The exhibition in the FADA Gallery (lower ground) focuses on the artist
and designer Ernst de Jong’s (1938-2016) contribution to design in South Africa
in the years 1957-1975. Video recordings of interviews with the designer, as
well artwork and artefacts sourced from the de Jong collection, contextualise
the display.
This selection provides
a link to the accompanying exhibition of Helen de Leeuw’s modernising rhetoric
that evinces interesting parallels of circumstance and purpose with
that of de Jong. Both individuals could
be said, as Chris Barron claims for de Leeuw, to have ‘created an alternative
way of living for … South Africans suffocating in a stuffy aesthetic inherited
from the British colonial past’.
The de Jong exhibition is part of an
ongoing project by Lizè Groenewald to document, record and communicate the
history of an extraordinary personality in his pursuit to domesticate modernism
in twentieth-century South Africa.
Some notes on the work on display
Various items of student work 1951-1956
De Jong was born in 1934 in Pretoria. He spent
much of his time during his school years either at the Hillcrest Swimming Pool
or painting in his mother’s kitchen. Both these pursuits would serve him well
in later life: as a talented diver, he was awarded a sports scholarship to
study at the University of Oklahoma (OU)in the USA, where he enrolled for a BA
Degree in Fine Art and majored in Painting and Information Design. In 1957, de
Jong and his American wife, Gwen Drennan (1935- ), a fellow student at OU, returned
to Pretoria where they opened Ernst De Jong Studios (EDJS) in 1958.
Items on display in the vitrines include a watercolour
of a landscape with houses, executed when de Jong was sixteen and still at
school, a set of hand-drawn roman letters crafted by Gwen as part of a
typography project at OU and the University of Oklahoma Year Book for 1956 (in
which the newly married couple appears). The delicate patterning and colours of
The Successors, a stone lithograph, foreshadows
the early style of EDJS, evident in the cover designs for the cultural journal,
Lantern, and the Automobile Association Touring Guide of South Africa.
In the time that de Jong was diving for OU,
the swimming team achieved unprecedented success and the exhilarating
experience of winning in an American sporting arena would inform de Jong’s
approach to all things once he returned to South Africa. In 1973 he was
instrumental, with his brother Gerrie de Jong, in designing and building the De
Jong Diving Centre, which is still maintained by the Tswane City Council.
Arguably, de Jong’s use of a vibrant turquoise in several of his early designs,
such as the cover design for the October/December 1958 Lantern, was prompted by his life-long attachment to the aesthetics
of swimming and swimming pools.
Early work 1956 -1966
The 1956 fantasy landscape in oils, The Colonnade, is typical of de Jong’s
painterly style when at OU. Despite the claim that his encounter with American
Abstract Expressionism brought about a ‘sea change’ whilst he was studying in
the USA, the visual language that he brought back to South Africa was more akin
to the whimsical mark-making of American artist / designer Ben Shahn (1898-1969),
whose work de Jong admired. De Jong’s commitment to Hard-Edge
abstraction appears to have occurred only after he relocated to Pretoria in
1957, a shift which is evident in the other works displayed in this group. De
Jong’s Degree Programme at OU included information design, painting and stone
lithography. The latter was presented by Emilio Amero (1901-1976) who was an
acclaimed muralist who taught an excellent technical course in print
making. De Jong himself became both a prolific
muralist and an expert print maker, producing several series of serigraphs, of
which a selection are on display.
In 1960 de Jong designed and built a ‘white
house’ in the modern style in Hill Street, Pretoria, where he lived and worked
until his death in 2016. De Jong, by his own admission, was not a great reader,
but the books in the Hill Street collection, amassed over more than fifty years
and of which a small sample is displayed in the exhibition, reveal the
influences and obsessions that shaped the designer’s life. A 1963 Vogue
magazine features the glamorous de Jong couple in their avant garde home. His father, who was a civil servant (but would
have preferred to be a painter), bequeathed his son a modest little book on
modern painting. The formal principles of art are explained in an ancient copy
of Helen Gardner’s Art through the ages, presumably
a prescribed text at OU. The rules of fencing vie with Sam Haskin’s erotic
photography, swimming pool design, cowboys, Picasso and yellowing texts on
lithography. Robert Motherwell’s ‘black
balls’, Jasper Johns’s Flag and Ben
Shahn’s illustrations for an idiosyncratic dictionary of peculiar words attest
to the importance of American modernism in de Jong’s approach to art making. In
1983, Esme Berman’s encyclopaedic Art and
artists of South Africa, declares triumphantly, “Ernst De Jong’s career
furnishes a story of success”.
Johan Hoekstra worked as a designer for
Ernst De Jong Studios from approximately 1960 to 1963. Hoekstra met de Jong while studying commercial
art at the Pretoria Technical College, where both Gwen and Ernst de Jong had
been employed as design lecturers after arriving in Pretoria from the USA. Hoekstra
brought to the studio his excellent illustration skills and an amusing
quirkiness that was well-aligned with de Jong’s decorative approach and the
frivolity of American modernism that was growing in popularity in South Africa.
