Dignity in Form: Maggie Laubser’s Expressionist Vision: Selected Portraits and Landscapes, 1927–1973

This painting was produced during Maggie Laubser’s mature early phase, between 1927 and 1932, when she was in her early- to mid-forties. A period by which she was considered to have consolidated her Expressionist idiom after returning permanently to South Africa from Europe. Two women occupy the foreground: one balances a heavy bundle of wood on her head while carrying a baby in a sling; another follows, bearing palm fronds. In the foreground, black-and-white pigs graze, and beyond, a Cape Dutch homestead rests under a glowing moon.

 

Formally, the painting bears many hallmarks of Laubser’s Expressionist style such as simplified volumes, bold outlines, and a chromatic scheme that serves to animate the landscape and heighten emotion, rather than provide a naturalistic representation. The figures are monumentalised yet stylised, emblematic of rural life rather than individual portraiture. Animals and agrarian labour, recurrent motifs in Laubser’s work of this period, signal her sustained preoccupation with themes of subsistence, humility, and the dignity of ordinary tasks.

 

When this work was painted, South Africa was undergoing profound political and social upheaval. The 1920s and early 1930s saw intensified racial segregation formalised through legislation, including the entrenchment of land dispossession (Native Land Act 1913 and its aftermath) and the consolidation of a racially stratified labour economy. Rural black communities, particularly women, bore the burden of subsistence farming and fuel gathering, and these tasks are echoed in Laubser’s subject matter. The image of women carrying wood and children on their backs, while pastoral on the surface, is also a direct reflection of the lived realities of black rural labour under conditions of economic hardship and systemic dispossession.

 

While Laubser herself was not a political painter in the activist sense, her focus on such subjects registers a quiet acknowledgment of social reality. The rural women here are not incidental, rather, they are central, filling the pictorial plane with their presence. Unlike the romanticised peasant types of European modernism, these figures carry a weight that resonates with South Africa’s political economy – they represent endurance, resilience, and the continuity of life under oppressive structures. The moonlit backdrop and lyrical colours soften the scene, but the subject remains firmly rooted in a context of racialised labour.

 

Laubser’s decision to monumentalise black women within her modernist language was unusual in the South African art world of the time, which often excluded or caricatured such subjects. Her work sits uneasily between European modernist archetypes and the South African reality she observed, producing paintings that can be read both as universalised, lyrical evocations of “rural life” and as historical documents inflected by the socio-political realities of segregation. In this sense, Figures in a Landscape is doubly significant as it demonstrates her synthesis of Expressionism with Cape subject matter, and it encodes the tensions of South African society during the interwar years.

Painted in the late 1920s to early 1930s, Laubser’s crucial first decade back in South Africa, this half-length portrait condenses the artist’s Expressionist language into a poised, humane study. The sitter, head wrapped in a white scarf which is punctuated with yellow florets, is placed close to the picture plane. Behind her a banded landscape of fields and distant mountains unfolds in simplified, geometric planes. The acute frontal cropping, the quiet turn of the head, and the averted gaze produce a mood that is introspective rather than descriptive – the subject is emblematic, not anecdotal.

 

Laubser treats the headscarf (“kopdoek”) as both cultural sign and formal device: its white ground, scalloped edges and floral punctuation counter-set the dark modelling of the face and anchor a triad of whites on three sides, with the headscarf and the blouse opening framing the subject. The portrait is rigid with firm contours at jawline and features, yet animated by softly modulating planes across the cheeks, nose, and brow. The restrained but saturated palette reveals the Fauvist and German Expressionist roots of Laubser’s practice, initially absorbed in Europe before 1921 and appropriated in the Cape thereafter. Brushwork is short and loaded, knitting sitter and setting into a continuous, tactile surface. Compared to the rawer facture of the mid-1920s, the handling here is surer and more economical, signalling the consolidation of her mature manner.

 

Returning from Berlin and the Low Countries to a conservative South African art world, Laubser spent the later 1920s forging a personal idiom in the face of sharp criticism. Portraits of Black women and rural workers from this period form a sustained sequence in which she monumentalises everyday subjects through simplified mass, saturated colour and empathetic presence. The present work belongs to that sequence: it advances beyond early experiments to a calmer, integrated design that would underpin her 1930s–40s production and anticipate the distilled lyricism of her late style.

 

The portrait is made amidst intensifying segregation and labour stratification in interwar South Africa: the Native Administration Act (1927), tightening pass regulations, the aftershocks of the 1922 Rand Revolt, the 1929–32 depression, and the Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem (1932) together formed a racially hierarchical political economy. Within this climate, Laubser’s decision to centre a Black woman with psychological gravity and painterly seriousness is significant. The work is not propagandistic; it offers a humanist counter-image to the demeaning visual regimes of the day. The sitter’s close cropping, calm scale and frontal dignity resist ethnographic distance and salon exoticism alike, locating the subject within a living landscape rather than as picturesque accessory to it.

