Robert Gwelo Goodman (1871–1939): Painting, Place and the Making of a South African Art Tradition
Robert Gwelo Goodman occupies an interesting, and sometimes underestimated, position in South African art history. He arrived in South Africa as a teenager, received his artistic education in Paris and London, and spent much of his career negotiating the relationship between European painting traditions and the particular visual character of the South African environment. His paintings do not announce a radical break with European art, nor do they attempt to imitate it without question. Instead, they reveal an artist who understood the technical possibilities of European painting but recognized that its conventions did not always adequately describe the light, color and spatial character of the landscapes around him. His interest in the Cape, the Drakensberg and historic architecture developed into a sustained investigation of how a place could become an artistic subject in its own right. Goodman's importance rests partly on this negotiation. He brought an unusually developed under...
