POSEIDON

Poseidon forms part of Preller’s landmark, late-career series of breath taking, enigmatic and mighty intaglios. Cast and painted in 1970, the work has never been exhibited; it was a gift from the artist to close friends and has remained in the same family collection since it left the artist’s studio. Yet Poseidon relates to the group of intaglios that was produced during the lead up to Preller’s remarkable 1969 exhibition at the Henry Lidchi Gallery in Johannesburg. The show was much anticipated – the public having caught wind of a radical change in the artist’s style – and it caused a sensation when it opened. Considerable attention was given to the intaglio technique that Preller had pioneered, requiring a resin cast to be lifted from a clay mould and then painted and gold-leafed in such a way that took the work’s low, concave relief into account. The results, which the artist described as ‘part painting and part sculpture’, were certainly spectacular.

Two versions of Poseidon’s cast were painted in 1970; the other, Neptune, taking its title from the Roman name for the same god of the sea. Classical and mythological subjects dominated Preller’s intaglios, inspired in the most part by a trip to Greece, Turkey, and Italy towards the end of 1968. There he had been moved by the nude, sculpted, ideal beauty and symbolic potential of the archaic, kouroi figures, and had been awestruck in Athens in front of the bronze Poseidon of Artemision, the face of which he had used in his earlier, small-scale Sea Amphora. Perhaps only in Preller’s imagination could the sea-god’s recognisable profile be so dramatically reinvented into a work like Poseidon.

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