 

Alongside Irma Stern, Laubser was instrumental in indigenising European modernism for South African conditions. Portraits such as this one show how Expressionist means – such as line as contour, colour as emotion, simplification as structure – could bear local subjects without reducing into caricature. They also mark a pivotal ethical turn in the visual culture of the period: the modernist portrait as a site of recognition. In South African art’s longer historical arc, this painting resides at the hinge where avant-garde form becomes a vehicle for social feeling, preparing the ground for later generations to enlist modernist grammar in the work of cultural empathy and critique.

According to Marias, this work would have been executed in the period stretching from the early 1930s to about 1950. The large, crisply cropped head-and-shoulders study emanates from Maggie Laubser’s sustained engagement with intimate portraiture in drawing. The sitter, with cheek resting on clenched fist and eyes averted in a pose of deep contemplation, is presented close to the picture plane. Laubser constructs the figure’s head with a sparing, assured contour and then develops form through broad, rubbed tonal masses, directional hatching and selective highlights left as exposed paper. The economy of means produces gravity – a frank, perceptive likeness that is less anecdotal “type” than individualised presence.

 

Charcoal served Laubser not merely as a preparatory medium but as an autonomous vehicle for expression. Here, she exploits its full register to articulate a form whose volumes read as light rather than line. The hand, a motif she often used to stabilise a bust and signal interiority and contemplation, is rendered with stocky planes that correspond with the sitter’s cheekbones and brow. Cropping is modern and cinematic – shoulders cut by the sheet edge, background pared to a few vertical sweeps. Compared with the more angular attack of some mid-1920s drawings, this sheet shows the calmer synthesis Laubser achieved from the early 1930s onward, blending structural clarity, empathetic modelling, and a rejection of caricature.

 

Having returned from Europe in the 1920s, Laubser spent the next two decades forging a South African modernism out of Expressionist and Fauvist lessons. Portraits of Black sitters made in oil and charcoal form a central strand of this effort. They mark her determination to dignify everyday subjects through scale, close cropping and painterly seriousness, even as conservative critics derided “distortions” in her style.

 

The drawing is made across years in which segregation hardened into full apartheid with the National Party victory in 1948; the Group Areas Act and pass laws tightened in 1950, and all this bracketed by the earlier Depression, the 1946 African Mine Workers’ strike, and wartime disruptions. Visual culture of the period routinely objectified or instrumentalised Black subjects. Against that field, Laubser’s portrait offers a humanist counter-image. The sitter’s proximity and psychological address resist ethnographic distance; the modelling seeks personality, not “type.” The thoughtful pose, with hand to face, performs subjectivity at a time when political structures denied it. While Laubser was not an activist artist, the ethical weight of her modernist portraiture lies precisely here: the use of a reduced, expressive grammar to recognise the inner life of those whom the dominant order rendered invisible.

 

Together with Irma Stern, Laubser naturalised European Expressionism in the Cape, transforming its colourism and structural contour into a language adequate to local light, physiognomies and social realities. In drawing, as in paint, she moved away from anecdotal genre to portraits of concentrated presence. This sheet sits productively alongside contemporaneous work by Gerard Sekoto and, later, George Pemba in insisting that modernist form could serve recognition rather than stereotype. It also exemplifies how South African modernism of the 1930s–40s broadened its ethical horizon: the avant-garde portrait as a site of dignity.

 

Spare, frontal and psychologically alert, Pensive young woman condenses Laubser’s mature approach to portraiture on paper. It demonstrates her technical command of charcoal, her modern compositional sense, and her ethical investment in the dignity of ordinary sitters. Set against the segregated and then apartheid South Africa of the 1930s–40s, the drawing functions as a quiet act of recognition, an image of interiority that anchors Laubser’s contribution to the broader history of South African modernism.

Painted between about 1940 and 1950, Huts, Sunflowers and Seated Figure in a Landscape belongs to a decisive middle phase in Maggie Laubser’s career, when the Expressionist language she forged in Europe had settled into a lucid South African idiom. The painting gathers several of her signature emblems such as rondavel-style huts, domestic fowl, a monumental plant form (here a radiant column of sunflowers), and a solitary seated figure, into a compact, frontal arrangement.

 

The seated figure occupies the threshold between homestead and garden, flanked by vigorously painted sunflowers, and seemingly watching three small red fowl. Laubser often monumentalised everyday rural motifs such as women at work, farm animals, and simple architecture, into emblematic forms. In this canvas, the sunflowers function as vertical “exclamation marks” of vitality and fecundity; their scale equals that of the huts, transforming a familiar plant into a bearer of mood. While the huts and birds situate the scene in a Southern African rural context, Laubser’s handling is not ethnographic; it is poetic and stylising, attentive to the inner life of forms and colour.

