I must’ve been about ten or eleven when I started sketching. Then someone suggested art lessons. In a small Karroo town, that was easier said than done. Fortunately for me, an artist of some renown had recently moved into town, and was offering lessons—to adults. Nico Hagen studied my sketches carefully. The smell of his pipe hung over the room. Eventually, a voice emerged from within his beard: he would take me on as a student. And so it passed that a preteen attended art class with a group of adult women.
Nico Hagen had lived in Paris in the 1960s, along with many other influential South African writers and artists—among others, Gerald Sekoto, Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Elsa Joubert, Marjorie Wallace, and Jan Rabie. After a promising start to his career, Nico gradually faded into obscurity while his fellow expatriates grew in stature. In the mid-1970s, Nico became the curator of the local museum in Burgersdorp.
Nico Hagen, Untitled, 1965.
One afternoon, I did a watercolour of a black cat. Nico studied it carefully. “It’s a cat,” he said. My ten-year-old self felt quite impressed that he had recognized my unsteady effort with a brush for what it was intended to be. Then he said, “Now paint the cat.”
I repainted my cat. “That’s a nice cat,” Nico repeated. “Now paint The Cat.” I did not understand.
When Nico moved from the house on the corner into the house next door to ours, he stopped giving art lessons to dedicate more time to finishing his own exhibition. I still visited, mostly to ask permission to strip the apricot trees in his garden so my mother could make jam.
The apricot trees grew along the wall that bordered our yard. From among the branches, I noticed the door to the stables along the adjacent wall was ajar: Nico’s studio was open and he was at work. Curious to see a real artist’s studio, I peeked in. On a table just beyond the covered easel stood a still life: A long black marble slab, on top of which rested an ornate brass candle-holder. Atop each of the three arms lay the wilted bloom of a white hydrangea. I snuck in and lifted the cloth to look at the work in progress: Nico had filled the canvas from the outside in: A deep cobalt background with a black dais along the bottom. In the centre, still in pencil on white canvas, the candle-holder and the outlines of the flowers. Slightly disappointed at not beholding a finished masterpiece, I went home.
Some months later, I the regional newspaper announced an exhibition of Nico Hagen’s work. They included a sneak preview of a painting: on a cobalt background, golden wisps linked three ram skulls to a dais.
My mother thought the picture was strange; I though I recognized The Cat.
Later, The Cat reappeared in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2; and again in Pablo Picasso’s guitars. Duchamp’s multiplying geometric shapes of the woman had abstracted movement and descent; Picasso’s guitars pushed us beyond the body of the guitar to consider its internal construction. What Nico had asked of me was for some level of abstraction: to find the essence of cat; to give additional meaning to hydrangeas by transforming them.
Ultimately, my chosen art form became words, but Nico’s instruction lingers: find the cat. Make every word, every brush stroke, count. Now more than ever: As we see the internet strain under the weight of Covid words, let’s look for the cat. Let our words and images reach beyond themselves, past the walls we have erected around us. Let them offer succour to others.
Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.