(i) Northern Africa.

Since the era of ancient Egypt, the northern region of Africa has had a history of interaction with its neighbours across the Mediterranean, but its modern history is largely shaped by the colonial enterprise of European states, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798–1801. When Muhammad Ali Pasha became the ruler of Egypt 1805, he recruited French engineers, architects, surveyors, and archaeologists, many of whom were among Napoleon’s vast entourage, in order to realize his ambitious vision of modernizing the country. This importation of European specialists was equally evident in the fine arts. Some of Europe’s best-known artists of the Romantic era, such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Fromentin, Emile Vernet-Lecomte (1821–1900), David Roberts, and Charles Gleyre, came to Egypt and other parts of North Africa in search of exotic, Oriental subject-matter. Some settled in Cairo and other regional capitals, introducing fashionable and contemporary European styles such as Romanticism and Post-Impressionism. By the beginning of the 20th century, sculpture and painting in North Africa was thus dominated by European artists who set up schools and art clubs, as well as French-style salons and ateliers to cater to an élite class who saw the patronage of foreign artists as a true mark of their high social status.

But the dominance of European-dictated taste was soon challenged by a rising tide of nationalist sentiment championed by Mustafa Kamil Pasha, the founder of the Egyptian National Party, who appealed to the Egyptian masses in his campaign to transform his country into a modern, independent nation with the aid of secular education. Kamil’s call for modernization was taken up by the influential art patron Prince Yusef Kamal when in 1908 he established the School of Fine Arts, Cairo, the first Western-style art institution in North Africa with an inaugural faculty of European artists. The beginning of modern art in the region is often traced to that date, since the school’s pioneer graduates—Raghib Ayyad (1892–1982), Mahmud Mukhtar, Youssef Kamel (1895–1971), Mohammed Naghi, and others—became Egypt’s first modern artists.

Of the pioneer modernists, the sculptor Mahmud Mukhtar is the best known for his introduction of neo-Pharaonism as the style compatible with early 20th-century Egyptian nationalism. For Mukhtar, neo-Pharaonism, which refers to the popular revival of ancient Egyptian architectural and sculptural styles in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, was a powerful acknowledgment of the richness of Egypt’s artistic heritage and its relevance to modern culture, but it also provided modern Egyptian art and authentic basis. An ardent nationalist himself, Mukhtar moreover embraced neo-Pharoanism not simply to reclaim it from the Europeans but more importantly to propose it as the artistic equivalent to the work of political nationalism. That is, whereas art styles originating from Europe, including Post-Impressionism and Orientalist realism were too alien to be put into the service of truly expressing an authentic Egyptian artistic identity, in neo-Pharaonism modern Egyptian artists found a way to demonstrate the antiquity of modern Egypt as a culture and a nation. His most famous work, Egyptian Awakening (1919–28) depicting an unveiling peasant woman accompanied by a waking sphinx, symbolizes the political visions of the nationalists who won partial independence from Britain in 1922, and served as the high point of the neo-Pharaonic movement in modern Egyptian art.

Mukhtar and several of his contemporaries, such as Raghib Ayyad, Mohammed Naghi, and Mahmud Said, formed the group La Chimère to consolidate their vision of Egyptian modernism in 1927. While they all did not share in Mukhtar’s overt embrace of neo-Pharaonism, they collectively rejected the naturalism of Orientalist painting and used various expressionist styles to depict Egyptian peasant life and folklore. In so doing they simultaneously claimed the formal inventions of European modernists and, in the spirit of contemporary political nationalism promoted by the secular élite, identified with the oppressed Egyptian masses as the source of modern Egypt’s rejuvenation (see Egypt, Arab Republic of, §III).

State sponsorship of the arts through establishment of art and design schools and scholarships for further professional training in European academies during the 1920s and 1930s provided Egyptian modernists access to artistic developments in Europe. For instance, after the Fascists came to power in Germany and persecuted the European avant-garde, the Art and Freedom group, established in 1938 by the writer Georges Hunain (1914–73), published a manifesto, ‘For a Revolutionary Independent Art’. In it the group took sides with the avant-garde groups in Europe, and called for free expression. The group’s main argument was that true artistic revolution could only be guaranteed by unfettered individual artistic expression. In rejecting the idea of a national or regional aesthetic, Art and Freedom distanced itself from previous groups such as La Chimère and the state-sponsored Society of Art Lovers, which was responsible for the influential annual Salon du Caire from 1923.

