OBSERVATIONS ON THE PAINTINGS OF JOHN KRAMER
Hayden Proud

The shadows in the paintings of the old buildings that John Kramer so relentlessly records in the dorps and sidings across the rural landscapes of the Western Cape are, as he says, ‘sharp and luminous’. They are seldom lifeless or impenetrable. The quality of the local light that generates them is more nuanced and form revealing than that of the harsher, bleaching, flattening glare and dramatic contrasts of the dry Highveld areas in our higher latitudes. The latter give a sense of a ‘true’ African chiaroscuro that, further south, finds itself modified in the Cape. While brighter than northern European light, the quality of Cape light, even in the southern Karoo, is what might conventionally be termed ‘Mediterranean’. Gentler, more temperate; it carries a hint of atmospheric salinity due to a coastal proximity. It has that same clarity that encouraged the Greeks to perfect the structure and fine decorative delineations of their classical peripteral temples; those sublime and most definitive of all building forms, with their vertical, sun-cupping, fluted columns. 

To invoke the Doric or Ionic Greek temple in relation to Kramer’s images of the seemingly ad-hoc, ‘non-architecture’ that he paints, might seem an absurd comparison or a pointless contrast, but there are perhaps some parallels to be drawn. As Kramer himself notes of his own evolution as a painter: ‘I came to realize that it was a certain type and scale of building and a certain quality of light that played on those buildings that, for me, summed up the moods and atmosphere of the place’ (Korber: 2011). Summed up, the softer Cape light, like Greek light, is the realist painter’s bonus in that it permits a greater perception – and consequent articulation - of detail in built forms. Light streams across planar surfaces like vertical walls and pavements, revealing imperfections, undulations, accidents, deviations and details that would have otherwise, in any other harsher African context, been flattened out or bleached away. Then there is the very human aspect of the two building types; the one very much considered as high ‘architecture’; sacred, abstracted, symmetrical and formal, the other its very antithesis as mere ‘building’ in its banal functionality, but both sharing a modesty in scale and an anthropocentricity in their intentions. Both were built for human beings to use and to relate to on their own terms. Both structures are embedded in their respective landscapes like natural accretions; both evoke nostalgia for the past while they, at the same time, like human beings themselves, unsuccessfully resist the inexorable attrition of history and change. The point of Kramer’s very specific realist project is that he redeems and ennobles the very artlessness of his selected structures through the power of painting.

The relationship of Kramer’s paintings to the phenomenon of American Photo-Realism, which appeared spontaneously in the wake of the Pop Art movement in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, has been previously remarked upon (Alexander & Cohen. 1990:154), but the point that he was perhaps the very first South African artist to be working in parallel to this major resurgence of realism has never been clearly acknowledged. Instead, a correlation has been suggested between Kramer’s job as a designer at the South African Museum with its natural history collections and his own artistic interests; these being conservation, scientific objectivity and representations that exclude the living human presence (Cohen & Alexander 1989:154).

Conceptual art’s rise to prominence since the time when Photo-Realism was first acclaimed at Documenta 5 in 1972 has seen a sharp decline in the latter’s critical reputation. Conveniently forgotten, it has seemingly been relegated to the history of the ‘bad taste’ of the 1970s. Nowadays, ideas and ‘interventions’ have simply become more fashionable than making paintings, especially ones that depend on an extremely high degree of technical skill and an obsessive commitment to a rigorous work ethic. Some of the most recent authors on the history of 20th-century art have tended to ignore Photo-Realism’s existence altogether (fn). Dieter Roelstraete (2010) says of these writers that ‘in this sense, their critical project appears to confirm the master narrative of twentieth-century art as the history of the progressive marginalisation of both realism and the idea of realism’. 

This rejection is nothing new; just as the official French Academy of the mid-1800s rejected the down-to-earth Realism of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, so the high priests of the current ‘orthodoxy’ of the Conceptual prefer to exclude all realisms from their framework of ‘cutting-edge’ art, together with the odour of nostalgia that accompanies them. For realism sooner or later inevitably evokes a profound sense of memory and longing for ‘what once was’ in all of us. This is precisely because its practitioners often take up unfashionable and marginalised subjects from real life just because they are on the verge of extinction. Courbet’s monumental lost work The Stone Breakers (1849), for example, was painted at a time when such common sights as labourers on the roadside in rural France were about to disappear as a social consequence of political revolution, rapid urbanization and industrialization. Forty years after Photo-Realism, many of its ‘period’ pieces evoke nostalgia for a now-vanished America.

In similar ways, especially now; twenty years into a new era of radical social transformation in South Africa, Kramer’s paintings seem to distill and epitomise a fading colonial past. His images of old, badly-altered buildings, all devoid of the human figure stand as melancholy signifiers of a previous order. Kramer has never faltered in his intentions and after more than forty years of painting, he pursues his ostensibly ‘narrow’ range of subject-matter as relentlessly as ever. In this he is not alone, for even his American counterparts, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings et.al., remain as industrious and as fixated on their original and definitive approaches to their own particular choices of subject to this day. While art critics and historians may have lost interest in their work, at least for now; the collectors have not. Louis K. Meisel, their dealer for many years, still operates from his gallery in SoHo in New York.

