Gerard Sekoto: Commuters, c.1945-7

Gerard Sekoto’s Commuters is a rare and significant work most likely from the artist’s early Sophiatown period between 1939 and 1942. This situates it as one of the formative early oil paintings in Sekoto’s oeuvre. As with many of Sekoto’s works, there is some uncertainty regarding the exact date, but it bears a distinct similarity in form, technique and palette to his paintings from his Sophiatown period such as Three Figures with Bicycles; Three Women on the Steps; Cyclists in Sophiatown; and Three School Girls all dated circa 1940-42.

Dense, with psychological depth and painterly power, Commuters captures a moment of urban Black life, during racial segregation before Apartheid, with profound empathy and formal sophistication. Sekoto in his South African period, before he left for Paris in 1947, displayed remarkable powers of observation, conveying, with poetic feeling, the quotidian dramas of black South African life.

This painting reflects Sekoto’s increasing concern with the psychological impact of racial segregation, displacement, and the rhythms of forced urban migration. With its brooding palette, gestural application, and haunting composition, Commuters stands among the most compelling visual meditations on labour, identity, and endurance in modern South African art.

As Prof Chabani Manganyi writes, ‘Sekoto’s devotion to art started in earnest in 1939,’ the year he went to live with his cousins in Sophiatown, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Sophiatown had, by then, already become the cultural nucleus for the increasing urbanised South African population. Sekoto repeatedly remarked that it was Sophiatown that played a formative role of his artistic life. As he wrote to Barbara Lindop in a letter in 1987:

‘The vitality of the area was a great stimulus. It was a theatrical scene seeing all these various types of people: women with baskets of shopping, some carrying baggage either on their heads or shoulders. Men of various styles of walking and clothing, some bicycle-riding or driving cars...there were also many children of varied appearance in attire and expression.’

Commuters is one of the great exemplars of Sekoto’s keen observations of the life around him. Sophiatown would become Sekoto’s first artistic muse. There he discovered a sensibility and inspiration that he would struggle to recapture while in exile in France. As he wrote:

‘Tough, rough and squalid as this Sophiatown was, it opened to me for the first time in my life the joy of feeling no rigid barriers dividing people of different traditions and beliefs. I felt I was part of the whole, hence I could sing in bright colours – yellows, red browns and blues – singing the sorrows, troubles and joys of those with whom I communicated.’

Sekoto’s Sophiatown period is distinct from his later South African work in District Six and Eastwood in that it was marked by aspects of social realism. It was the period before his more expressive use of colour took primacy in his work. Commuters is a perfect example of how the Sophiatown paintings reflect a sense of social disquiet. This, Sekoto stated, was induced by the act of commuting into the city ‘on the pavement I found myself in the many rapid movements of pedestrians — coming and going … All those complexities did not permit the newcomer a single moment of relaxation.’

Commuters emerges from this moment with clarity and conviction. The tightly cropped composition presents a procession of anonymous figures, hemmed in by a wall of compressed brushwork suggesting a backdrop of houses. The agitation of the brushstrokes, and the modelling and movement of the figures suggest perfectly a sense of exhaustion, resignation, and quiet resistance. It is generally unexpected in Sekoto’s street scenes to see the expressions of the face. But in Commuters a sense of disquiet is deftly conveyed in the men’s and woman’s faces. The central figure cast in shadow and wrapped in ochre and mustard tones, becomes both an individual and a type, emblematic of the thousands who made the daily trek between township and city in apartheid South Africa.

The palette, dominated by burnt umbers, acidic yellows, perylene green, and saturated blacks is rare in Sekoto’s work. Light fractures across the figures’ faces, heightening the emotional intensity of the composition and underscoring themes of marginalisation and loss of identity.

Gerard Sekoto’s Commuters is a work of exceptional gravity and poignancy, most convincingly situated Sophiatown Period (1940–1942) – the first, and arguably most intense and formative, phase of his South African oeuvre. Painted during a time of escalating social hardship, political repression of war time South Africa, and personal introspection, this painting bears all the hallmarks of Sekoto’s mature South African style: psychological weight, gestural intensity, and a palette rich in shadow and atmosphere.

Commuters draws the viewer into a dense, compressed, even claustrophobic composition. Figures crowd the foreground, hemmed in by a wall of abstracted brushwork that suggests movement, noise, and urban confinement. The central figure, wearing a battered hat and a heavy yellow coat, emerges in stark contrast against the dark, undulating background. His face is partially obscured by shadow, his mouth faintly parted. Around him, other figures form a shadowy procession, spectral and indistinct, absorbed in their own unknowable burdens.

Paint is applied thickly and roughly, with expressive impasto and abrupt transitions between colour zones. The broken, gestural application enhances the painting’s atmosphere of anxiety and disquiet. Light appears fractured, filtering in sharply from above and casting deep shadows across the figures’ faces – a formal device used by Sekoto to heighten emotional impact and signal the erosion of individual identity under oppressive conditions.