This post is prompted by the discovery of some light hearted drawings by artist Max Piron.
With no further references to to samples of any other art, this post serves mostly as context to art (or the lack of it ) the ‘early day’s’ on the Copperbelt.
At the same time, he seems to have been a character and an interesting artist and he seems to have played an early role as a friend of David and Ellen Chudy in the early days on the Copperbelt. Interesting some day to some serious art by the man.
Read for more background
Andrew Mukuka Mulenga in his paper Contemporary Zambian Art, Conceptualism and the ‘Global’ Art World, makes a number of references to Max Piron, many attributed to Ellison, G. 2004. Art in Zambia. – including the following
Trained as an artist in Germany, he had escaped from Hitler’s persecution of Jewish people and arrived in Lusaka in about 1940. The town was full of refugees from the war in Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish and Max Piron rented a room in the now defunct VV Hotel in Cairo Road.
He is described as one other first trained European artists to arrive in Zambia and he is described as the first to give art training to indigenous Zambians. .
He certainly features in some of Ellen Chudy’s diary memories and there are at least 3 extant photos of him in David’s collection (2 above). There is another photo which was clearly taken in Europe – also with a mildly clowning pose.
‘Earliest modern’ might apply to him, but the ‘earliest’ accolade has to fall to Czech explorer Eric Holub who made at least 3 trips to the region from 1872 on and left his drawings to posterity. David Chudy was there in 1938 but was not a ‘trained artist’
Further quotes from Mulenga’s text:
Ellison writes that Piron joined a department in the colonial government as a building inspector, “as art presented an uncertain economic future” (Ellison 2004: 14). She adds that he took to painting portraits of “local dignitaries and their wives, landscapes and African studies although samples of his work are not available in public displays”. Ellison (2004: 14) states:
One of his early commissions was to paint the portrait of Sam Fischer, an important and influential figure in Lusaka. A few other commissions followed and the artist became a familiar figure in town, sketching when he could and spending his leisure time in the studio. He worked in oils and also made skilful black and white pen and ink drawings and later, etchings.
This personal commitment from Piron may be likened to that of McEwen across the border; he too may have also faced the challenges encountered by the latter. As Elizabeth Morton3 points out,
McEwen’s promotion of art was always hampered and shaped by the many institutional liabilities that he faced. His major audience, the white Rhodesian bourgeoisie, was extremely racist and in no way predisposed to supporting modern black art. This audience which McEwen publicly avowed as ‘old women of both sexes’, responded by getting white politicians to cut back the national Gallery’s budget in the mid-1960s as soon as McEwen’s new artists began supplanting the watercolour landscapes that Rhodesians favoured (Morton 2013: 274).
Ellison (2004: 14) indicates that Piron’s paintings were in a sense innocuous, void of any deeper meaning or interpretation, but it was the “skilful black and white” pen drawings he used to apply a more layered meaning to, although she does not seem to elaborate the “depth of meaning” in detail.
