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Wits Spaces
What’s in a gaze?
Marlene Dumas’s gift to WAM’s permanent collection strengthens the University’s connection with special alumnae, writes Jacqueline Steeneveldt.
Wits alumna and poet Elisabeth Eybers (BA Hons 1937, DLitt honoris causa 1972) made a remarkable “homecoming” to her alma mater on the day that would have been her 109th birthday on 26 February 2024. She returned in the form of a 130x110cm-sized portrait, painted by renowned South African/Dutch artist Marlene Dumas.
It was a balmy Johannesburg evening, complete with full moon, when Dumas officially handed over her Portrait of Elisabeth Eybers to the permanent collection of Wits Art Museum (WAM).
What made this donation especially meaningful and valuable is that it is the only oil on canvas painting by this major artist now owned by a South African museum. (Previously Dumas donated drawings from The Next Generation to the Iziko South African National Gallery and The Benefit of the Doubt to the Constitutional Court).
“Every now and again in Johannesburg, it seems like the stars all align and it feels like this is the best city in the world. And tonight, I feel is, one of those nights,” said Fiona Rankin Smith, special projects curator at WAM on the evening.
Distance and connection
The donation was partly due to the interventions of Prof Ena Jansen (PhD 1992), a long-standing friend of both Eybers and Dumas. Prof Jansen, now based in Cape Town and Amsterdam, taught at Wits’ Department of Afrikaans and Nederlands for 16 years and her doctorate in 1992 was an analysis of the poetry of Eybers, which was later published as Afstand en verbintenis Elisabeth Eybers in Amsterdam (Van Schaik, 1996).
Dumas became acquainted with the work of Eybers through Prof Jansen’s work. All three women have succeeded in achieving influential positions in the Netherlands, while maintaining strong ties with South Africa.
“The connection to Johannesburg is the primary reason we reached out to WAM,” said Prof Jansen.
Eybers lived in Johannesburg for over three decades, moving to Amsterdam in 1961, where she remained until her death on 1 December 2007.
She lived between poles of Amsterdam and Johannesburg with a separating distance, but also with an intimate connection in her imagination and memories. Eybers often compared the two cities in the form of alternate seasons; the past and present; sunsets and moonrises in her poetry. To illustrate this, Prof Jansen read from 1 Desember (Respyt 1993) in which the culmination of the poem compares a clear full moonlit winter’s night in Amsterdam to a “heavenly” July evening on the Highveld. As an immigrant, Eybers made use of the ambiguities of being “here” and “there”, refusing to abandon writing in Afrikaans, saying it was “a language created for poetry”.
When former president Nelson Mandela (LLD honoris causa 1991) visited the Netherlands in 1999, he described Eybers as a “stewige loopplank” (steady walkway)* between the two countries.
Eybers began her relationship with the University in 1932, at the age of 16. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934 and continued her honours degree in Afrikaans and Nederlands, graduating with a first-class pass. Thereafter she worked as a journalist, including as editor of Die Moderne Vrou (The Modern Woman) and published her first volume of poetry, Belydenis in die skemering (Confession at Dusk) in 1936. She was the first woman to publish a collection of poems in Afrikaans.
She returned to Wits in 1972 to receive an honorary doctorate for her “outstanding contribution to modern Afrikaans letters” and bringing renown to the University. “In honouring a woman of such intelligence and deep sincerity the University is evincing its interest and involvement with the creative side of Afrikaans cultural life,” the citation reads.
Eybers remains the only non-Dutch writer to be awarded the PC Hooft Prize for Dutch Literature in 1991. She was also the recipient of the Hertzog Prize (considered the highest accolade for an Afrikaans poet), twice, in 1943 and 1971. Thabo Mbeki awarded Eybers the Order of Ikhamanga (Gold) in 2007 for her exceptional contribution to literature.
A psychological landscape
Portrait of Elisabeth Eybers was included in Dumas’s retrospective exhibition Intimate Relations held in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 2008. At the time, fellow Wits alumnus David Goldblatt (BCom 1957, DLitt honoris causa 2008) remarked:
“I went back again and again, beginning to learn something of the layerings and intricacies of the work. Perhaps the one that fills me most with wonder is the portrait of Elisabeth Eybers. Almost cartoonlike in its seeming simplicity, it evokes the lucid precision of Eybers’ vision and even the terrible clarity of the Witwatersrand light...”
Dressed in black on the evening of the handover, Dumas generously offered insights into the process of creating Eybers, which she painted from a photograph in 2007. It was the same year that both Eybers and Dumas’s mother died.
“The painting itself is not of a live model, the scale is larger,” she said. No preliminary sketches were made. “The painting happens on the canvas”. The background colour in the portrait emerged as reminiscences of the dress Eybers wore on one of the only two chance meetings they had face to face.
For Dumas, emphasising “the gaze” was of interest, not merely recreating a physical likeness. She explained she was interested in the connection between two people meeting gazes, as artist and painter.
In addition, she wanted to capture the “inner world” of Eybers, making it a “psychological exploration, an abstract portrait”. She said the black of the eyes were particularly overemphasised: “My brother as a baby had eyes that were totally black,” she said. “What was important was the intensity of the eyes and to contrast it with the rest of the painting.”
Although Eybers never saw the actual portrait, only a smaller reproduction, she provided the translation of the accompanying poem Geluk (Happiness) that Dumas used in the catalogue, shortly before her death later that year. “It was the very, very last poem she wrote,” said Prof Jansen.
Happiness
“Ages ago it doesn’t matter when as I first encountered it doesn’t matter whom we fixed our gaze on one another at a moment unfettered to time.
Sometimes it flashes back in my consciousness blindingly sharp, an arrow of sheer light, token and warrant of I know not what.”**
**from Bestand, 1982, translated by Eybers on 3 July 2007
