Artist profile: Gerard Sekoto
‘Art is the spark, the illumination which is socially significant for it brings about understanding’ – Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993)
Gerard Sekoto was born in Botshabelo, Mpumalanga province, in 1913, the year in which the Natives Land Act dispossessed many black South Africans of their ancestral lands. In 1938 Sekoto moved to Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He held his first solo exhibition the following year, and in 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased his work Yellow Houses – A Street in Sophiatown (1939–1940). It was the first painting by a black South African artist to be acquired by a South African art institution, although Sekoto had to pose as a cleaner to see his own painting hanging in the gallery.
Sekoto based this painting, titled Song of the Pick (1946), on a photograph taken in the 1930s of black South African workers labouring under the watchful eye of a white foreman standing behind them. However, in his painting the dynamic has changed. Sekoto has enhanced the grace and power of the labourers, turning them to confront the small and puny figure of the overseer, who appears about to be impaled by their pickaxes.
Sekoto painted this work in the township of Eastwood in Pretoria, shortly before moving to Paris in what became a lifelong exile from South Africa. During the 1980s, postcard-sized reproductions of this iconic painting were widely distributed in South Africa, as both a badge of honour and a source of inspiration in the struggle against apartheid.
Explore a diverse range of art stretching back 100,000 years in our exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation (27 October 2016 – 26 February 2017).
Exhibition sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan
Logistics partner IAG Cargo
Song of the Pick, 1946. Image © Iziko Museums of South Africa, Art Collections, Cape Town. Photo by Carina Beyer.
Song of the Pick was based on this image, taken by photographer Andrew Goldie in the 1930s.

















