The caretaker of wounds : pictures of the deposition of Christ in the work of Marcus Glaser

Abstract

The South African artist Marcus Glaser (1936-2007) created several prints of the Deposition of Christ, seemingly to understand, through this important iconographical image, his own position in relation to the western art canon. The works reveal the predilections and anxieties of an artist trained in the classical tenets of high modernism in South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s, and shed light on the ways in which some artists of Glaser’s generation responded to the political and arthistorical landscape in which they found themselves. The paper considers Glaser’s images as exemplary prints in a long line of Deposition prints and paintings, beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) seminal works on the same theme. It also explores the aesthetic anxieties of this individual artist and suggests that they are symptomatic of a particular moment and ethos in South African art of the late-twentieth century.