Eric Laubscher’s rich living legacy to South African Art. By Steve Kretzmann

Would you like a drink asks Claude Bauscharain in her charming Swiss-French accent, referring to alcohol rather than tea.
Although it is only the first time I’ve met her and her husband Erik Laubscher, who I had just interviewed, the invitation provides a glimpse into the gregarious and easy-going nature of these two artists.
Although Erik has just crested the hill of 80 years of age, he and Claude nonetheless maintain a glint of youth in their gaze, if not their gait, likely from a life of exercising the intellect, and keeping the company of peers similarly graced with wit.
In fact the almost legendary double storey house at number 6 Cheviot Place in Green Point in which they have lived for most of their adult life and in their younger years shared with the writer Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace, was regularly filled with visitors such as Etienne Leroux, Ingrid Jonker and Breyten Breytenbach, to name only a few.
It likely hosted the kind of parties and lively discussions that would pale the better efforts of today’s sms and Facebook-obsessed set.
For Erik, who brooked no compromise in his art and explored a wide range of the abstract in his painting – through Cubist beginnings, ‘pure’ abstraction, Hard Edge and touches of Expressionism and Surrealism – immersed himself into the Cape Town art world almost as soon as he returned from his final years of studies at the Académie Montmartre in Paris in 1950 which followed London in the late ‘40s.
His frank nature, artistic ability and 24-year-old good looks gained him immediate acceptance into the somewhat small but nonetheless lively Cape Town art scene of the 50s, a scene he was to play an integral part in shaping over the next five decades.
The paintings he produced over these decades challenged – like all good art does – the accepted modes of the time, and remain mesmerising, decades later.
Cape Town of the 1950 and ‘60s was, by all accounts, rather parochial, with the public on the whole unwilling to accept anything more adventurous than a provincial ‘Cape Impressionism’ which regurgitated mountain sunsets, vineyards and thatched cottages, while Erik’s work was, and remains, largely abstract, with hardly a human figure to be found. Thus he did not sell well until the mid-‘70s he says.
But in the 1950s, having been joined in Cape Town by Claude, the married couple needed to pay the rent, particularly as there were children on the way.
His first foray into business, taking advantage of an offer by Maurice van Essche and George de Leon to run the Continental Art School, was not very successful.
“I didn’t have any bloody business sense, really. One was sort of spending the money as it was more or less coming in. That didn’t last too too long,” he says with a chuckle.
“Financial success probably came about ‘74 when I had gone through the acrylics cycle, which I was beginning to find a bit too easy. You take a bit of masking tape and you go zip zip and work out your colours. I thought that’s it! Now I must stop that. And I thought I must go back to oils and I must relax and just enjoy painting. And that exhibition did bloody well. But I had to do other things all my life.”
Chief among the “other things” was following the suggestion of a friend who worked as an agent for paint makers Plascon, to “do colour schemes”. And so started about 17 years of being what amounted to a glorified paint sales rep, but if there’s a trace of bitterness in Erik’s voice as he tells the tale, it’s not detectable. Having a steady income allowed him to maintain his integrity as an artist as he was never forced to produce work to please the predominant art market of the time, and allowed him to travel all over the Western Cape where he discovered many of magnificent landscapes which would become the abstracted subjects of later paintings.
“I’d see all these abstract shapes in the wheatfields…it was quite a battle at first, I couldn’t get the bloody shapes to go…away (show perspective) and then slowly it came right. I would stop and I would look at them and draw them and see the certain little nuances that would come in.”
In fact he quite enjoyed being free to roam the country encouraging people to paint their kitchen doors orange.
“I had a nice car. I had a Volvo. You do 30 000 and then you get a new one. No speed limits, you’d be cruising at 80-90 miles an hour. Lekker.”
But working “five and a half days” a week may have prevented him developing quite as much as he might have liked as an artist, especially since he only had evenings and Saturday afternoons in which to paint.
Sundays were mostly given over to recovering from Saturday nights, he says with a laugh.
Yet despite these constraints he managed to exhibit, solely and in groups both locally and abroad, and have work selected thrice for the Venice Biennale (1954, 1956 and 1958 from which he withdrew in a protest) and the 1957 Sao Paulo Bienale, plus arranging a non-governmental entry to the 1959 Sao Paolo Bienale.
He also served on numerous art committees and institutions and was elected Western Cape Chairman of the SA Association of Arts in 1961 and was the first South African to be awarded a Carnegie grant to study art movements in the United States in 1966.
Juggling corporate earnings and art finally came to an end, however, when he established the Ruth Prowse Art Centre in 1970, from which he only retired as principal in 1996
And even though the years are catching up with him, there’s more evidence of laugh lines than frown lines on his face, and he hasn’t stopped painting either.
There are still oil paints staining his fingers and he talks of this and that painting which still need to be finished.
But whether he produces new work or not, he has made an invaluable contribution to South African art and made the South African art scene much richer for his presence.
And after a lifetime of struggling, somewhat successfully, for the proper recognition of the role of art in society, the only time regret tinges his voice is when he mentions he is no longer able to take his sketchbook and camera and go camping with his friends.

*The Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery (Smac) is imminently launching a book on the life of Erik Laubscher and will host his 80th retrospective exhibition.