Ernest Mancoba (1904-2002)

Aliases: Ernest Methuen Mancoba; Ernest Ngungunyana

Professions: Sculptor; Painter

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  Ernest Mancoba

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  Ernest Mancoba

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  Ernest Mancoba, (South African, 1910-2002), Untitled

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  Ernest Mancoba, (South African, 1910-2002), Untitled

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Ernest Mancoba Biography

(b Turffontein, Johannesburg, 29 Aug 1904). French sculptor, painter and draughtsman of South African birth. He attended an Anglican teachers’ training college, Grace Dieu, near Pietersburg (1920–29), both as student and as teacher. He enrolled at the University of Fort Hare where he studied English, history and psychology, intending a career in journalism, and graduated from the University of South Africa (BA 1937). Although he won acclaim in 1929 for a religious carving, Bantu Madonna (Johannesburg, A. G.), he gave up carving in 1950 and thereafter devoted himself to painting and drawing. Mancoba gained from his mother Florence (née Mangqangwana) a lasting reverence for their Fingo histories, the African philosophy of the brotherhood of man, and for poetry, in particular that expressing the ‘unsayable’ of experience. During the mid-1930s his friend the sculptor Lippy Lipschitz (1903–80) introduced him to the sculptor Elza Dziomba (1902–70) and brought to his attention Paul Guillaume’s and Thomas Munro’s book Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926). Guillaume’s analysis of African sculpture particularly affected Mancoba’s approach and kindled an enduring respect for older African art. Mancoba’s imagery, technique and style changed systematically in accordance with the notion of the ‘unsayable’ and his interest shifted from descriptive to interpretative carving. Mancoba left for Paris in 1938 and enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. (He became a naturalized French citizen in 1961.) With the Danish sculptor SONJA FERLOV MANCOBA (they married in 1942) he explored automatism, emphasizing autonomy of line and colour wash (drawings in Silkeborg, Kstmus.). He was interned during World War II, after which he lived in Denmark, encountering like-minded artists in the groups Høst (Harvest) in 1948–9 and in COBRA in 1950. At the centre of Mancoba’s expression is a configuration that conjures up associations with the Kanaga masks of the DOGON of Mali (e.g. Drawing , 1960; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) and the reliquary figures of the KOTA (ii) of Gabon (e.g. Painting , 1971; Århus, Kstmus., and Painting , 1973; Silkeborg, Kstmus.). He evoked these ancestral images by means of, and within a field of, seemingly impulsive brushstrokes. Later (c. 1990) he developed a personal calligraphy of script-like characters in his ink and pastel drawings (Copenhagen, Gallerie Mikæl Andersen) that simultaneously masks and reveals the presence of three or more ancestral images, holding in suspension memories and the unknown.

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