Paris, his 'new home'

Ernest Mancoba arrived in Paris and registered to study art at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs without being able to speak a word of French. He made friends with some Danish artists who spoke English and appreciated his work, among them Ejler Bille who introduced him to the sculptor Sonja Ferlov, through whom he met the famous sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, who later became his neighbour.

But Europe was on the brink of World War II and when the Germans occupied France, Mancoba was interned in 1940 for four years for having a British passport. Despite this, he married Sonja Ferlov in 1942. They shared an outlook that placed them outside the Western, Eurocentric philosophical framework of modern art and formed a firm partnership that endured for their whole lives. Their only child, Wonga, was born in 1946 while they were living in the flat above Giacometti's. Thanks to their marriage, he and Ferlov both became stateless, as South Africa would not accept mixed race marriages and Danish women were expected to take on the citizenship of their husbands.

Mancoba moved away from sculpture and began drawing and painting. In the stimulating atmosphere provided by his circle of friends, and the regular exposure to art from the rest of the continent in Europe’s museums he discarded the remnants of his earlier Western European religious style and any reference to natural appearance. His rich and subtle use of colour reflects his Southern African origins, and has resonances with Xhosa and Zulu beadwork and the ochre tones common in Southern Africa.

He and Ferlov found the Renaissance idea of perspective being a fixed point of view very limiting; it trapped the observer and deprived him of his own interpretation, making the work of art prescriptive, rather than liberating. They often assisted each other with their work and saw nothing strange about their method of working, records his biographer, Elza Miles.

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