Larry Scully
spent most of his youth in Portsmouth, England. The family was
very poor and he left school and home at about 13 years of age
to go to work in a grocery shop in order to help to support his
family. When he was 15, the family moved to South Africa.
From
1939 through 1946, Scully served in the South African Permanent
Forces working as a draftsman. In that time, he also obtained his
high school degree through correspondence courses. This qualified
him to obtain a grant to study at the University of the Witswatersrand
(Wits) in Johannesburg, from 1947 through 1950. There he was part
of a cohort that included Cecil Skotnes, who remained a kind friend
throughout Scully’s life, and Christo Coetzee
and Esme Berman. In 1963, he became the first person in South
Africa to be awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree (cum laude).
Scully’s subject was San influences on Walter Battiss’s
work.
In the late 1940s, Scully taught at the
Polly Street Art Center in Johannesburg, one of the first art
schools on the continent designed to encourage African artists.
Polly Street asked him to become director, but Scully reluctantly
declined because he needed to pay off his student loans. He
became certified as a teacher and from 1951 through `65 taught
Art at Pretoria Boys’ High
School, where he followed in the footsteps of his mentor Walter
Battiss. In 1959, Scully married Christine Frost, pianist and
teacher at Pretoria Girls’ High. They had twin girls in
1962 just before the family moved to Johannesburg.
The late 1950s and 1960s saw Scully defining
his style. An excellent still-life artist and landscape painter,
Scully also searched for new forms, experimenting with shapes
and textures inspired by African masks, but finally finding
in abstract art a passion that remained with him always. His
artistic career really took off in 1962 with his one-man exhibition
in Pretoria at the South African Association of Arts (SAAA)
gallery. He had many exhibitions over the next few years, and
he won the prestigious Oppenheimer Painting Prize in 1965.
In 1966, he represented South Africa at the
Venice Biennale, and again at the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil
in 1967 (with 8 paintings). In the course of the 1960s and ‘70s, he
held numerous one-man exhibitions at galleries such as The
Goodman Gallery, the Botswana National Gallery, and at SAAA
galleries throughout South Africa.
Scully, who was 6 ft 8 inches tall, also
painted on a large scale. Among his most famous works are two
murals, one in the Dudley Heights building in Johannesburg,
entitled Cityscape, and the other for the Conservatorium of
Music at the University
of Stellenbosch. He called the Dudley
Heights murals, painted in 1971, “environmental murals” in
part because they attempted to render the vista of a city connected
to the golden mine dumps that circled it. The University of
Stellenbosch commissioned him to paint his “Music Murals” in
1978. A series of large paintings and smaller works fill the
entrance foyer. Scully modeled the murals on the Mandala concept
of peace and balance. He saw these murals also as an “African
symphony” and
homage's“ to Bach, Satie and Debussy.”
Scully held various leadership positions within
the art world, both in education and in civic life. He was head
of Fine Arts at the Johannesburg College of Education from 1966
to 1973, when he decided to resign in order to paint full time.
In 1976, he became Professor of Fine Arts and Art History at
the University
of Stellenbosch, a position he held until 1984. He was chair
of the South African Association of Arts in Johannesburg, and
National Vice-president from 1969-1974. He also served as Chairman
of the Venice Biennale selection board in 1970 and was a member
of the Aesthetics Committee of the Johannesburg City Council
from 1970-1974. He was a Trustee of the South African National
Gallery from 1978 through 1984.
In the 1970s, Scully headed a committee organizing a Johannesburg
Biennale. He planned to have all South Africans represented as
artists and audience members. A week or so before the biennale
was due to open, the South African government ordered Scully
to limit the biennale to whites only. Scully refused to agree
to this and shut down the biennale immediately. This was an unusual
and highly principled action at a time when most whites supported
Apartheid and did little to challenge racial discrimination
Scully was Art Editor of The Sunday Express newspaper
in Johannesburg from 1973 to 1975. In that column he highlighted
the work of his peers and also used the forum as a place to display
his increasing interest in black Johannesburg and the creative
tensions arising between the building of skyscrapers such as
the Carlton Center, and the poverty and experiences of black
South Africans working in the apartheid city. The slides he took
documenting the developing city, and many others taken both in
South Africa and during Scully’s frequent trips to Europe
and the USA, became the basis of his famous “multi-image” slide
shows. He would set up 5 projectors and manually projected slides
at a dizzying pace to music. Audiences often left the shows in
tears of overwhelming emotion and delight. Scully never repeated
a show, an impossible feat since the eleven thousand or so slides
generally ended up in a jumble around him on the floor. Scully
held these shows at The Baxter theatre in Cape Town, Stellenbosch
Town Hall and various other venues.
In 1973 The Star newspaper, a liberal, anti-apartheid
newspaper in Johannesburg commissioned Scully to paint a picture
to raise money for an education fund for black South Africans.