This stance also pitched the Art and Freedom against the rival Contemporary Art Group founded by the artist-teacher Hussein Youssef Amin (1906–84) in 1944. Despite the fact that his own nude and landscape paintings at the time were heavily influenced by those of the French modernist Paul Cézanne, Amin and his followers, who included ‛Abd al-Hadi al- Gazzar and Hamid Nada (1924–90), argued that a truly Egyptian modern art, shorn of overt foreign artistic influences, must spring from a combination of the nation’s pharaonic, Coptic, Arab, and folk art traditions. Moreover, it ought to participate in articulating a progressive social vision by projecting the supposedly simple life and customs of the country-dwelling peasants. The work of the Contemporary Art Group, which frequently depicted themes of hunger and poverty, was seen as a critique of the Egyptian élite class and the political status quo.

In 1947 the newly formed Group of Modern Art based at the Institute of Pedagogy, Cairo, joined in rejecting both the élitism associated with the School of Fine Arts and Art and Freedom’s embrace of the European avant-garde. Looking inward, the Group of Modern Art, led by Gamal al-Sigini (1917–77), Hamed Oweis (1919–2011), and Gazbia Sirry (b 1925), embraced the revolutionary nationalism that came in the wake of the July 1952 Revolution. Mixing social realist styles with Egyptian folk imagery and Coptic figuration, the group’s members promoted the spirit of collectivism and progressive idealism that pervaded the early years of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s post-revolutionary rule. In their work, modern Egyptian art, having digested the formal lessons of the European avant-garde, moved beyond it by incorporating stylistic and design elements specific to Egypt’s cultural history. Inspired by Nasser’s politics of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism, the Group of Modern Art artists brought modernism in alignment, if only for a short while, with political rhetoric and practice of decolonization and cultural nationalism.

In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco an equally well-established tradition of Orientalist painting was initiated and sustained by French artists who settled in the region since the French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix’s visit to Algeria and Morocco in 1832. French-style art academies and salons dominated the modern art scenes of the three countries until the 1940s, when the movement toward political independence inspired the first generation of indigenous modern artists to reject the Orientalist tradition as a colonialist aesthetic. The beginning of modern art in Tunisia is thus traced to the establishment of the School of Tunis by the French-Tunisian artist Pierre Boucherle (1894/5–1988). The leading figure among this group in Tunisia, Yahia Turki (1901–68), called for the adoption of Tunisian folk visual cultures as the basis for new work (see Tunisia, Republic of, §3). However, neither he nor the Tunis-school artists advocated for a specific formal style. Rather they frequently used various realistic styles to depict contemporary Tunisian subject-matter as a way to project their shared national identity.

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Nja Mahdaoui: The drums silence, Indian ink on vellum, double membrane drum, d. 670mm, 1996, this artwork was originally created to be part of the set of a percussion show "Joussour" (bridges), performed in Tunisia in 1996 (London, British Museum); © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY/Courtesy of Nja Mahdaoui

After Tunisia won its political independence from France in 1956, discussions about the task of modern artists shifted to the development of authentic formal styles informed by indigenous craft and Arab design. It was no longer enough to simply depict Tunisian themes using dated European avant-garde modes. The influential painter Hedi Turki turned to the fresh abstract language of the American Abstract Expressionists and in the process suggested new stylistic possibilities to the next generation committed with renewed vigour to the idea of a Tunisian-Arab modernist style. Najib Belkhodja (1933–2007), for instance, developed a hard-edge abstract painting style based on simplified architectural structures of the Medina of Tunis and the calligraphic cadence of the square Kufic script. On the other hand, Nja Mahdaoui focused on the lyrical quality of Arabic calligraphic text, and invented a highly graphic style consisting of masterfully penned, florid, calligraphic compositions (see fig.). Despite the fact that they resulted from a conscious desire for a Tunisian modernist aesthetic, Belkodja’s and Mahdaoui’s calligraphy-derived abstractions did not win many converts among the post-independence generation. But they exemplify the Tunisian contribution to the calligraphic modernism that emerged in decolonized North Africa and the Middle East by the mid-20th century.

