South Africa's culture of collecting: the unofficial history.

Since the late 1990s, collectors of southern African art have become increasingly cautious as a result of the growing evidence that this market is being flooded by fakes and copies. In 2002, four prominent collectors of art from this region--Kevin Conru, Ken Karner, Udo Horstmann, and Jonathan Lowen--were so alarmed by this development that they issued a pamphlet warning other buyers to exercise extreme care before purchasing traditionalist southern African household and personal objects such as staffs (Fig. 2) and meat platters. Yet as late as the 1970s, hardly any of the household items and other artifacts made for personal use and adornment (Fig. 3) that had been collected in this area by missionaries and early travelers since at least the mid-nineteenth century were known or disseminated in the then-burgeoning literature on African art. Indicative of this trend, not a single article on southern African carving traditions had been published in African Arts by 1980. Instead, African Arts repeatedly showcased mural arts--both old and new--such as San rock art (see Woodhouse 1969, 1977), the twentieth century mural traditions associated with indentured laborers living on white farms (Rohrmann 1974, Matthews 1977), and southern African beadwork traditions (Brottom 1973, Priebatsch and Knight 1978), including nineteenth century beadwork pieces housed in various museums in the US. (1) Moreover, although in 1974 African Arts published a short description of a Tsonga girls' initiation ceremony by Thomas Johnston (1974), there was no indication in either the article or the accompanying photographs of the rich sculptural traditions associated with rituals of this kind (Fig. 4).

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It is not surprising, then, that American collectors, such as Jay Last, who now have substantial collections of southern African art, point out that they have no memory of works from this region featuring in either books or museum displays in the 1970s. (2) South African-born Jonathan Lowen, who studied for a law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in the mid-1960s, notes that even in South Africa there was no discernable interest in the traditionalist art forms produced by communities living in the country's rural periphery at that time. As an undergraduate student who elected to study art history as part of his BA degree, which he completed in 1963, he was never exposed to either African or southern African art. Indeed, with the exception of San rock painting, which served as an example of prehistoric art in the chronological survey approach that was followed at that time, the curriculum offered by the university's Department of History of Art was completely Eurocentric. Moreover, although African art courses were eventually introduced at the graduate level in 1977, their focus was on West and Central African art. This was partly because very little had at that time been published on southern African traditionalist art forms, but probably also because of the persistent bias in favor of figurative art forms among both academics and most collectors of African art. Consequently, after moving to London upon the completion of his studies, Lowen had virtually no competition from other buyers when he began to collect southern African art in 1969.

In Britain, many families owned southern African material that had been acquired as souvenirs by forebears who had fought in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 or the South African War of 1899-1901. Most of these old carvings initially ended up in London's flea markets and charity shops. As late as the 1970s, moreover, the few American, British, and European dealers who had examples of what they normally described as "Zulu" household objects and weapons in their shops made little if any attempt to showcase this work, largely because there was virtually no market for it. But once it became clear that collectors were prepared to pay comparatively high prices for items such as staffs and headrests, southern African carvings began to appear increasingly at Sotheby's and Christie's auctions. According to Jonathan Lowen, however, the arrival of the American collector Jerome Joss, who started bidding against him sometime in the late 1970s, was the first indication that others had become interested in this field. (3)

Collectors who developed an interest in southern African art before the 1980s appear to have done so for complex and often very diverse reasons. In the late 1970s, Jonathan Lowen approached John Mack at the Museum of African Art in London to find someone to catalogue his collection. Margaret Carey (4) soon took on the job. According to Carey, Lowen said that his initial decision to buy southern African pieces had been motivated by the fact that he had felt incredibly homesick when he first moved to London. Clearly, though, Lowen's interest in collecting African art--if not the art of southern African communities--can also be attributed to the example afforded by his father, who bought a Shankadi headrest at a 1943 exhibition held in Johannesburg's Joubert Park. (5) According to Lowen, his father owned several other works by African artists, including a painting by Gerard Sekoto, a pioneering South African modernist who has since been hailed for spearheading the development of contemporary "black" art in South Africa. At that time it was fairly common for collectors--especially Jewish collectors who, like Lowen's father, had gone to South Africa as refugees in the 1930s--to purchase works by both African modernists such as Sekoto and central African carvers. Although hardly anyone else in South Africa was interested in African art in the 1940s and 1950s, some of these collectors acquired art work on their travels. One such was Peter Staub, (6) who had several masks that he had bought in the field while visiting Malawi. Remarkably, Staub also acquired large quantities of beadwork at a time when there was virtually no interest in either this art form or other aspects of the art produced by southern African traditionalist communities.

