Almost every dessert and cake at the Pierneef à La Motte restaurant arrives with Pierneef's signature in chocolate. La Motte wine farm in Stellenbosch also boasts a museum dedicated to Pierneef's art and a shop where you can find everything from a butcher's block to a tea cloth with Pierneef's name emblazoned on it.
It is hard to think of any other South African artist who enjoys this kind of pulling power. This isn't measured only in the domestic wares and edibles that bear his signature, but the record sum one of his works fetched at last month's Strauss & Co auction in Johannesburg.
This may have contributed to the hype around the works and "new" prints on show at this week's Turbine Art Fair.A hush and gasps
Everyone had a hunch that Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond Stellenbosch, a work Pierneef produced in 1928 and which was previously unseen, was going to do well at auction. It was estimated to fetch up to R8-million. It is indeed an exceptional work, but no one could have guessed that the painting was worth a cool R20-million, because Pierneef's works had never sold for so much before.
"There was a hush and gasps" in the room during the auction as the figure climbed, recalled Susie Goodman, general manager of Strauss & Co Johannesburg.
The auction house has been mum on the buyer's identity. The rumour mill has been in overdrive. One art collector, who would prefer not to be named, said she saw Johann Rupert in the room shortly before bidding on the work began.
The Ruperts own one of the biggest collections of Pierneef's art. La Motte — owned by a Rupert daughter — boasts some of it, as does the Rupert museum in Stellenbosch, whose permanent collection includes the much-admired Johannesburg Railway Station Panels series (1929-32).
And the Rupert collection is not even regarded as the best. Anton Taljaard, an art collector who has come into the public eye via his Trumpet art centre in Rosebank, Johannesburg, holds that title. A selection of his collection is on show at the Turbine Art Fair, which also features a number of Pierneef lino cuts.
The lino cuts on Strauss & Co's online auction sale are estimated to sell for between R15,000 and R20,000, which suggests that Pierneefs are still within the reach of the middle class. However, they may well fetch a lot more, given the new record.It is easy to fall in love with Pierneef's art. He appears to reverse nature; clouds in his hands are hard and square, as if carved out of wood, and mountains appear like soft mounds of pink-tinged sugar.
Wilhelm van Rensburg, an art historian and art specialist, said he believed it was the accessibility and the decorative nature of Pierneef's landscape art that gave it such wide appeal.
The "new" Pierneef
Given Pierneef's popularity, it is not surprising there is hype surrounding the "new" Pierneefs. Even if it is somewhat of an oxymoron: Jacob Hendrik Pierneef died more than 60 years ago, so "new" art will not be forthcoming. Nevertheless, Van Rensburg eagerly anticipated the new Pierneef prints included in Taljaard's collection at the Turbine Art Fair.
Van Rensburg has been studying Pierneef's art for decades. He is more than a fan, he is a devotee, having curated a Pierneef exhibition at the Standard Bank Art Gallery in 2015 — to some degree putting his neck on the line.
"Pierneef had completely fallen out of favour from around the late '80s to the '90s. He seemed to embody white Afrikaans nationalism," said Van Rensburg.
Van Rensburg eschewed the label. If Pierneef was indeed an Afrikaner nationalist darling, he would have secured all the public art commissions. Instead these went to his contemporaries WH Coetzer and Anton van Wouw, which "irked Pierneef his whole life", said Van Rensburg. "It is easy to claim that someone is an Afrikaans nationalist.""Too wild"
Pierneef didn't find favour with English-speaking South Africans or the British either. The works he made for London's South Africa House in 1935 were criticised because he made the "landscape look too wild, it was not civilised enough", said Van Rensburg. But the value of his art has grown steadily.
"Every decade added a zero to the value of a Pierneef," said Van Rensburg — even in the late '80s and early '90s, when contemporary artists such as Wayne Barker aimed to "destroy" Pierneef's art via his subversive pop language in which the characteristic landscapes were used as a shorthand for colonisation and oppression.
Barker's resolve softened in time. Last year in an interview ahead of a solo exhibition at Everard Read, he confessed that he had "forgiven Pierneef. It was always a love-hate relationship."
The "new" Pierneefs have been made possible via artist and art lecturer Pippa Skotnes, who was invited to pull new prints from a number of Pierneef's etching plates belonging to Taljaard. The plates, along with her prints, are being shown in public for the first time.Destroyed
Pierneef had his own printing press and generated his own prints on an on-demand basis. How Taljaard acquired some of Pierneef's plates isn't known, as Pierneef's widow apparently had most of them destroyed, presumably to ensure the value of his art.
"I am dying to see them. To see how new white, treated paper will bring out the lines," said Van Rensburg.
Skotnes recalls using 14 zinc plates and being quite pedantic about numbering them so that they could be traced and wouldn't be sold as real editions. The plates, along with her prints, are being shown in public for the first time, at the Turbine Art Fair. No doubt visitors will flock to see them. Although of interest to Pierneef devotees, these prints don't have a monetary value. So if you want to spend money on a "new" Pierneef, it will have to be one set in chocolate...