In Morocco—as in Tunisia and Egypt—French, Spanish, and Italian artists in search of exotic Arab subjects introduced Orientalist painting and various forms of Parisian modernism emulated by the first generation of native Moroccan artists. The establishment of the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Tetouan, in 1945 and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca, in 1950, however, led to the emergence of politically conscious young artists by 1956, when Morocco won its independence from France and Spain. This group rallied around several of their accomplished compatriots recently returned from French art academies with a vision of uniquely Moroccan modern art movement. Just as Arab calligraphy provided their Tunisian colleagues with material for their formal experimentation, post-independence Moroccan artists looked to the country’s dominant Berber visual cultures for inspiration. One of the first to pursue this line of inquiry was Ahmed Cherkaoui, whose earlier training in Arab calligraphy and later encounter in Paris with the abstract work of the French painter Roger Bissière saw him begin to incorporate Berber mystical signs and decorative design into his own largely abstract paintings. Similarly, when his colleague Farid Belkahia returned from Europe after training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1962, he became director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca. In this role he reorganized the school’s curriculum, introducing studies of Berber and Arab visual cultures in order to revitalize and align Moroccan modern art with traditional arts of the nation’s peoples. Along with two other teachers—Mohammed Melehi and Mohamed Chebaa (b 1935)—who formed the nucleus of the Casablanca School, Belkahia’s followers frequently incorporated Berber tifinagh script and Arabic calligraphy, as well as techniques and media associated with popular crafts into their work (see Morocco, Kingdom of).

The modern art movement began in the Sudan relatively late. Unlike its neighbours to the north that had sizeable populations of resident European artists by the 19th century, fine art instruction was only introduced at the Khartoum Technical Institute—Sudan’s first art school—after 1950. Several of the first generation of modern artists, trained at the Goldsmiths College and other British art schools in the 1940s, and upon return to the Sudan produced work largely influenced by European modernist styles though they often depicted local subject-matter. However, Osman Waqialla (1925–2007), a graduate of Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, London, and the School of Calligraphy, Cairo, explored the expressive and compositional possibilities of Arab calligraphic form in his text-based paintings. Waqialla thus became of the first North African artist to free Arab calligraphy from its historical relationship with the sacred Islamic text and to propose it as a veritable resource for modernist art (see Sudan, Democratic Republic of the, §4).

In the early 1960s Waqialla’s students and colleagues at the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Khartoum, Ahmed Mohammed Shibrain (b 1931), Ibrahim el-Salahi and Tag el-Sir Ahmed (b 1933) joined in the task of creating a Sudanese modernist art. Shibrain, for instance, used the ancient technique of solar engraving to create calligraphic text-based paintings and prints reminiscent of the bold formalism of abstract expressionist work. On the hand el-Salahi, argued that for modernism to be relevant it should explore Sudan’s diverse cultures and visual traditions, a position that coincided with that the School of the Desert and the Jungle, a literary movement that defined Sudanese literature as consisting of ancient Nubian, Arab, and black African traditions. In his own work, el-Salahi deconstructed the Arabic scripts into their constituent abstract shapes, combining them with stylized forms and design patterns from Sudanese crafts. His figurative and abstract lyrical compositions, exemplified by The Last Sound (1964) explored mystical, social, and political themes.

(ii) West Africa.

As in the Sudan, modern art arrived in West Africa after the region was officially colonized by European nations in the last quarter of the 19th century. Similarly there were no resident, professional European artists, which meant that the first generation of artists had no readily available Western art models to emulate or react against. Thus, the first West African artist to adopt Western-style painting as the means to express his modernity was the Nigerian portrait painter Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) (see Nigeria, Federal Republic of, §V). In A Discourse of Art, a booklet he published in 1920, Onabolu argued that academic painting in the tradition of the 18th-century British academician Joshua Reynolds must be the basis of modern African art. The adoption of the academic mode would dispel any claims about African mental inferiority, and provide the most effective means for expressing the individuality and modernity of the African élite. For this reason the nationalists praised Onabolu’s positive and sympathetic portraits of modern Africans as a form of artistic nationalism. While Onabolu offered art classes to generations of Nigerian artists, his advocacy for academic and professional art practice contrasted with the claims made by colonial apologists, including Kenneth Murray (1903–72), the first official art teacher in Nigeria, who believed that teaching of Western academic or even modern art to Africans posed a threat to the sustenance of the more authentic native arts and crafts he hoped to revive through his teaching.

