Christo Coetzee was a South African artist. He was closely connected with the avant-garde art movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by art dealer Rodolphe Stadler, art theorist Michel Tapié, and art collector and photographer Anthony Denney, as well as the Gutai group of Japan, Coetzee developed his own easily recognizable style.
Background
Coetzee was born in Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa, on March 24, 1929. His family had been farming in the Colesberg district but later were forced to move and seek an income in the rich mining economy of the Witwatersrand shortly before Christo Coetzee's birth.
Christo Coetzee's father developed lung problems. He had a disease colloquially called miners' phthisis and moved to the building industry, where his talents for drawing became apparent. Coetzee later attributed his artistic talents to his father and his business ones to his mother.
Coetzee's father died when he was 10 years old, in 1939. Christo Coetzee was raised by his mother and two elder sisters, Gertruida, 20 years his senior, and Johanna, 16 years older.
Education
Christo Coetzee was a student of Parkview Primary School and later Parktown Boys' High School. Between 1946 and 1951 Coetzee attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where among his fellow students were Esmé Berman, Gordon Vorster, Larry Scully, Nel Erasmus, Ruth Allen (Furness), Cecil Skotnes, and Anna Vorster. With Vorster, Scully, Skotnes, and Erasmus, he later became part of the so-called Wits group.
At the University of the Witwatersrand, Coetzee designed costumes and decor for drama productions. Influential teachers included Maria Stein-Lessing, Heather Martienssen, Charles Argent, and Marjorie Long.
After his graduation, he received a scholarship from the university and went to London in 1951 to study at the Slade School of Art under the direction of Professor William Coldstream.
In 1959 Christo Coetzee was awarded a Japanese government scholarship for two years of study in Osaka and Tokyo. The financial support was paid entirely in 1959. After Coetzee's arrival in February 1959, he quickly joined the Gutai group of artists of Kyoto University. Coetzee had received some knowledge of the group from Michel Tapié, an art theorist, curator, and collector, and soon met its founder Jiro Yoshihara and his son Michio Yoshihara. He would spend the next 11 months working with these important Japanese painters.
Christo Coetzee had his first solo exhibition in January 1951. The exhibition was organized by John Paris, the South African National Gallery director, and included portraits in Victorian daguerrotype style.
In 1952 he set off to Spain for several months. After his return to South Africa, he spent six months in London, before moving back to Johannesburg at the beginning of 1953. He was soon occupied with office work, at first working for the South African Railways, then at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), meanwhile, holding an exhibition of small oil paintings at the Lawrence Adler Gallery in Johannesburg.
On November 6, 1953, Coetzee was on his way to London. He took an administrative position at a tobacco company but then took a position at the framing business of Robert Savage. During this time Christo Coetzee took a painting to Gillian Ayres at the Artists' International Association (AIA), who in his turn showed it to photographer and stylist Anthony Denney, who immediately bought the painting for £12. Denney invited the artist for dinner, that marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In 1954 Christo Coetzee rented a room in Anthony Denney's home, paying with his paintings. As a result, Denney owned about ten artworks from this period.
Anthony Denney arranged for Christo Coetzee a display of his works at Hanover Gallery in March 1955. This was his first one-man exhibition abroad. This exhibition consisted of 51 portraits and still life paintings.
In 1956, through the mediation of the British Council, Coetzee received funds from the Italian government to go to Italy for a four-month period. During his time there, he met many interesting and talented people in the art world, such as the Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Italian artist, Alberto Burri.
While Christo Coetzee was in Italy, French tachist Georges Mathieu visited Anthony Denney in London, and noticing one of Coetzee's artworks, extended an invitation for the artist to come to Paris on his return from Italy and visit the Galerie Rive Droite to meet owner Jean la Carde. On Coetzee's arrival in Paris, he met Georges Mathieu and was introduced by him to Michel Tapié de Céleyran. Tapié would bring the influence of Art Informel to bear on Coetzee's work.
Soon the gallery was closed, and with encouragement from Denney and Tapié, Coetzee moved to the new Galerie Stadler, which had been founded by Rodolphe Stadler and offered a stipend to its artists, who were required to supply paintings for regular exhibitions. Christo Coetzee established his studio at the end of the 1950s.
During 1958-1961 his works were exhibited at a number of important international group exhibitions in Osaka and Tokyo (Japan), in New Hampton, Pittsburgh and New York (the United States) and in Turin (Italy). In addition, on March 17, 1959, the Galerie Stadler requested him to participate in a two-man exhibition with Lucio Fontana in Paris. The latter exhibition was held just before he left to spend about a year in Japan.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Coetzee made frequent trips to Tokyo, even organizing a studio there. This work culminated in a show of Art Informel works at the Minami Gallery, Tokyo in October 1959. The Gutai group invited the artist to exhibit at the Takashimaya Gallery in Osaka in 1960. Coetzee donated eleven Gutai paintings, along with a Gutai Pinacotheca publication, to the University of Johannesburg in 1976.
One of Coetzee's paintings from this period "Butterfly lighting in a diamond" (1960) was bought from the Stadler Gallery by Philip Johnson for $1000, and sent straight to the Museum of Modern Art for the 1961 "The art of assemblage" show including 140 artists, such as Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg.
