Fred Page Book Review

Fred Page: 'Ringmaster of the Imagination', by Jeanne Wright and Cecil Korbel (Self-published)

by Robert Greig

Fred Page, sometimes loosely described as a surrealist painter, lived and worked most of his life in Port Elizabeth which another native son, Athol Fugard, described as 'an almost featureless industrial city'. But both found there strange beauty.

Page’s mother died when he was young; he was foster-homed, moving from aunt to aunt – does this explain his love of Dickens later? He saw service as an NCO during the Second World War then settled in Port Elizabeth, then artistically in thrall to the last breaths of Victorian romanticism. The end of the war infused ideas to Port Elizabeth (as elsewhere), and this benefited Page briefly at art school.

This determined, closed man lived hand to mouth in Central, buoyed by the generosity of strangers and patrons. He lived and painted in boarding houses, with their smell of cats and others’ unwashed clothes (finely described by Wright), on the peripheries of such manifestations that existed locally of bohemia. Page was occasionally favoured by patrons with a jaunt to the giant metropolis of Cape Town. He had come to the attention of some collectors who were (and remain) as obsessive about Page as he was in his own vision. Something of a cult has developed.

Wright’s account of this is thorough, unpretentious and accessible – a view of a hermit and eccentric, rigorously exploring and photographing possibilities represented by decay. She casts a wide net for parallels: an allusion to Freud’s work on the joke is useful: much of Page’s work and his titles have the aura of the private joke. (Inevitably, too, someone called Becket is mentioned; attentive editing might have clarified a connection with an Absurdist playwright called Samuel Beckett.)

The city provided Page (like Fugard) with matter and imagery. Much of his work is a record of its bald, bare, wind-scraped streets, its enameled skies and the derelict streets and denizens of Central, the suburb adjoining the city.

The steep hilly town with its harsh geometrical architecture is the backdrop or stage set for Page’s work. Within this setting are performances observed and recorded. The sense of theatricality, though unexplained, is inescapable, along with light so harsh that it is dark. Day and night are distinguishable only as degrees of ambiguity; in this, figures have the flatness of shadows. Vacant buildings on vacant streets have the thin, indicative quality of plans or post-nuclear remains. (Even Page’s acrylics have the depthless look of linocuts.) The bizarre, the mutant and the cryptically comic denizens of nightmare engage in private rituals. If the atmosphere is nightmarish, this is of surprise or shock: geometric settings eliminate possibilities of horror. The experience of viewing is cool - of being in a nightmare and noting rather than succumbing. The human and beastly blur: figures have animal and bird features and faces are as featureless as old tombstones.

The force of Page’s vision lies in the denial of boundaries - of time, place and identity – and the withholding of clues (Becket –sorry, Beckett territory). The work occurs in the aftermath of the disruptions, disjunctures or incursions that characterise surrealism. (Accidentally, Page’s vision of the interpenetrative lives of the dead and living evokes African cosmology.)

'Ringmaster of the Imagination' – an overstated, lurid title – has been designed, written and published to redress neglect of an artist of a significant body of work in a rare idiom expressing an unusual vision. It aims to indicate accomplishment which, it is suggested, may have been underestimated because Page worked in the provinces and not a big city.

There’s some justice in this. Arguably artistic reputation – or its lack – may partly be a function of densely populated places where power and influence are concentrated and further directed by media of production and publicity. These define the terms under which outsiders may qualify for entry – terms that affirm urban pretension, practice and values. Such terms may distort, deny or simply redefine the nature of non-urban achievement. (In South Africa, ‘making it’ is a tiered affair: first the city then the nirvana of ‘overseas’. Provincialism is not merely a dorp thing.)

Wright's example of Helen Martins of Nieu Bethesda is apposite. Martins tends to be portrayed by urbanites as a freak, a naïve or a nut case. (Saartje Baartman was similarly regarded by London and Parisian viewers). More flatteringly, the provincial import may be characterized as 'original' and sometimes 'an original': the word ‘original’ carries the dual opposing senses of having many and having no antecedents and sources (Wright indicates some of the sources of Page's work and speculates about others). Page's work seems original for another reason and that is that it shows little evidence of exposure to work by others. This could be because he wasn't interested in others' work or because he lived in a place isolated from artists who might have stimulated him, or his work was dominated by private obsessions or preoccupations. Whatever the reason, one has little sense of his being challenged formally or thematically. He had a vision of his world, and it was rooted in his setting; it seemed to express his condition; he recorded the work and expressed whatever he needed to express through his vision. Neither changed much; nor did the work develop much. The line of Waiting for Godot comes to mind: ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful’.

Page’s work did not seem to develop. He was physically stuck because of lack of money and later ill-health. He seems to have been psychically stuck too and his work was a repeated deployment of the same motifs and techniques. It did not progress. Yet his work is also unusual - the idiom of neo-surrealism has attracted relatively few other artists - a notable exception is Alexis Preller. (I suppose one could also mention Walter Battiss though, to me, his work seems to involve private japes and giggles – a form of self-admiration rather than Page’s hermeticism.) Then surrealism as a literary movement has never really rooted in Anglo-Saxon countries as opposed to places where they order things differently.

The quest for lineage, though obligatory among some Old Testament writers, academics and gold-diggers, may be a distraction. Perhaps Page was simply an autodidact with an autodidact’s obsessiveness, and that power fuels his work - and is partly why it is repetitive. Page’s mythology is closed and private, with the strengths and weaknesses that these imply. That it barely alters over time suggests that it expresses a personal pathology of entrapment.

Ultimately what seems most striking about much of Page’s work is not what is seen but the movement of the eye enforced by composition. This movement is through the finite theatre of buildings, then among the figures at play, in ritual or simply being. Finally, the eye is taken upwards and outwards into bare, blank and unknowable sky.

Where have we experienced this sense of the gaze turning heavenwards? The Romantics and in camp. Sets, plots and choreography of Romantic ballets aspire heavenwards where meaning is found and what is considered life matters only as a manifestation of the divine. The world of the stage exists less in its own right than to indicate the sublime. In Page’s work the movement of the eye towards the blank or sublime is equally compelling. The camp element involves using mechanisms and motifs of the serious to deny the purposeful. As with nonsense poetry – Page liked Lewis Carroll – structures of seriousness and purposefulness frame – but are denied by - the reverse.

In his High Windows, Philip Larkin – himself someone of a Page character - moves from an image of teens who are enviably ‘doing it’, to self-disgust and then dismissal of religion, to:

The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Page’s work follows this track again, again and again. (This impression may also lie in the experiencing of reading a book with the over-eager cramming habits of a street hawker - stuffing in every work Page ever did where his work would be flattered by sparseness.) The outward movement is as repetitive and ultimately as desperate as an animal clawing at bars. In whatever comes hereafter, Page may be painting pleasing studies of pretty blondes and nature. He has served his hell.


Robert Greig is a Cape Town-based academic and writer