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Uche Okeke: Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), oil on board, 920×1219 mm, 1961 (Washington, DC, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joanne B. Eicher and Cynthia, Carolyn Ngozi, and Diana Eicher); © National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution/Photograph by Franko Khoury

Nigeria’s first renowned modernist artist, however, was Ben Enwonwu, a former student of Murray and later a graduate of the Slade School of Art, London, who upon return to Nigeria in 1947 was appointed art adviser to the colonial government. Enwonwu frequently criticized colonial art education for its lack of African content. His own personal style vacillated between figural realism and abstraction, but his subject-matter often focused on African dance and mask themes. Going beyond him in 1958—two years before Nigerian political independence—the Art Society, a group of art students at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria, called for a decidedly Nigerian modern art that would result from the combination of indigenous Nigerian art forms and techniques and the experimental sensibility of the European modernist avant-garde. Led by Uche Okeke, Demas N. Nwoko, and Bruce Onobrakpeya (see fig.), the Art Society group was inspired by notions of cultural affirmation and self-assertion inherent in the Pan-Africanist ideas of leading Nigerian and African political nationalists such as Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah. But they did not advocate for a particular national style. Rather, in the early 1960s, Okeke experimented with Uli, the body drawing and mural art of the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria, translating its lyrical lines and simplified forms into his drawings and paintings (see fig.); and Nwoko created iconic terracotta sculptures reminiscent of ancient Nok, §2 figures from northern Nigeria.

Beside the Art Society, the modern Nigerian art scene of the 1960s included other artists such as Jimo Akolo (b 1935), Erhabor Emokpae (1934–84), and Okpu Eze (1934–95) who developed surrealistic and expressionist painting styles inspired by those of the earlier European modernists though they frequently depicted African and Nigerian themes. Their cosmopolitan style contrasted with the Art Society’s reliance on Nigerian indigenous art forms and the emphasis on Yoruba subject-matter by artists associated with the Mbari-Mbayo Club, Osogbo, who trained in summer workshops organized by the German-born critic Ulli Beier also an early advocate of the Zaria Artists.

Senegal had a few French artists resident in Dakar in the early 20th century, but their work did not initiate any widespread discussion about its place in the country’s colonial-era art. The modern art movement emerged only after its political independence in 1960 under the patronage of the country’s first president Léopold Sédar Senghor (see Senegal, Republic of). Regarded as the foremost poet and theorist of Negritude, Senghor established modern art schools and museums and an elaborate system of official patronage in order to encourage an artistic modernism compatible with Negritude’s celebration of black cultural and racial essence. He hired two Senegalese painters, Papa Ibra Tall and Iba N’Diaye (1928–2008), as well as the French mathematician and artist Pierre Lods, to lead the two visual arts departments of Ecole des Arts, Dakar, established by the government in 1960, the year of national independence.

Papa Ibra Tall and his students at the school’s design section created paintings and tapestries composed of rhythmic lines, flat shapes of colour, and symbols of black cultural heritage inspired by Senghor’s Negritude theory. Lods, who had in 1951 established a similar painting workshop at Poto-Poto in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, promoted the idea of an African innate creativity that must not be impeded by learnt artistic techniques. The art resulting from Tall’s and Lods’s instructions became known as the School of Dakar. On the other hand, N’Diaye’s fine arts section of the Ecole des Arts stressed artistic rigour and individual expression, rejecting Tall’s and Senghor’s doctrine that modern Senegalese art should strive at expressing a national or racial identity. Official support of Lods’s work at the school, and at the tapestry centre established by Tall in the town of Thiès in 1965, ensured that modern Senegalese art of the 1960s was mostly directed toward the expression of Senghor’s Negritude theory. Despite the fact that he disagreed with its focus on racial and African identity, N’Diaye organized an exhibition of the School of Dakar for the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966.

(iii) East Africa.

Ethiopia is unique as the only African country that was never colonized by any European nation. Moreover, its long-established tradition of Christian art stretching back to the 1st millennium AD dominated the country’s art well into the 20th century. The first generation of modern artists, including Egegnehu Engeda (1905–50) and Abebe Wolde Giorgis (1897–1967) who studied in French academies with Ethiopian government scholarships, broke with this tradition. Despite serving as officials in the Department of Fine Arts, the government office charged with integrating the fine arts into the national schools curricula, Engeda and Giorgis established art schools through which they promoted realism as the style of modern Ethiopian art.