When Kramer graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in 1968, American Photo-Realism was still in its infancy and unknown in South Africa. At that time the Michaelis School’s painting department was still a bastion of a form of expressionism that was as painterly as it was melancholy and sentimental. Kramer recalls that ‘the School was [then] coming out of a Matisse period’. He regarded the work of his lecturers, Professor Maurice van Escche (1906 -1977), with his quasi-expressionist ‘Africanist’ approach and Carl Büchner (1921-2003) with his endless renderings of sad, Pierrot-like clowns, as being ‘a bit old fashioned’. Although Neville Dubow (1933-2008) was on the staff teaching Basic Design, photography had not yet been established as a studiowork option, and the idea, so fundamental to Pop art (and ultimately Photo-Realism), of using media images and photographs as a basis for making paintings would have been actively discouraged. ‘Copying’ photographs was anathema.

Perhaps the only artist who, from his professional base in commercial art and graphic design, began to experiment with enlarged Ben-Bay dots and local subject matter in a Pop idiom in the early 1960s was Helmut Starcke (born 1935). Kramer recalls seeing Starcke’s acrylic painting The Blue Shop (1964) with its flatly-painted advertising signs in the SA National Gallery, and admits that it must have been an early influence on him in some way since at that time there was ‘very little realistic contemporary painting’ to be seen in Cape Town. He also recalls Dubow’s influential advice that South African painters ‘should look at their own ‘backyards’, so to speak, for subject matter’, as having ‘the most influence on my thinking’. For all the misgivings that Kramer might have had about the work of his mentors, he has never regarded his time at the Michaelis School as wasted. ‘I spent a lot of time working on my drawing and realist painting skills in art school’, he recalls, ‘and after and by the time the Super-Realist moment broke I was ready to work in the same manner’.

In 1969, the year after Kramer’s graduation from UCT, the American astronaut Neil Armstrong left the first human footprints on the surface of the Moon. The event, which Kramer recalls following on the Voice of America radio service in the days before South Africa had television, galvanised him and changed his outlook. It seemed that science and technology were now capable of anything. His work took a turn that, as he remembers, was directly ‘influenced by the space race’. Control, precision and objectivity became his new mantras, and this led him to engage more seriously with the photographic image:

"My paintings of that time reflected this concern for technology. I started using more controlled techniques. My work became harder, more metallic. I used acrylic paints and created straight edges with masking tape and the ruling pen. Silver and deep blacks made their appearance. Because of the availability of space images, shots of the moon, man floating in space, views of the earth from satellites and films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey, I became directly influenced by photographs in magazines and began working from two dimensional collages made from pasting bits and pieces together." 

From this point it was an easy step for Kramer to experiment with working directly from photographs themselves. He struggled with the challenges that they posed; this recalls a time when the present-day digital manipulation of images using Photoshop was an as yet undreamed-of possibility:

The object of the exercise was not simply to copy the photograph, but to explore qualities inherent in the photograph itself; things that were not possible in nature, like the phenomena of over and under-exposure, and in and out-of-focus. The nature of tone and colour in photos, and how this could be manipulated [in paint] was of great interest.

With this developed the awareness that a single painting could be made from a distillation of many photographs, and that the camera was actually only a tool in this process. As with America’s Photo-Realist painters of the urban landscape, another guiding light in Kramer’s work must have been Edward Hopper (died 1967), whose Early Sunday Morning (1930) (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) must surely rank as the most seminal twentieth-century painting of its genre. A view of a section of Seventh Avenue in New York, its eerie silence, with its carefully structured horizontals and verticals, are a distillation rather than a mere description of the scene. People are absent, but the human presence is manifest everywhere. Kramer, similarly, seems beguiled by a fascination with its South African equivalent:

"I would pick a town and explore it on foot, usually on a Sunday morning, as the streets were empty. The feeling I wanted to capture was without people, a sort of sleepy Sunday. Sundays in the 1970s were boring and dull, with all shops and cinemas being closed, including cafes. I looked mainly for small shops or general dealer stores. These often had wonderful metal signs (Three Teas Tea, Coca-Cola and Joko Tea) that could add a touch of colour to a drab building."

Kramer’s kinship with Hopper, especially in his paintings where the forms are parallel to the picture plane, is very clear in this instance. The irony of their shared realist enterprise is that, although starkly representational, their approach is equally about abstraction; the editing of ‘reality’; pictorial construction; the ordering of surfaces and painterly effects, and the creation of studied compositions. 

REFERENCES

All quotations by John Kramer are from unpublished interviews and notes that he kindly made available to me.

Lucy Alexander & Evelyn Cohen. 1990. 150 South African Paintings, Past and Present. Struikhof, Cape Town, p.154.

Dieter Roelstraete. 2010. ‘Modernism, Post-Modernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic’, After All Online Journal, no. 24, Summer. Accessed 5 June, 2014.
Rose Korber. 2011. ‘Kramer's World’ Referenced June 7, 2014.