Joe Maseko

A self-taught artist with little formal schooling, Maseko began painting in 1959. These early works are painterly examples of everyday scenes that recall Ephraim Ngatane (qv.), and to a lesser extent Louis Maqhubela (qv.), both of whom were Maseko’s contemporaries. They are dated 1964 (plate 120) and 1968 (plate 121). The latter work shows his departure from a realist idiom to a more abstract one. The work of 1968 is clearly a township or urban scene that was mistitled as Children in a wooded landscape. It is an almost abstract painting from an era where formal experimentation had not yet become formalised cliché. As such, these works are interesting not only because of their successful synthesis of naturalism and abstraction, but also because they precede the development of ‘township art’ as a stylistic idiom.