Marjorie wallace artist biography

Marjorie Wallace

The Scots-born Marjorie Wallace made a deep impression on the cultural life of her adopted South Africa. Wallace has been characterised as “a realist painter working in a broad, narrative style” (Berman 1983:483), but this observation underplays her penchant for emphasising flattened areas of oil colour, fairly loosely applied in a light and often bright key.

Marjorie wallace artist biography

It was an approach that well-captured the light and mood of the Western Cape especially. During the 1960s and 70s when abstraction tended to dominate artistic thinking, Wallace resolutely declared her attachment to, and preference for, the human subject.

Upon her graduation from art school in Edinburgh in 1947, Wallace was awarded a travel grant to visit Europe and Italy.

Like most aspirant young artists at that time, she finally gravitated to Paris and settled in Montparnasse. In was in this fertile artistic and literary context that she encountered the South African writer Jan Rabie and his dissident Af