Gregoire Boonzaier
Eastern Freestate Dongas
Dated: 1998
Oil on Canvas Strecher
51cm x 61cm
68cm x 78cm Framed
Gregoire Boonzaier was the fifth child of political cartoonist and his cousin Maria ElizabethBoonzaier. Early on Gregoire made the acquaintance of the artists , , and , all of whom were close family friends.
It was Moses Kottler who first gave Gregoire a box of paints in 1922 and Nita Spilhaus an easel in 1926, igniting a creative flame that was to burn for more than eighty years. Gregoire's father was dead set against a formal training in art and felt that he had more to learn from the artists around him. In 1923 his first two oil paintings were shown at Ashbey's Gallery in Cape Town, simply signed "GREGOIRE". His first one-man exhibition followed two years later he was to hold more than 100 one-man exhibitions during his painting career.
After an acrimonious confrontation with his father in 1932, Gregoire moved into his own studio in Cape Town and after a successful exhibition visited England in 1934 where he was a student together with Terence McCaw and Frieda Lock at the under Bernard Adams, and training in graphic art techniques at the in London. His early paintings having been strongly influenced by Pieter Wenning, he now absorbed the work of , , and , and made trips as far afield as Russia, where his socialist leanings are reinforced. He returned three years later to help found the New Group, with Terence McCaw, Frieda Lock, Lippy Lipshitz and others, and served as its first chairman for ten years. The New Group served as a forum and mouthpiece of young South African art for almost 15 years, staging exhibitions throughout the country, and providing rural areas with a glimpse of the new trends in art. He served for six years on the Board of the , Cape Town.
Boonzaier made Cape Town his base and his subsequent work reflected views of and the , recording its colourful life. He settled at Onrusrivier, a short distance outside Hermanus. He had been introduced to Onrus shortly after by whose family had holidayed there for many years.
