Reshada and the devil (with angels) — an artist’s polemic in support of her vision

Reshada Crouse’s bravura account of her life and work begins with an encounter with the devil, as she frames it. The occasion is a visit to the Prado in Madrid. As an art student, she tells us, her encounter with European art history was mainly one of puzzlement. Her teachers’ admiration for the art of distant centuries looked like a hegemonic conspiracy – the undeclared, insider principles of a “snobbish, esoteric club”.

Pursuing a journey of discovery in the museums of Europe, though, her encounters with some artworks are moments of revelation. The living paintings that she knew only through reproductions in textbooks turn out to possess vital lives of their own. It can be a blessing “to gaze upon such celestial beauty”.

One painting in particular, Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children, attracts her attention. It is a famously gruesome depiction of the classical myth telling the story of old father Time preventing his usurpation. As an earnest aspiring artist, she smells “the stench of evil for the first time”, both in the violence of the subject, which she sees as man’s “propensity for evil” in dealing with evil, and in “the static silence” of colours arranged on a canvas to represent it.

From an aesthetic point of view, evil is seen in the enormous tension between the horror of the subject and the “bewitchery” of its execution. In that one viewing of the painting, she says, she learnt that “Art likes the devil. And I was given to it”.

This is a big book: complex in thought and feeling, sophisticated in form. The conversational tone draws the reader in from the start. The author deals pretty frankly with the events in her life, her thoughts on art theory, her love of family, and her views on several controversial topics. The frankness invites a similar response in the reader, creating the feeling of a “discussion”, as she says.

At the outset of her career, Crouse tells us, she experienced the European male-dominated art that she studied so closely as an overwhelmingly powerful achievement, and her major source of inspiration. In line with her intuitive feminism, and based on the manifest absence of women from the tradition, however, she also saw that history as a challenge. She would be a female artist, taking on the established conventions where it suited, developing new ones when it didn’t.

She intended her paintings of the birth of her daughter, for instance, to address the subject with neither male horror nor female angst, she tells us. She would represent this archetypal situation of blood and pain, one that males can never know, “without cruelty or anxiety”.

Recognising that the history of feminism has developed through a series of generational and critical stances and is now a complex domain of debate, she presents a personal view of debates about “gender disparity”. She recognises a current orthodoxy, that gender identity isn’t binary, but a spectrum of many possibilities. (Her suggestion that it is infinite is perhaps a little overstated.) Then she presents an understanding of heterosexual gender identity.

Consulting recent research, she argues that men tend towards logical, analytic, objective left-brain modes, women more towards intuitive, creative, subjective modes. At these “binary” extremes of the spectrum, maleness and femaleness are shot through with difference and confrontation, but they are also beautiful and complementary.  

This view will, I’m sure, invite the ire of collegiate theorists and others who believe that contested debates require clear antagonisms. But that would miss the point. If the gender debate makes sense, all gender stances are to some extent “nature”; that’s the whole point. Her view declares her preference without demanding that we share it, only that we recognise ourselves in it. She never sets up a straw man just to blow him away.  

No topic, personal, familiar or professional, is addressed abstractly, or even in the relatively specialised registers of standard autobiography. Nor is this a “collegiate” conversation, as Crouse describes academic discourse. Adopting techniques of narrative, reflection, description and anecdote, she develops a broad, associative context that allows a sort of polyphonic confluence of registers.

So, for instance, Crouse’s experience of giving birth leads us to the pro-life debate. The lightning strike of Picasso’s Le Demoiselles d’Avignon takes us, via a horrific personal experience, to contemporary debates about rape. The long tradition of European art, so long dominated by men, is appreciated for its immense achievements and also critically examined in terms of feminism and power relations in art. Her experience of motherhood is refracted through Biblical lore and her icon project. The resources of language are used to paint a multilayered self-portrait.

A central thread in her work has been portraiture. As she argues, the human person has been the central feature of the tradition in which she works for millennia. Given such a long tradition, the representation of the person has accrued highly formal conventions and constraints. Chief among these is that a portrait must offer an interpretation of the multidimensional history of the sitter’s life through a static, two-dimensional representation of their face.

As her numerous portraits show, Crouse addresses this challenge, not by developing a consistent, even style in her portraiture, but by fitting her particular approach and style to the subject. Clearly, she delights in interweaving different styles of representation and symbolism in her visual art, and she has applied this to her writing.

It might seem that this is a matter of an instinctive creative preference. This would, I think, miss the thoughtfulness of Crouse’s approach to telling her story. As in her paintings, structure is as important as content. To miss this would be to underestimate the book’s power. Her response to highly theorised positions on the contested issues she discusses so frankly might be something like: what’s your view, what’s your practice, what do your paintings look like?

The book is an artist’s polemic in support of their vision, a practitioner’s view. As part of this, Crouse, for instance, sometimes adopts a quite transgressive stance, though with a wry note. Transgression isn’t the fundamental principle of art, but a means to an expressive end. Her motto is “the magic lies in doing”. For Crouse, art is a practice intertwining a practitioner’s thought, feeling, perception with their lifelong expressive action.  

The intuitive structure of her book is a demonstration of her understanding of herself as a female artist, not an argument for it. The book’s episodic, non-linear, discursive form expresses her belief that female creativity recognises interdependence, introspection and the “interwoven complexities of emotion necessary to navigate the immediate environment”.

As with her art, so with her life. Crouse gives us an account of her life in the “Republic of Yeoville” – which she describes as a pan-African immigrant neighbourhood so fringe that it might be the essence of cool. She provides a host of stories and impressions that illustrate her experience of everyday postcolonial realities not shared by the vast majority of her peers.

When she first went to live there, Yeoville was still in the heyday of its status as the city’s cool, multiracial, arty suburb. Within years after the advent of democracy many of her friends, fashionable and relatively well-off white folk, had fled an apocalypse that never arrived. She’s always been happy to visit them in their suburban homes, to enjoy their sense of “perpetual luxury of quiet privacy”. But living in Yeoville isn’t a principle of social theory. It’s her neighbourhood.

Crouse’s fundamental orientation in European art will be criticised in some quarters. It will be said that it kowtows to “whiteness” or colonialism. Yet surely this stance merely mirrors the immense parochialism of the cosmopolitan gaze. A complex, pluralist country has emerged from the stark oppositions of our history. Crouse’s resolute, patient, tenacious insistence on following her own star – on playing her own game – is as much a part of our emerging realities as the approaches of other artists.

To take up the invitation to conversation for a moment. Crouse centres her book on a conception of “the devil”. This is not the horned figure of folklore but a mode of understanding: the capacity to see beauty in horror. As Crouse’s own work shows, the artist’s aim in doing so, though, is to triumph over horror, not to celebrate it. 

Her work expresses other spirits too: tenacious curiosity, the blitheness of living, piquant humour among them. To adopt the metaphor, Crouse’s title perhaps rather underplays the angels in her life. But then maybe Angels and Demons might not have made the best title.

Decades ago, Herman Charles Bosman argued that South African art was still slavishly following European “tricks”. It would only become fully itself when it gained its own spirit, and its own techniques to express it, in the service of a beauty that “will endure because it is our own”. This has been ongoing for some decades, and this book is a wonderful exercise in doing it. DM

Richard Jurgens is a writer, researcher and editor with extensive experience in Africa and Europe, and whose career has spanned management, editing, writing, reporting, political analysis, technical and literary translation and mentoring writers.