home. It was estimated he had been dead for three days. He is survived by his daughter, Louisa Maseko.

Chris Barron 

ARTIST: Joe Maseko, whose art paid for his social life