Scully painted The Madonna and Child of Soweto, some
8 foot by 5 foot in size. Harry Oppenheimer of Anglo American
bought the painting that was then donated to the Regina Mundi
Church in Soweto. Regina Mundi was the site of much anti-apartheid
activity both in the 1970s and through to the ending of apartheid
in the 1990s. Numerous funerals of activists were held in the
church and many organizations used the church for meetings. During
the student uprising in 1976, students fled to Regina Mundi after
police shot at them. In 1997, Nelson
Mandela declared Regina
Mundi Day in recognition of the importance of the church to the
anti-apartheid struggle. As Michael Morris has noted the painting “had
a prophetic quality: the focal point is the child’s right
hand, forming a victory sign.”[Morris Interview with Scully
in Matieland February 2002}.
In 2004, journalist Mpho Lukoto reflected on 10 years of democracy
in South Africa by saying of the painting:
“Perhaps one of the most poignant reminders of the past is the Black Madonna
and Child of Soweto, which was painted by Laurence Scully. Beneath the image
of the Black Madonna, Scully painted an eye, with the different images in it
giving meaning to the picture. The pupil of the eye represents the township.
The two black forks that run across the eye toward the pupil represent the pain
inflicted on black people. And in the centre of the eye, representing the church,
is a cross with a light that illuminates the pupil. It struck me that in the
midst of all the painful memories, the painting is a symbol of the hope that,
like the church itself, was in the heart of the people. I like to believe that
it was that hope that makes it possible for us to celebrate 10 years of democracy.” The
Star, March 23, 2004
Today thousands of visitors still see The Madonna and Child
of Soweto on tours of the City and the image of the black
Madonna is printed on t-shirts that are sold across South Africa.In
the 1970s, Scully continued to document the changing landscape
of Apartheid South Africa, taking numerous photographs of District
Six as it was demolished to make way for white settlement in
the center of Cape Town. His photographs of District Six are
housed in a permanent collection in the Stellenbosch University
Art Museum and in the District Six Museum.
Scully’s location in Stellenbosch seems to have drawn
him away from the art world in Cape Town, and by the 1990s, Scully
was increasingly being acclaimed as a son of Stellenbosch. By
his death in 2002 people were rediscovering his work as a lyrical
testament to the human spirit—primarily rendered through
his beautiful abstract paintings such as Nkosi’ Sikelele
iAfrika, completed in 1997 as a celebration of the New South
Africa, and through his photography. Scully was a photographer
of distinction, winning the South African Republic Art Festival
photography prize in 1981. In the 1980s, Scully experimented
also with photo-drawings (where he drew with pen on photographs).
His most celebrated works are a series “Xhosa Initiates
with Transistor radio.” The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art owns one of these photo-drawings. Scully also documented
miners’ decorations of their bunks in the mining compounds
around Johannesburg.
Scully’s works are held in various
public collections including The Royal Palace of Lesotho, The
South African National Gallery, Hester Rupert Museum, The Pretoria
Art Museum, Jan Smuts International Airport (now known as
Johannesburg International airport), Pretoria Art Museum, the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Universities of the Witwatersrand,
Cape Town, Stellenbosch and UWC. His paintings and photography
are also in private collections around the world including in
Australia, Ireland and the United States.
Scully said of his love of painting: “Painting
is for me visual music and visual thinking. My inspiration
comes from the colours, textures, forms and light of Africa,
and is a continuing search for unity out of diversity.”
 |
Photograph by Simon Sephton |
A tall, kind man, who nevertheless often infuriated people he
worked with in part because of his penchant for whipping out
a paintbrush in the middle of a conversation, or demanding the
right to change a painting that was now in the possession of
a gallery or individual, Scully was a legendary educator.
He
inspired devotion among many of his students long after his days
as a teacher. His direction of Macbeth and Julius
Caesar while a young teacher at Pretoria Boys’ High
School is still remembered by many pupils and members of the
audience. Larry sometimes reflected that if he had been born
a few decades later he might well have become a film director
as well as a painter.
Scully had a wonderful capacity
for striking up conversations with acquaintances he met through
his love of art, tennis, music and travel, and these chance
meetings often developed into fast friendships, such as his
longstanding friendship with the Iranian tennis player Monsour
Bahrami.
Larry also corresponded with Christo, listened
to music with Jacqueline Du Pre (he wrote to her when in London
and said he loved her music and would like to listen to her
Elgar cello concerto with her—she invited him to
her home to do so) and became fast friends with pioneering art
critic Tsion Avital.
While not an overt political activist,
Larry Scully’s
desire to recognize the humanity in all people on all sides of
the difficult divide that was Apartheid South Africa is probably
his lasting legacy, symbolized indeed by his beloved Madonna
and Child of Soweto and by his multi-media images of District
Six.
|