Wolf Kibel

Wolf Kibel (16 December 1903 – 29 June 1938) was a Polish-born South African painter and printmaker. He was partly responsible for the introduction of Expressionism to South Africa. His paintings and monotypes have earned him recognition as a sincere and gifted artist. Accommodation was in short supply and Kibel frequently resorted to sleeping in the Wiener Prater. and his influences ranged to Matisse, Chagall and Soutine. Like Chagall and Soutine, he was of Eastern European, and exclusively Jewish, extraction.

Kibel was a strict formalist and he refused to provide explanations, engage in sales talk or even sign and date his works. He naturally despised exhibitions because of this and it certainly did not endear him to the public or the critics. Yet he was keenly sensitive to human values and this led him to avoid the picturesque, such as the impoverished Malay Quarter in Cape Town, which was, and still is, mined endlessly for saleable pictures. Freda Kibel was using Interior with bed as an example, in which distortions of perspective are reminiscent of Van Gogh. His skin tones are reminiscent of those of Renoir.

Kibel was the first to exhibit monotypes in South Africa in numbers, notably at the prestigious 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg. Working from metal plates, he brought the medium to expressive perfection and respectability as an artform.

Final exhibition and illness Kibel had been feeling ill for some time before his exhibition in 1937. He refused to see a doctor, fearing that a negative diagnosis would derail the exhibition. The exhibition contained 45 works, including a tempera portrait of his wife, bought by the South African National Gallery. Melvin Simmers commented on his coloured monotypes in the Cape Times of 24 June 1937:

A visit to a physician after the exhibition revealed that he had advanced tuberculosis of the lungs and throat. His health soon collapsed and he was removed to hospital. He received visits from many friends, notably several times a week from artists Cecil Higgs and Maggie Laubser, but succumbed to the disease after ten months, on Wednesday, 29 June 1938.

Major collections Wolf Kibel's works are included in a number of major collections: South African National Gallery, Cape Town Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria Durban Art Gallery, Durban King George VI Gallery, Port Elizabeth Tatham Gallery, Pietermaritzburg Spier Art Collection, Stellenbosch William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town