Stanley Pinker
The Bather is a small, intimate painting. In style, it is evocative of the French Impressionists and Paul Cezanne’s later work. In subject, too, it follows familiar themes, gesturing to a history of European art and to that history’s many bathers. The painting's palette is largely blue and cool – only the two oranges, left lying beside the unopened bottle of wine, offer a complementing colour. Described without the symbolism and surrealism that would come to characterise Pinker’s later works, it offers an early image of quiet idyll. This, however, is a presumption of chronology on the writer’s part – none of Pinker’s paintings are dated. Among the artist’s more curious habits, it appears, was a disregard for time’s passage. Presumably, then, this undated work, with its naïve simplicity and the transparency of its influences, belongs among his earliest paintings.
b.1924, Windhoek; d.2012, Cape Town
Stanley Pinker was a professional dilettante in the avant-garde ‘isms’ of Western art history. A brief overview of his work more often includes, in varying arrangements, the stylistic influences of impressionism, post-impressionism, surrealism, cubism, symbolism, synthetism and dada (an ‘ism’ in spirit if not in spelling). Having spent his early art career in Europe before returning to South Africa in 1964, Pinker was fluent in modernism’s many moods. Here, his "magpie eclecticism", in the words of one critic, found the singular expression that came to represent his work. Despite the country’s political antagonism, South Africa offered Pinker a unifying subject. In gently satirical, dreamlike scenes populated by imagined characters and everyday objects, Pinker found reflections of apartheid’s contradictions. These reflections, however, were never conspicuous; the artist subtle in his subversion. Throughout his career, Pinker’s primary preoccupation would remain one of formal enquiry – his paintings studies in line and shape, colour and its effects, the integrity of the picture plane, and the shallow pictorial space behind it.
