Larry Scully

Larry Scully was born in Gibraltar in 1922 to an Irish father and a South African mother. He spent much of his childhood in Portsmouth, England, before moving with his family to South Africa in 1938. Between 1939 and 1946, he served as a draughtsman in the South African Permanent Forces, earning his high school diploma during this time. After World War II, Scully enrolled in the fine arts department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he met contemporaries Cecil Skotnes, Gordon Vorster, and Christo Coetzee.

In 1963, he became the first person in South Africa to be awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree, completing a thesis on the influence of San art on Walter Battiss.

Scully played a pivotal role in art education. He taught at the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg in the late 1940s, qualified formally as a teacher in 1951, taught at Pretoria Boys’ High School from 1951 to 1965, and was later appointed Professor of Art at Stellenbosch University in 1975, retiring in 1984.

Moreover, Scully’s work is represented in the Constitutional Court Art Collection. Focused on the 1970s, where he documented the changing urban landscape of apartheid South Africa, photographing the demolition of District Six and the forced removals of its residents, a subtle yet powerful testament to social injustices.

References

1. Beattie, M. Larry Scully: A Retrospective. Johannesburg: Wits Art Museum, 2005.

2. Coetzee, J. South African Masters: Postwar and Contemporary Art. Cape Town: David Krut Publishing, 2012.

3. University of the Witwatersrand. Alumni Records, Fine Arts Department. Johannesburg: Wits Archives.

4. National Museum of Art. South African Artists in International Biennales: Venice and São Paulo. Pretoria: NMA, 2010.