 

By the 1940s Laubser’s drawing had become more economical and her colour orchestration more assured. The paint is laid in short, loaded strokes that knit the surface – planes are simplified, and outlines are declarative. The chromatic temperature containing cool hues offset by warm earthy tones, reveals her abiding debt to European modernism, namely Fauvism and German Expressionism, here re-imagined in the Cape’s light. This mid-period synthesis with clear silhouettes, expressive contour, and saturated but balanced colour, differs from the rawer approach of her 1920s work and anticipates the distilled serenity of her late paintings.

 

After returning to South Africa in the 1920s, Laubser endured two decades of conservative resistance to modernism. By the 1940s, however, she had an expanding base of collectors and supporters, regular exhibitions, and a more stable working rhythm in the Western Cape. The early provenance of Prof S. Pauw in 1949 suggests that the work circulated promptly after completion, aligning with a period in which Laubser’s reputation was consolidating within academic and professional circles. That consolidation culminated in public recognition in the 1960s.¹

 

The 1940s were marked by the Second World War, accelerated urbanisation, and intensifying segregation in South Africa. Within this atmosphere, Laubser’s image of homestead, figure and garden reads as a pastoral counter-imaginary. It neither documents political events nor indulges in salon exoticism; rather, it quietly dignifies rural Black life through scale, centring and painterly seriousness. The seated figure is not marginal décor – positioned frontally and grounded by deep shadow, the person commands the picture’s gravity. The painting’s lyricism offers a humanist register that sits in tension with the period’s coercive state policies. To that extent, the work participates in the broader cultural production of the 1940s that sought images of care, endurance and belonging amid ideological fracture.

 

Laubser’s works of this middle period show how decisively she translated the European Expressionism language into one capable of bearing local subjects without subordinating them or reducing to anecdote. Her treatment of rural architecture and Black figures avoids caricature, preferring simplified mass and empathetic presence. In the history of South African modernism, such canvases are pivotal: they mark the moment when avant-garde means (colour as emotion, form as rhythm) were naturalised to the Cape, opening paths for later practitioners to deploy modernist form as a vehicle for social feeling and identity. The sunflower motif, here filtered through Post-Impressionist antecedents yet rooted in the Cape garden, became one of Laubser’s clearest signatures, emblematic of her effort to reconcile European colourism with Southern African life.

 

Huts, Sunflowers and Seated Figure in a Landscape crystallises Laubser’s 1940s synthesis: a modernist grammar of contour and colour turned toward Southern African subjects with dignity and warmth. Set against the tightening strictures of segregation and the advent of apartheid, the painting’s pastoral lyricism articulates a quiet, humanist counter-image. Its assured mid-career style and resonant iconography secure its place within both Laubser’s oeuvre and the broader story of South African modernism.

Painted in the final years of her life, Birds, Boats and a House is typical of Maggie Laubser’s late style – a lyrical synthesis of the natural motifs that sustained her vision for more than five decades. Two black swans glide across a shallow tide, while a lone figure steers a boat beneath a turquoise sail and, in the distance, a Cape Dutch homestead rests against soft hills. With their simplified contours, singing colour and tactile brushwork, these elements are woven into a composition at once emblematic and deeply personal.

 

Laubser had, by this point, achieved the recognition she was denied in her early career. After decades of criticism for introducing Expressionist and Fauvist tendencies to South Africa, she was celebrated in a major retrospective at the South African National Gallery in 1969 and honoured as one of the country’s pioneering modernists alongside Irma Stern. In these last years, she returned repeatedly to motifs of birds, boats, cottages and farm animals, distilled into designs that balanced formal economy with emotional resonance.

 

The motif of the “black swan” is significant. While not typical of South African fauna, Laubser often transformed creatures into expressive emblems rather than naturalistic studies. These birds anchor the composition visually and emotionally, their dark, elongated forms setting up a counterpoint with the pale sands and bright sail. In so doing, Laubser evokes an archetype of harmony between nature, human labour, and home life – a vision of sanctuary at a time when South Africa’s social and political climate was defined by repression. Her paintings of this late period, while not explicitly political, offered a counter-image of tenderness, dignity and belonging.

 

This work, recorded in Dalene Marais’s catalogue raisonné (cat. no. 1704), where it is illustrated and dated to the early 1970s, has a notable provenance. The verso bears an inscription with the name Basil Trakman, a Hampstead-based pharmacist and art enthusiast long associated with the Cape Town gallery Universal Art. Trakman was active in the promotion and circulation of South African modernism. Subsequent ownership by Mr J. Lazarus of Pretoria strengthens its South African provenance.

 

In its subject matter, painterly vitality and serene mood, Birds, Boats and a House is a distilled monument to Laubser’s lifelong search for an art that could reconcile modernist form with the lyricism of everyday life in South Africa.