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Boghossian Skunder: The End of the Beginning, oil on canvas, 1225×1700 mm, 1972‒73 (Washington, DC, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, museum purchase, 91-18-2); © National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution/Photograph by Franko Khoury

It is against this art that the second generation of Ethiopian modernists positioned their work. The first of this new group to gain national acclaim was Afewerk Tekle (1932–2012), who trained at the Slade School of Art, London before returning to Ethiopia. He believed that the true mark of Africa’s artistic modernity lay in the use of realism often combined with strong, schematic colour composition to depict affirmative Ethiopian Christian and African cultural themes. Two of his contemporaries, Skunder Skunder (see fig.) and Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–81), who returned to Ethiopia from Europe to join the teaching staff at the School of Fine Arts, Addis Ababa (founded in 1957 by Ale Felege Selam (b 1924)) proposed different approaches to modern Ethiopian and African art (see Ethiopia and Eritrea, §II, 2, (iv)). Boghossian was first attracted to the Negritude movement and American jazz while in Paris, and in his paintings, such as Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1964), he reflected a cosmopolitan black aesthetic, drawing from French Surrealism, indigenous African cosmologies, and Ethiopian Christian imagery. On the other hand, Desta, like N’Diaye in Senegal and Jimo Akolo in Nigeria, rejected any overt expression of African cultural identity through art. He asserted his freedom from the burden of tradition and heritage by developing an abstract expressionist style. His work and ideas encouraged the next generation of Ethiopian artists to confront issues pertaining to modern art, heritage, and national identity.

British colonial education policies played an important role in the development of modern art in the rest of East Africa. When the government established regional universities, the fine arts programme was based at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The result was that the first generation of modern artists in Anglophone East Africa were trained Makerere. The Slade-trained British artist Margaret Trowell (1904–85), an admirer of Murray’s teaching in Nigeria, had established art instruction at Makerere College in 1937. Like Murray, her vision of modern art, as the paintings of his pioneer student from Tanzania, Sam Ntiro (1923–93) show, was based on using simple naturalistic modes to depict traditional African life and subject-matter, rather than the development of sophisticated art styles reminiscent of the work of the European avant-garde. Another of Trowell’s former students Elimo Njau (b 1932), also from Tanzania, known for his illustrative genre paintings, took her ideas a step further, rejecting the emulation of African or European art at the expense of individual artistic vision. However, between 1958 and 1971 a new generation of artist-teachers led by the South African Cecil Todd, including Jonathan Kingdon (b 1935; Tanzania), Ali Darwish (b 1936; Zanzibar), and Francis Nnaggenda (b 1936; Uganda), sought to reshape East African modern art of the post-Trowell era through rigorous mastery of techniques, media, and ideas inspired by the work of the European post-Cubist avant-garde. Due to the diverse national, cultural, intellectual, and racial backgrounds of Makerere-based artists during the 1960s, modern art associated with the school had no specific ideological or stylistic direction (see Uganda, Republic of, §2 and Tanzania, United Republic of, §3).

(iv) Southern Africa.

With the exception of South Africa, modern art in many parts of southern Africa was closely tied to the establishment of workshops by Christian missions in need of new religious imagery for their churches. In 1939 the Protestant Mission at Cyrene, in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), began art instruction by the Reverend Edward Paterson whose laissez-faire teaching method was similar to those of Kenneth Murray in Nigeria or Margaret Trowell in Uganda. The resulting work, though based on Christian themes, was illustrative and technically unsophisticated.

A different and better known modern art movement emerged in Salisbury (now Harare), Rhodesia in the late 1950s through the work of the British artist and art administrator Frank McEwen (1907–94) (see Zimbabwe, Republic of, §3). As the founding director of the country’s National Gallery, McEwen sought to encourage local artistic talent by providing art materials to the museum’s African employees. The first of these, Thomas Mukarobgwa (1924–99), produced richly coloured, expressive, abstract landscape paintings, but sculpture soon dominated the output of the members of the informally organized Workshop School, many of whom had previous experience as souvenir stone sculptors. McEwen’s emphasis on originality ensured that individual styles varied, from totally abstract compositions to stylized figurative forms. However, the subject-matter frequently depicted Shona folklore and mythology, a majority of the artists being native Shona. The establishment of another sculpture site at a farm with rich stone deposits in Tengenenge by the South African farmer Tom Blomefield (b 1926) in 1966 diversified the group of artists associated with McEwen, the National Gallery, and the ‘Shona artists’, as they were called. McEwen used his extensive contacts in Europe and the United States to create an international awareness of the modern sculpture movement, especially after successful exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968 and at the Musée Rodin, Paris, in 1971.