Christo Coetzee left Japan in March 1960 for a one-man exhibition at the Swertzoff Gallery in Boston. The two-part show "New Media, New Forms" and "New Media-New Forms: Version II" took place from June 6 to June 24, 1960, and from September 28 to October 22, 1960, respectively.
Coetzee's first personal exhibit at Galerie Stadler was opened at the end of January 1961 and, in April 1961, solo shows were held at the Galerie d'Arte del Naviglio, Milan and the Lawrence Adler Gallery, Johannesburg. The same year, while on his way to a reception by Rosamond Bernier, an art historian and co-founder of the magazine L'Oeil, Christo Coetzee was stuck in an elevator with designer Elsa Schiaparelli. They struck up a conversation and became friends. Schiaparelli commissioned him to produce a painting to promote her perfume S.
In 1962 Christo Coetzee was visited by Danie van Niekerk of the Rembrandt Group and commissioned a work for Turmac Tobacco Company in Zevenaar, Netherlands. This work was included in the collection titled the "Peter Stuyvesant Collection", and, in 1994 renamed the "BAT Artventure Collection".
The artist was forced to abandon his studio due to intentions to restore the building in 1965. Coetzee bought a house in Finestrat, Spain and settled there. While in Spain, Coetzee befriended Imme Reich and Frederico Van Ankum and exhibited at their Galeria Arrabal in Callosa d'En Sarrià. During a short visit to South Africa the same year, it was decided to organize a retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Pretoria Art Museum, which was curated by Albert Werth. 77 examples of his work were exhibited.
From 1968 on, he divided his time between Spain and South Africa. In October of that same year, his works were exhibited in the Cape for the first time in 17 years, at Stellenbosch.
In 1975 Christo Coetzee entered a new period in his career. In January 1975 a one-man exhibition of his oeuvre was held at the gallery of the former South African Association of Arts (Western Cape). The following afternoon, the artist returned to the gallery and cut twenty-three paintings to shreds. The act was explained by a poor review of his exhibition and a news report on the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, with whose work Coetzee had been familiar with when he was in Europe.
Coetzee gave a lecture on the act at the South African Association of Arts, Cape Town, February 7, 1975. He situated his destructive act in the context of work he had done in the 1950s and called it a "Gutai act". In May many of the cut paintings were displayed at the Rand Afrikaans University's (now University of Johannesburg) Gencor Gallery.
The day following the opening night at the former South African Association of Arts (Northern Transvaal) in Pretoria Coetzee blocked out works with black paint during his exhibition at the former South African Association of Arts (Northern Transvaal) in Pretoria in 1978, but was persuaded to cover some works with black plastic sheeting in order to preserve the originals. At the opening night of an exhibition by Ferrie Binge-Coetzee's art pieces in Potchefstroom in 1983, Coetzee bought a painting, cut it up and distributed it to the audience, persuading visitors to eat the painting. It was an indirect reference to Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art as a form of artistic protest.
His second retrospective exhibition was held in the Pretoria Art Museum in 1983, during which 81 works from the period of 1965-1983 were presented. A third retrospective was organized at the University of Stellenbosch in 1999, and was accompanied by a book illustrating his works from the three previous decades.
Christo Coetzee became one of the most prominent figures in the world of art in the 20th century. His best-known masterpieces include such artworks as Crespian (1957), Celestial Bicycle (1958), Waterlily Ball (1958).
Coetzee received the South African Academy for Science and Arts Medal of Honour in 1983. The same year a commemorative exhibition took place at the University of Potchefstroom, along with a retrospective at the Pretoria Art Museum. An exhibit of his artworks at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was organized in Taiwan in 1985. In 1999 a major retrospective was held in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Christo Coetzee's house, a National Monument dating from 1796, was restored and opened as the Christo Coetzee House Museum and Gallery in August 2011. Coetzee's collection of some 2600 paintings were donated to the University of Pretoria Art Collection.
Coetzee's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from $71 USD to $321,257 USD. The current record price for this artist at auction is $321,257 USD for "Painting Yellow", sold at Strauss & Co., Cape Town in 2016.
Nowadays, Coetzee's paintings can be found at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley; SASOL Collection; the University of Cape Town; the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; Schlesinger Art Collection, Italy, among others.
Christo Coetzee married his first wife, Marjorie Long, in Hammersmith, London, in 1952. In a year, the couple separated.
In May 1966 Coetzee's friend Ludwig Binge died of heart disease in Pretoria. Christo Coetzee invited Ferrie Binge, his widow, to visit him in Spain the next year. She visited him in June 1967, and they were eventually married in Gibraltar on March 5, 1968.
Spouse:
Marjorie Long
Spouse:
Ferrie Binge
Friend:
Antoni Clavé
Antoni Clavé (1913-2005) was a Catalan artist, printmaker, sculptor, stage and costume designer. He was nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design) for his work on the 1952 film "Hans Christian Andersen".
Friend:
Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was an Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli is considered one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the two World Wars. Her designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. Among her clients were the heiress Daisy Fellowes and actress Mae West.
Friend:
Anthony Denney
Anthony Denney was an art collector, stylist and photographer as well as one of the most devoted patrons of Christo Coetzee.
Gutai: Decentering Modernism
Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art.
Old Towns and Villages of the Cape
Old Towns and Villages of the Cape is the first comprehensive study of the physical history of the older towns of the former 'Cape Colony'.
