Neville Dubow 1933 - 2008

By Hayden Proud

Professor Neville Dubow, who died on 24 August at the age of 74, was an authoritative and commanding presence in the visual arts fraternity of Cape Town for as long as most of us can recall. Although retired since 1998, he maintained a highly-active and constant profile as a writer, researcher, art consultant and lecturer. His tireless engagement with his chosen field makes his sudden death from a mysterious, debilitating illness seem a particularly tragic stroke of fate. The cultural and intellectual landscape of Cape Town (and South Africa at large) seems to have contracted markedly now that he has gone. At a time when South Africa is losing much-needed expertise, it is hard to imagine how the gap that he leaves can be filled.

Possessed of an appearance that at times seemed uncannily similar to that of the critic, theorist and ‘pope’ of the Surrealist movement André Breton (1896-1966), Dubow cultivated a rakish style in his manner and dress. With his strong, dark hair slicked backwards and his coat thrown over each shoulder, or especially wearing his well-worn blue smock when teaching at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, he cut an unforgettable image. He was in every way an aristocratic and challenging ambassador of the artistic avant-garde and the principles that it stood for. It was as a strident and fearless young critic that Dubow first came to public and intellectual attention. Writing in the local Cape papers, his astute judgments and perceptions on South African art were admired, respected and even feared. Apparently the late Robert Kirby staged a comedy sketch entitled ‘The Art Critic’, featuring Dubow’s profile against a luminous red square with the accompanying words ‘better the devil you know than Neville Dubow’. Dubow’s earlier reviews and critical essays, now languishing in yellowed newspaper files, deserve to be rescued and republished. They are still surprisingly fresh and set a standard that has not been surpassed.

After joining the staff of the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1962 where he taught courses in basic design, Dubow was elevated to the Chair of Fine Art at UCT in 1971. This was a prominent post in the South African art world that had been previously held by the likes of Maurice van Essche (his immediate predecessor), Rupert Shephard and Edward Roworth, all practicing painters and all born and trained abroad. It was against this fairly conservative and polite art school tradition, and in the earlier case of Roworth an ultra-conservative one, that Dubow, a young South African-born and trained professor aged only 37, sought to make his mark. And make it he did.

With strategic impact over subsequent years he appointed staff who were to assist him in extending the boundaries of creative endeavour at the School beyond the traditional confines of drawing, printmaking, painting and sculpture. These included, among others, Kevin Atkinson, Dimitri Fanourakis, Richard Wake, Bruce Arnott, Bob Denton, Peggy Delport, Stanley Pinker, John Nowers and Helmut Starcke. Photography, ceramics, animation, performance art and what was then termed ‘interdisciplinary studies’ made of the Michaelis School of Fine Art the most advanced and experimental art school in South Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was from this crucible that some stunning talents emerged and matured into professional artists and art historians. They include Marlene Dumas, Gary Schneider and Vivienne Koorland, who have made notable if not stellar careers abroad. The teaching of art history was also put on a more secure footing at the School from 1975 with the appointment of Evelyn Cohen as the first full-time lecturer in the subject. In many senses, even considering the later, if unhappy, separation of art history from the Michaelis School, Dubow has to be given credit for laying the initial foundations for the later growth and standing of this discipline at UCT. One of the School’s graduates, the noted feminist art historian Tamar Garb, is today Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College, London.
Another area nurtured by Dubow at Michaelis was the study and practice of art education. The idea that teaching could be a creative act in itself saw the launch of a new degree course for art educators, led by two of the most able and insightful lecturers, the late Stephen de Villiers and the late Patricia Pierce-Atkinson.
Their unique legacy survived in several generations of the most able and talented teachers of art in the secondary school system, such as Jill Joubert and Henry Symonds. Underpinning both the
fine art and art education streams at the School was the idea of making art as a very serious form ‘play’, a concept and spirit of which ultimately flowed from the person of Neville Dubow himself, and which he in turn had imbibed from Walter Battiss, whom he greatly admired.

A born Capetonian, Dubow was nurtured and educated within the best traditions of Cape liberal
skepticism at Wynberg Boys’ High School and at UCT where he studied architecture. His first formal introduction to the visual arts was via his mentor Florence Zerffi (1882-1962) who gave private art classes until her departure for England in 1956. UCT, his alma mater, where he received his B (Arch) degree in 1956, remained his intellectual home for his entire professional life. It was the framework of his architectural training and practice that underpinned his structured, conceptual and theoretical approach to teaching in the visual arts, and which considerably enhanced his clear gifts as an administrator. In committee he had a particular gift for finding simple solutions to the most complex problems. As such he was a vital and exceptionally wise member of a number of advisory boards, notably at the Iziko SA National Gallery. It was perhaps in Dubow’s persona that Vasari’s Renaissance ideal of a blissful unity between the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, all underpinned by the practice of disegno, or drawing, found a local incarnation.

Born in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, Dubow grew up in the shadow of the racist abominations of the Third Reich. His awareness of the politics of power and the role of the artist in the pre and post-1945 world were highly informed within the finest senses of the Jewish intellectual tradition. His achievements and ideas, however, were attained without his ever wearing the great religious tradition to which he was heir, openly on his sleeve. A man of deep conscience and conviction, he argued and fought for artistic and political freedom in South Africa. It is through his notable students, as well as his publications and artistic achievements as a photographer, that his important legacy grows and continues.

Neville Eric Dubow, architect, artist, photographer, critic, theorist and administrator; born Cape Town, 16 September 1933; died Cape Town, 24 August 2008.