Local Art • 1938
Walter Battiss, Alexis Preller, and other young South African artists form the New Group in response to the British-inspired academicism of current South African art. They seek an alternative modern art rooted in the integration of African and European aesthetics. The New Group, and South African artists in general, benefit from the immigration of European intellectuals fleeing the totalitarian regimes emerging in Europe at this time.
An entry from the timeline included in the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance (2009–2010) at the Iziko National Gallery, which proposed connections between art production in South Africa and abroad against the social and political contexts that framed them. A revised version of this timeline was later featured in the retroactive Flight Paths (2011) exhibition guide commissioned by Clare Butcher.