Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination

By Sean O'Toole

In 1992, Fred Page, an orphaned Utrecht-born 'farm boy' who spent his adult life variously labouring as a shepherd, barman, gold miner, military man, tyre maker, ticket writer at Garlicks, museum doorman, artist’s model and – most famously – painter of imaginatively bleak and colour deprived scenes set in old Port Elizabeth, was the subject of a touring exhibition. As is usual with these sorts of tribute shows, a catalogue was commissioned, painter and art teacher Alexander Podlashuc, an acquaintance of Page, asked to contribute a critical essay. 'Reading through his press clipping', offered Podlashuc, 'one notes that none of his interlocutors has managed to explain his history beyond its most inconsequential passages'.

Podlashuc attempted to remedy this, remarking on the 'bare' interior of the artist’s boarding house room and also contextually describing Port Elizabeth as a kind of ersatz Detroit devoid of 'serious or cultivated collectors'. Podlashuc, though, wasn’t tasked with writing a biography; his job was to offer a critical appreciation of an artist known for his 'overcast vision'.

In the preface to Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination, journalist and ceramic artist Jeanne Wright describes her book-length survey of Port Elizabeth’s most enigmatic cultural export after Athol Fugard and John Kani as 'a brief biography', adding that it is also 'a review of his oeuvre'. Podlashuc’s brief essay spanned 16 pages; Wright’s takes up 124 pages, two thirds of the 180 pages of this lavishly illustrated tribute, saying much the same thing. Despite the added word length, and obvious time spent digging through the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum’s archives, where many of Page’s personal documents are stored, the new book doesn’t significantly restate what is already known about Page’s life of working class hardship and artistic escape.

Partly, one realises early on, this is because Wright is essentially a dispassionate third party. The book is the doing of Cecil Kerbel, Page’s lawyer, confidante and patron. Kerbel bought his first work from the artist in 1964; he in turn cultivated an intimate circle of Page supporters. Wright’s coolness registers early on, in the preface, Page ia described as 'brusque', 'solipsistic', 'antisocial' and 'misanthropic' – admittedly she also speaks of him as 'intriguingly opaque' and 'unique'.

Beginning with his miserable childhood, which was marked by fatherly abandonment and the death of his mother when he was ten, the story quickly jumps to his decade as a serviceman. Like many of the other jobs he did out of economic necessity, Page hated it – 'you were simply a machine'. Some commentators have suggested that his experience in battle during World War II may have sharpened his sense for the gruesome, Page having already acquired a literary taste for the macabre through his intense liking of Edgar Allan Poe. Wright doesn’t go there, offering instead a whimsical anecdote about Page’s encounter with an elephant while on patrol on the Limpopo River border.

In 1947, aged 39, Page entered art school – a 'seminally important' event, as Wright puts it. Mentored by artists Jack Heath and Dorothy Kay, his capabilities (rather than outright flair) as a draughtsman were given focus. A liberation of sort occurred. 'For Page, that liberation of his inner life became what religion or ideology is for the average person', states Wright. Page held his first solo exhibition in 1960. He was 51. The Eastern Province Herald breathlessly reported on it: 'A real artist – someone of immense value – one of the really individual talents of our country'. More shows followed, in Johannesburg as well as Cape Town.

Hardship was a hallmark of Page’s life: milestones included early divorce, and the debilitating arthritis that crumpled him up in his later years. Unsurprisingly, hardship also dogged his professional career. Page was perpetually broke. Although feted in a 1965 press release for a show in Johannesburg as 'one of the few genuine surrealist artists in this country, if not the only one', Esme Berman, in her book Art & Artists of South Africa (1970), records the uncertainty with which metropolitan audiences met Page’s 'disquieting conceptions'.

While Wright’s book often uninterestingly restates what has already been written of Page elsewhere, it is not entirely a missed opportunity. She usefully unpacks Page’s 'precise method of working', showing how his work can be read as 'an idiosyncratic form of magical realism overlaid with parochial and autobiographical details from his personal environment'. Largely razed by the Group Areas Act, Port Elizabeth’s terraced Central and South End suburbs remain permanent and immovable in Page’s fantastical paintings and architecturally precise prints. That Page’s adopted home was ugly is self-evident. Recognising this ugliness, and in the manner of Fugard loving it, unequivocally, through art, marks his distinction. It is a distinction fully deserving of celebration, which this book modestly achieves.

Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination

By Jean Wright and Cecil Kerbel (Cecil Kerbel, R290)