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Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba (29 August 1904-25 October 2002) was an avant-garde artist, born in South Africa, who spent the majority of his life in Europe.

Biography
Born in Johannesburg, Mancoba attended Fort Hare University, the South African Native College, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of South Africa by correspondence in 1937, while teaching English at the Khaiso Secondary School in Pietersburg. He left South Africa for Europe in 1938 when he received a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris, where he enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Superieue Arts Decoratifs. While in Paris he met fellow student Sonja Ferlov, whom he married. When the Germans occupied Paris during the Second World War, Mancoba was arrested and sent to a camp as a British subject.

After their release, Mancoba and Ferlov settled in Denmark where both became members of the newly founded CoBrA group of abstract artists (CoBrA is an abbreviation of COpenhagen, BRussels, Amsterdam). He exhibited with the legendary group between 1948 and 1950. In the 1950s, Mancoba returned to Paris, where he became a French citizen. He died near Paris in 2002, aged 98.

Early Life and Career
Mancoba began his artistic career as a sculptor, carving a number of religious works including the so-called "Bantu Madonna" (1929), which created a scandal because of its depiction of the Virgin Mary with "negroid" features. Mancoba gave up sculpture in 1950 and devoted himself to painting and drawing, in which he pioneered various approaches to abstraction.

Over the course of his life, Mancoba was dedicated to recreating a single image, loosely based on the human form as represented by the West African Kota reliquary figures. As time went by, its expression was reduced further and further in his search for the purest essence of the figurative form. A retrospective exhibition of Mancoba and Ferlov's work was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1994, which was the only time Mancoba returned to South Africa from exile.

He was included in Okwui Enwezor's The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, which opened at the Museum Villa Stuck in 2001 and traveled to Berlin, New York and Chicago.

Although Mancoba was an active participant and founder in CoBrA and in later artistic movements, his role received little attention in art historical scholarship, leading artist and scholar Rasheed Araeen to argue in 2004 that the erasure of Mancoba was the result of racism and ethnocentrism.