Christo Coetzee (24 March 1929 – 12 November 2000) was a South African assemblage and Neo-Baroque artist closely associated with the avant-garde art movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the influence of art theorist Michel Tapié, art dealer Rodolphe Stadler and art collector and photographer Anthony Denney, as well as the Gutai group of Japan, he developed his oeuvre alongside those of artists strongly influenced by Tapié's Un Art Autre (1952), such as Georges Mathieu, Alfred Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies and Lucio Fontana.
Early life and education Christo Coetzee was born on 24 March 1929 at 54 Biccard Street, Turfontein, Johannesburg, to Josef Adriaan Coetzee and Francina Sofia Kruger (1888–1964) (who claimed to be a relation of President Paul Kruger). The family had been farming in the Colesberg district, but were forced by drought and the dilution of income by a large number of sons on the Coetzee family farm, Strydpoort, to seek an income in the rich mining economy of the Witwatersrand some time before Christo's birth. Christo's father developed a lung condition colloquially referred to as miners' phthisis and moved to the building industry, where a talent for drawing became evident. Christo would later attribute his artistic talents to his father and his business acumen to his mother. Christo's father died in 1939 and he was raised by his mother and two sisters, Gertruida (20 years his senior) and Johanna (16 years older).
Christo attended Parkview Primary School and then Parktown Boys' High School, where he became an enthusiastic art student. In the years 1946 to 1950 he attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where his fellow students were Cecil Skotnes, Esmé Berman, Nel Erasmus, Ruth Allen (Furness), Gordon Vorster, Anna Vorster and Gerda Meyer (Eloff). With Scully, Skotnes, Vorster and Erasmus, he would become part of the so-called Wits group, a loosely knit group better known for their subsequent careers than any coherent aesthetic philosophy.
At Wits Christo designed decor and costumes for drama productions. Influential teachers were Charles Argent, Maria Stein-Lessing, Heather Martienssen, and Marjorie Long, who would become his first wife.
After graduation from Wits with a degree in fine art in 1951, Christo Coetzee had his first solo exhibition in January of that year. This exhibition was opened by South African National Gallery director John Paris, and featured portraits in Victorian daguerreotype style.Gray, Stephen. Christo Coetzee and the avant-garde. Lantern 20(4), June 1971: 26–35.
Career and travels
London, 1951–1955 A Wits scholarship took him to London in 1951 to study at the Slade School of Art under Prof. William Coldstream. The following year, Coetzee and Marjorie Long married in Hammersmith, London and set off to Spain for a honeymoon of several months in the coastal town of Benidorm in Alicante. After her return to South Africa, he spent another six months in London, before returning to Johannesburg at the beginning of 1953.
He was soon occupied with mundane office work, first for the South African Railways, then at Wits, briefly enlivened by an exhibition of small oil paintings at the Lawrence Adler Gallery in Johannesburg. The interest of Cape Town art dealer Louis Schachat was peaked and it became his occupation to acquire Christo's work from this period and the 1951 exhibition. On 6 November 1953, Coetzee was again on his way to London, spurred by a travel lust that would lead to the dissolution of his marriage with Long. She would never again join him abroad.
This time without a sponsor, he took an administrative position at a tobacco company, but found it wanting. He enquired at Gimpel Fils, where Peter and Ernest Gimpel (nephews of Lord Duveen) recommended taking a position at the framing business of Robert Savage, where, indeed, Coetzee found a more rewarding position. It was during this time that he took a painting to Gillian Ayres at the Artists' International Association (AIA), who in turn showed it to photographer and stylist Anthony Denney, who bought the painting immediately for £12.
Denney invited Coetzee to dinner at his home at St Peter's Square 30, Hammersmith, where he found his painting hung above a work by Antoni Clavé. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In 1954 Christo took up a room in Denney's home, paying the rent with paintings. Denney owned about ten works from this period.
Anthony Denney arranged for Coetzee to exhibit at Hanover Gallery in March 1955. The gallery had a reputation for presenting challenging modern artists and alumni included Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, William Scott and Henry Moore. This was his first solo exhibition abroad, coincidentally in the same year as Richard Hamilton would have his first solo at the gallery, run at the time by Erica Brausen and supported financially by Max Aitken, son of Lord Beaverbrook. The proceedings were observed by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster.
Coetzee's exhibition consisted of 51 portraits and still life paintings. According to Coetzee, Denney paid £100 for Pompeian lobster and smaller paintings were sold at £50 each. On 26 October 2011, Bonham's, the auction house, sold one of these, Fabergé egg, from the collection of Max Aitken, purchased on his behalf by Le Roux Smith Le Roux, for £13,750 (inclusive of buyer's premium). Other buyers were Sandy and Bunny Roger, who purchased two works (sold by Sotheby's in 1998), and Elizabeth David.
Italy, January 1956 – April 1956 In 1956 Coetzee and Australian Sidney Nolan received a bursary from the Italian government, through mediation of the British Council, for a four-month sojourn in Italy. With an introductory letter from Erica Brausen to Pavel Tchelitchew, he set off to Frascati in January of that year. He met Alberto Burri in Rome, visited the Rome Quadriennale, and arranged the purchase of Burri's Tutto Nero for Anthony Denney's collection. Later, in pilgrimage, he visited Peggy Guggenheim at her home in Venice and remembered vividly the glass and metal gate of American artist Claire Falkenstein.
