Yesterday spending some time off from the commercial crowd at the National Gallery. For the first time I noticed a beautiful painting of the Table Mountain that, even from a close distance appeared to be a really original if quite unknown piece out of the extensive German Expressionist catalog. But did Max Beckmann or one of the „Brücke guys“ ever set foot on the South African coast, let alone painted the table mountain under a pseudonym. If you google Maggie Laubser, you´ll be surprised to learn that she was a South African painter of rural background who happened to travel Europe in a time when the art of painting reinvented itself, constantly changing names and labels on the way to final abstraction. Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, whatever label you put on it was trying to close in on abstact art without yet being abstract. Fortunately enough Maggie didn´t think too much about categorization or labels but just went on painting in the style of her young idols who weren´t at all unreachable for her as the painting of the table mountain strikingly demonstrates. When Maggie finally went back to South Africa in 1924 the people back home judged the state of her art considerably different.

"Is there any normal, sane human being in all South Africa who is able to appreciate as a work of art, to enjoy as a picture the one sent by Maggie Laubser?"

 - Bernard Lewis (art critic)