21 Facts About Ernest Mancoba

Ernest Mancoba was an avant-garde artist, born in Transvaal Colony, who spent the majority of his life in Europe.

Ernest Mancoba was probably South Africa's first professional Black modern artist, and exhibited from the late 1920s onward.

Ernest Methuen Mancoba was born to Florence Bandezwa and Irvine Jonas Mancoba, a miner, in Turffontein, Johannesburg, Transvaal Colony on 29 August 1904.

Ernest Mancoba first began attending primary school at an Anglican church in Boksburg.

Ernest Mancoba continued his education at an Anglican school in Benoni when his family moved there in 1915.

Ernest Mancoba enrolled at Diocesan Teachers' Training College, Grace Dieu, near Pietersburg for his secondary schooling after suggestion from his maternal uncle, Rev Alvin Mangqangwana, an Anglican minister.

Two years later, Ernest Mancoba was offered a job by the South African government's Department of Native Affairs during the spring of 1936 to craft purchasable souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg later that fall.

In 1937, Grace Dieu rehired Ernest Mancoba to teach English at an affiliate, Khaiso Secondary School in Pietersburg.

The goal was for Ernest Mancoba to earn a living while completing received his undergraduate degree from the University of South Africa by correspondence.

Ernest Mancoba took up woodcarving, which he would specialize in until moving to France in 1938.

Ernest Mancoba left South Africa for Europe in 1938 when he received a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris, where he enrolled at the Ecole nationale superieure des arts decoratifs.

Once in Europe, Ernest Mancoba continued his expedition in art; visiting art museums and attending exhibitions.

Ernest Mancoba consciously abandoned the religious artistic tradition he had started out in and permanently transitioned from sculpture to painting.

Ernest Mancoba's first painting, Composition, figuratively modernizes a Congolese Kuba mask by merging colorful geometrical shapes and sections that reestablish the human form in a profound new configuration created by appropriating figural and design aspects from the African canon.

In 1940, shortly after Germany occupied France during WWII, Ernest Mancoba stayed in Paris along with Sonja Ferlov during Germany's western front.

In 1947, Ernest Mancoba moved with Ferlov to a small town village outside of Copenhagen.

Constant and Corneille invited seven other Danish Artist, including Ernest Mancoba who did not participate.

Ernest Mancoba sought transparency in his painting process while depicting a freedom of expression through abstraction.

Ernest Mancoba's style is composed of line movement often encompassing a central figure-like form that dissolves into the surrounding abstract atmosphere of colorful oils, charcoal, ink or pastel marks.

Ernest Mancoba is described as a careful and focused artist with a deep relationship towards researching man's juxtaposition here on earth.

Ernest Mancoba was not afraid of debating Europe's one sided relationship to Africa and its artforms, and created his own breakthrough of modernism within art.