Ernest Mancoba

Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba (29 August 1904 - 25 October 2002) was an avant-garde artist, born in Transvaal Colony, who spent the majority of his life in Europe. Quotes My carvings are made to show Africa to the white man Identity and Abstraction: Ernest Mancoba in London and Paris, 1938- 1940 9 May 2018 Fort Hare was not based on the assumption that black Africans require and deserve a different, inferior kind of education I wasn’t even considered as a full human being in my own country The first reason for my leaving South Africa was probably when I understood that I would not be able to become either a citizen or an artist in the land of my fathers In my daily life, I felt more and more humiliated at the conditions made to my people I soon understood I would never be able to feel free enough, in my mind, to express myself as fully as I wished, but would always knock my head against the barriers which the colonial order had set up in my country, wherever I went I had no time to lose with the petty vexations, the daily wrongs that the indigenous man had to put up with I believed that art was precisely also a means to favour a greater consciousness in Man Making art was as urgent as working for the political evolution I know not which kind of destiny had brought me into the presence of the ideal person, and the right group of artists, for a fruitful dialogue and collaboration you will never prove or disprove the truth of our common humanity, any more than a child needs material evidence to instinctively know that his mother is his mother I do not believe that we Africans, any more than other people, should need to show the white man how good we are at speaking or writing his language The embarrassment that my presence caused – to the point of making me, in their eyes, some sort of ‘Invisible Man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist – was understandable, as before me, there had never been, to my knowledge, any black man taking part in the visual arts ‘avant‐garde’ of the Western World Our history has brought about, little by little, this dichotomy between abstraction and figuration which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomisation in the very essence of life For me, art can only be founded on the single notion – of which it is both the confirmation and the proof – that Man is One what is still not realised is a common acceptance and understanding between whites and blacks An Interview with Ernest Mancoba 7 May 2010 The third world has to be taken into consideration as it exists I want that this separation this apartheid has to be pushed aside and that all human species have to hang together hand in hand Ernest Mancoba between racial marginality and african modernity at the Pompidou Centre 6 June 2019 Quotes about him Ernest Mancoba is an unclassifiable artist Ernest Mancoba Symposium: A dialogue on his art and words, Alicia Knocks 11 February 2020 External links Category:Artists from South Africa Category:1904 births Category:2002 deaths