page_title: Gerard Sekoto
section_title: Exile
hierarchical_section_title: Gerard Sekoto / Exile
caption_attribution_description: General notes: Oil
context_page_description: Gerard Sekoto, was a South African artist and musician. He is recognised as the pioneer of urban black art and social realism. His work was exhibited in Paris, Stockholm, Venice, Washington, and Senegal, as well as in South Africa.
context_section_description: In 1947 he left South Africa to live in Paris under self-imposed exile. It is said that when Sekoto departed from South Africa, the people that were familiar with his work felt a great loss from him leaving. The first years in Paris were hard, and Sekoto was employed as a pianist purely by chance at l'Echelle de Jacob ("Jacob’s ladder"), a trendy nightclub that had reopened for business after World War II. Here he played jazz and sang "Negro spirituals", popular French songs of the period and some Harry Belafonte. Music became the way that he could pay his living and art school expenses.
  During his time in Paris, Sekoto was interviewed by a man named Chabani Manganyi. Manganyi describes Sekoto as being ''life-loving'', and states that ''The Genius of Gerard Sekoto remains wide open''.
  Between 1956 and 1960, several of Sekoto's compositions were published by Les Editions Musicales. Sekoto played piano and sang on several records. He composed 29 songs, mostly excessively poignant, recalling the loneliness of exile, yet displaying the inordinate courage of someone battling to survive in a foreign cultural environment. In 1966 he visited Senegal for a year.
  Sekoto's paintings became political in the 1970s due to apartheid in his home country. In 1989 the Johannesburg Art Gallery honoured him with a retrospective exhibition and the University of Witwatersrand with an honorary doctorate. He died on 20 March 1993 at a retirement home outside Paris.
caption: link=File:%22Mother_and_Child%22,_1959_-_NARA_-_559003.jpg
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