The long history of sustained European immigration to South Africa, combined with the existence of major urban centres there resulted in a strong relationship with modern art European art since the 19th century. Pioneering modernists, such as Hugo Naude (1868–1941), the Dutch-born Pieter Wenning, and Strat Caldecott (1886–1929), established Cape Impressionism, the South African version of the European movement. Several of the next generation of South African modernists equally had direct contact with German Expressionists and were attracted to the prevailing discourse of primitivism among the European avant-garde. For instance, while in Germany at the end of World War I, Irma Stern exhibited with the Freie Sezession and Novembergruppe artists in Berlin before she returned to South Africa in 1920. Similarly, Maggie Laubser met Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and other members of the Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter, two other leading German Expressionist groups, while in Berlin in the early 1920s. Laubser and Stern opened the way for the prevalence of Expressionism and other post-Cubist European trends in early 20th-century South African art. Moreover, the founding of the New Group, a collective of young modernists, by Grégoire Boonzaier (1909–2005), Alexis Preller, Terence McCaw (1913–78), ‘Lippy’ Lipshitz (1903–80), Frieda Lock (1902–62), Maggie Laubser, and others, broadened the influence of European modernism on South Africa art (see South Africa, Republic of, §IV).

While Stern and the New Group looked to German Expressionism and European modernists as the sole models for South African artists, Walter Battiss, also a member of the New Group, explored San rock art forms and imagery as well as South African beadwork in his paintings in order to create a modern style that acknowledged the uniqueness of its local cultural context. Preceding Batiss, J(acob) H(endrik) Pierneef, in the early 1920s, began to develop a specifically South African modernist art, inspired by the nationalist ambitions of the Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers. He was the first to identify the prehistoric San rock art found all over southern Africa as a basis for modern art style. His paintings of the South African open vistas of the veld combined the lyrical simplicity of rock art with the expressive and decorative palette of European avant-garde.

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Gerard Sekoto: Girl with Orange, oil on canvas, 470×395 mm, 1943, (Johannesburg Art Gallery); © The Gerard Sekoto Foundation/image credit: Johannesburg Art Gallery

Racial conditions in South Africa prevented black artists from access to proper art education or to the institutional support available to their white counterparts. As in Nigeria, the first generation of black modernists, which included Ernest Mancoba, John Koenefeefe Mohl (1903–85), Gerard Sekoto (see fig.), and George Pemba (1912–2001), concentrated on realistic representation of individuals or life in black residential areas. Mancoba and Sekoto, however, left South Africa in search of better opportunities as artists in Europe in 1938 and 1947, respectively. Mohl studied art in Windhoek, Namibia, and Düsseldorf, Germany, on a Christian mission scholarship and, upon his return, set up his own ‘White Studio’ art school. In 1960 he founded Artists Under the Sun, a popular, open-air art exhibition in Johannesburg in order to bring modern art to the people.

Despite the promulgation of apartheid laws by the Afrikaner-led government that came to power in 1948, some white artists reached across the racial divide by creating opportunities for art instruction to black artists. In 1950 the painter and printmaker, Cecil Skotnes transformed a recreational facility at Polly Street, Johannesburg, into an art centre where black artists—including Sydney Kumalo, who later replaced Skotnes as senior teacher, and Ezrom Legae (1938–99)—encountered European modernist and West African sculpture, incorporating their aesthetics into their own work, which frequently depicted African and genre themes. The 1950s and 1960s also witnessed the establishment the multiracial Amadlozi (Zulu: ‘spirit of our forefathers’) group. While adopting forms of post-Cubist abstraction the Amadlozi group, including Cecily Sash, Cecil Skotnes, Eduardo Villa, Guiseppe Cattaneo, and Sydney Kumalo, and their followers such as Louis Maqhubela (b 1939) and Dumile Feni (1942–91) asserted modernism’s debt to African art and the authenticity of their own work as inheritors of both European modernism and Africa’s great sculptural traditions.