Hoekstra designed several sun-emblems for
de Jong, including the first EDJS logo, which was an illustrative symbol that
evokes the robust earthiness of early Renaissance woodblock books. Hoekstra’s
work captures the mood of an ebullient and hip Pretoria in the early 1960s. He
left EDJS in the mid-1960s.
Colin Bridgeford (1938 — )
Colin Bridgeford was one of the first
student designers employed by EDJS. However, his most important contribution
emerged in the late 1960s when he re-joined the studio after a period spent in
the advertising industry in Johannesburg. Bridgeford introduced the neutral language
of the International Style to EDJS. He transformed Hoekstra’s rustic sun-symbol
into a signifier of needle-sharp precision and efficiency. In his purity of
vision, he echoed the hard-edge imagery and ascetic beauty of de Jong’s
serigraphs. Bridgeford’s consistent use of sans serif
letterforms and the grid conveys a heightened commitment to the modernist
project in South Africa but also the increasingly anxious mood of the 1970s.
Bridgeford left EDJS in 1975.
DASHING SDSA CRYSTAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING
DESIGN ACHIEVEMENT 1986
The Society of Designers in South Africa
(SDSA) made this award only once, and it was presented to Ernst de Jong for his
contribution to South African design. The jury’s decision to honour a producer
of ephemeral trademarks (as opposed to the architects of the South African
Reserve Bank, who only received a merit prize) attests to the high esteem in which
de Jong was held in the South African design community at the time.
The 1970s had seen the emergence of the
graphic designer as superstar and in the 1980s this trend probably reached its
peak. De Jong himself had promoted the cult of design hero as early as the
1950s when he signed his cover illustrations for Lantern. The legendary American designer Paul Rand (1914-1996)
followed the same practice, although de Jong was unaware of Rand’s work until
much later in his life.
Before the 1990s, it was relatively common
for a creative director to take the credit for the work of junior designers. Thus,
the iconic logo of the 1972 Munich Games, although more usually attributed to
the designer Otl Aicher (1922-1991), was the inspired idea of a lesser-known colleague,
Coordt von Mannstein (1937- ). Similarly, the EDJS design for The Gift Horse
trademark featured in the exhibition is attributed to de Jong in the New York Art
Director’s Annual, but was in fact designed by his studio manager, Colin Bridgeford.
In a field where creative outputs are invariably the result of team work, it is
often difficult to determine with certainty the authors of past graphic design
experiences, a challenge that contributes to the difficulty of constructing a history
in this regard.
The Oklahoma motor hotel corporate
identity
The Oklahoma campaign was executed as part
of a collaboration with de Jong’s older brother, Gerrie, a property developer
who built the iconic Oklahoman Motor Hotel in Pretoria in 1969. Both brothers
had studied at OU and The Oklahoman project celebrated their love affair with
American modernity, an experience that they re-imagined in the capital city of
South Africa.
In addition to styling the visual identity
of the hotel, de Jong produced a striking series of serigraphs (not on display)
that anticipated the Shield Series (1975), the Night’s Passage Series (1976)
and the Western Series (1977). Somewhat like the more recent South African
restaurant franchise Spur, The Oklahoman appropriated Native American iconography
as part of an emancipatory frontier narrative that sought alternatives to a
conservative Christian Nationalist ideology and British imperialist aesthetics.
De Jong executed more than twenty-five
mural commissions, thereby shaping the visual rhetoric of architectural spaces
as diverse as the Atomic Energy Board, Arcadia Shopping Centre, Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the State Theatre in Pretoria. One
of his earliest commissions, completed in 1963, was for two glass mosaic murals
in the Transvaal Provincial Administration Building. EDJS also designed the
programme, on display in the vitrines, for the inauguration of this iconic
modernist building in Pretoria. In the case of the undated mural design for
Everite — a company that produces building products — de Jong capitalised on
the outcome by re-using the design on the company’s corporate calendar.
De Jong, never one to bypass an opportunity
to promote himself or his studio, ensured that, on the desk calendar, the
designer of the mural received as much attention as the client. Although this
strategy may appear conceited, Everite was, in fact, benefitting considerably from
its association with a creative practitioner that exemplified modernity and
excellence in international design at the time.
Irmin Henkel (1921 — 1977)
Henkel’s portrait of de Jong at the height
of his success in 1970 provides an interesting counterpoint to the more recent
video recordings of the designer reflecting on his life. Henkel, an orthopaedic
surgeon, immigrated to South Africa in 1951. Largely a self-taught painter, he
pursued a dual career of medicine and art and painted the portraits of several
prominent political figures in the National Party government. In 1969, he
completed a large commissioned canvas depicting the South African Cabinet of
1961, the year that South Africa became a Republic. Henkel was a central figure
in the Pretoria social scene. He was well-acquainted with the de Jongs — they
attended one another’s stylish parties — and he painted the portrait of de Jong
as well his father, Gerrit de Jong, the latter, by request, in the style of
Paul Gaugin.
Lizè Groenewald can be contacted by email lizeg@uj.ac.za or by phone +11 559 1024.