Paris, 1956–1959
French tachist Georges Mathieu had visited Anthony Denney in London, and noticing one of Coetzee's paintings, extended an invitation for the artist to come to Paris and visit the Galerie Rive Droite to meet owner Jean la Carde. On Coetzee's arrival in Paris, he met 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.
Jean la Carde soon decided to marry and close the gallery. With encouragement from Denney and Tapié, Coetzee moved to the new Galerie Stadler, which had been established by Rodolphe Stadler at 51 Rue de Seine a year earlier. The gallery offered a stipend to its artists, who were required to supply paintings for regular exhibitions. Coetzee established his studio at 4 Rue de l'Hotel Colbert, in a cellar room, and stayed at 5 Rue de Lille, in the attic, both in the 7th arrondissement on the Left Bank.Barnard, Chris. Skilders in die son. Die Huisgenoot, 9 April 1971: 36–38.
In 1958, Coetzee's Crespian (1957), an assemblage painting, is included in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, along with artists such as Joan Mitchell, Conrad Marca-Relli, Édgar Negret, Maurice Wyckaert, Nassos Daphnis, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Calder and Richard Diebenkorn.The 1958 Pittsburgh Bicentennial International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture : Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, 5 December 1958 – 8 February 1959. [Pittsburgh]: Carnegie Institute, Department of Fine Arts, 1958. (catalogue, with an introduction by Gordon Bailey Washburn)
Coetzee became an attendee at the Thursday salon of Marie-Louise Bousquet, wife of dramatist Jacques Bousquet and Harper's Bazaar's editor in Paris for 50 years. Here Coetzee met Dutch painter Karel Appel, Annabel Buffett, wife and muse of Bernard Buffet and gallerist Charles Vessey.
Coetzee found an important friend in the person of Aileen Hennessy, the cognac heiress, who had an apartment at 1 rue Gît-le-Cœur in the 6th arrondissement, only 7 minutes walk from his studio. Aileen was a painter who accompanied Coetzee to galleries and invited him to the gatherings she hosted in her apartment on the Seine. Typical attendees would have been Aileen's sister Scheilagh and Alice DeLamar, heiress to the fortune of Joseph Raphael De Lamar, who had an apartment in the same building. In later years Aileen's brother, Francis Hennessy, would visit Coetzee in Tulbagh, South Africa.
On 17 March 1959, Coetzee joined Lucio Fontana in exhibiting his work at Galerie Stadler. On this occasion Solange de Noailles, Duchesse d'Ayen, fashion editor of French Vogue, hosted a lunch with several future collectors of his work. The group included architect and interior decorator Victor Grandpierre, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Tom Kernan, editor of Maison & Jardin.
Japan, February 1959 – March 1960 Coetzee was awarded a Japanese government bursary for two years of study in Osaka and Tokyo, through mediation done by the British Council. The financial support was paid entirely in 1959. Francis King, later to become a respected writer, worked for the British Council in Kyoto and was Coetzee's liaison.
After his arrival in February 1959, he was quickly referred to the Gutai group of artists by professor J. Ijimi of Kyoto University. Coetzee had gained some knowledge of the group from Michel Tapié and soon met founder Jiro Yoshihara and his son Michio Yoshihara. He would spend 11 months working with these important Japanese artists.
Coetzee also made frequent trips to Tokyo, even taking a studio there. This work culminated in an exhibition of Informel works at the Minami Gallery, Tokyo in October 1959. In Tokyo he also met artist Takako Idemitsu and her husband Tono, an art critic.
The Gutai group invited him to exhibit at the Takashimaya Gallery in Osaka in 1960. He did so from 20 to 24 January 1960, with an introduction by Francis King. In 1976, Coetzee donated eleven Gutai paintings, along with a Gutai Pinacotheca publication, to the University of Johannesburg.
One of Coetzee's paintings from this period Butterfly lighting in a diamond (1960) was purchased from the Stadler Gallery by Philip Johnson for $1000, and sent straight to the MOMA for the 1961 The art of assemblage show comprising 140 artists, including Braque, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Man Ray, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg. Coetzee would visit Johnson at his famous Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1962.
Coetzee left Japan in March 1960 for a solo exhibition at the Swertzoff Gallery in Boston, who also represented assemblage artist Bruce Conner, then a group exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery at 32 East 69th Street, New York. The two part show New Media, New Forms and New Media-New Forms: Version II ran from 6 to 24 June 1960Canaday, John. Art: A Wild, but Curious, End-of-Season Treat. New York Times, 7 June 1960. and from 28 September to 22 October 1960Canaday, John. The Blind Artist: In a Crucial Time He Plays at Games. New York Times, 2 October 1960. respectively. Version I, of which Coetzee was a part, also featured Antoni Tàpies, Jean Arp, Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Dan Flavin, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg.
Paris, 1961–1965