The preference these pioneering collectors showed for Central African art is further evidenced in the collection of the artist Irma Stern, whose parents came to South Africa from Germany, although in their case they did so long before Hitler's rise to power. Having traveled to Europe to study briefly with the German Expressionist Max Pechstein in the late 1920s, Stern seems to have bought some African pieces, including a Buli Master stool, (7) before returning to South Africa to pursue her career as an artist. In the 1940s, Stern traveled to Central Africa, where she acquired a large collection of figurines, masks, and household objects--among them pieces from Yaka, Luba, and Mangbetu communities--that are now on permanent display in the Irma Stern Museum, the house in Cape Town where she lived for much of her adult life. But even though she also traveled extensively in southern Africa and produced numerous, highly romanticized paintings depicting local rural communities, Stern appears to have had little if any interest in the art produced by these communities.

When the well-known Swiss collector Udo Horstmann moved to South Africa in 1970, this tendency to collect African art other than that produced by local communities was still very common. Horstmann notes, for example, that although the Johannesburg-based collector of African art Egon Guenther amassed a very large collection of West and Central African art after settling in South Africa in 1951, (8) he acquired no more than "a handful" of works produced in southern Africa. (9) Horstmann himself had no interest in African art when he first went to Johannesburg, where he lived for ten years before returning to Europe. However, having until then enjoyed the benefits of Frankfurt's rich and diverse cultural life, he found the limited cultural expectations of South Africa's middle-class white community extremely alienating. In the face of this alienation, he gradually developed an interest in African art (Fig. 5) through his contact with other expatriates such as Egon Guenther and a few local collectors such as the artist Cecil Skotnes, from whom he bought at least one southern African piece. (10) Horstmann also bought pieces in the field during regular trips to Zimbabwe and Richards Bay, a large industrial development on the coast of present-day KwaZulu-Natal, where to this day some Zulu-speaking communities use and produce items such as meat platters. At the time, Horstmann's Johannesburg business associates mocked him, repeatedly suggesting that they could save him the effort of looking for material in the field by asking their "kitchen boys" (11) to carve pieces for him. Needless to say, Horstmann was shocked by the racism of this middle-class white community, which, as he points out, clearly believed that all Africans were "primitive people with no culture." (12)

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

In 1978, shortly before he returned to Europe, Horstmann began to look for southern African pieces on auction and in other private collections, gradually expanding his search to the US. At that stage, he also started buying books on African art with a view to learning more about this field. But, prior to the publication in 1980 of Sieber's groundbreaking study on African household objects, this literature provided very little of interest to already-established collectors of nonfigurative art forms. While Sieber's work thus had the effect of confirming a growing trend among some private collectors, it had a major impact on the collecting and display practices of public institutions, where the bias in favor of figurative work from West and Central Africa persisted long after private collectors had begun to show an interest in "minor" forms such as staffs, spoons (Fig. 6), and headrests (Fig. 7).

[FIGURE 6-7 OMITTED]

Although the dramatic growth in interest in southern African art in the 1980s certainly cannot be attributed to Sieber alone, his decision to exhibit African household objects and the publication of both African Furniture and Household Objects (1980) and Sieber's earlier African Textiles and Decorative Arts (1972) undoubtedly made a significant contribution to shifting attitudes to, and perceptions of, the nonfigurative "minor" arts of Africa.

As Sieber pointed out in his introduction to African Textiles and Decorative Arts, the study of traditional forms such as textiles, costume, and jewelry had until then "been neglected by the West, where attention has been focused primarily on the sculpture of Africa." As he noted further: "This attitude not only stems from Western aesthetic values but results in a geographical emphasis on West Africa where most traditional sculpture is to be found" (Sieber 1972:10). In his African Arts article previewing his 1980 exhibition of household objects, Sieber confronted this bias again, noting that "Our Western view of African traditional household objects has been warped by our passion for the figurative, the decorative, and the unique." In the face of this bias, Sieber affirmed the importance of studying household objects and repeatedly alerted his audience to the aesthetic concerns that informed their production. To this end he noted, for example, that "Tools such as knives, hoes, and mortars tend towards functional simplicity; furniture such as beds, neckrests, and stools and containers of wood, clay, or calabash may be simple, even stark, or they may be richly varied in form or highly decorated" (Sieber 1979:29).

The art dealer Michael Graham-Stewart, who was still based in London at the time of the 1980 Sieber show, (13) is convinced that he would not have succeeded in making large sales of southern African artifacts to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and, later, to public institutions in South Africa such as the Local History Museum in Durban, had it not been for Sieber's groundbreaking study on household objects. In 1991, the National Museum of African Art mounted an exhibition titled "The Art of the Personal Object," utilizing in part the material Graham-Stewart sold to it in the late 1980s, including a large collection of snuff containers. In the pamphlet accompanying this exhibition of "personal objects," Philip Ravenhill reaffirmed the importance of understanding the focus in these artifacts on "the inventive combination of function and form that is the result of ingenious conception, meticulous planning, and skillful execution." As he noted further, "The care devoted to the realization of the utilitarian forms on exhibition attests to an importance that goes beyond mere functionalism." (14)

The preoccupation with form evidenced in this pamphlet and in Sieber's 1980 exhibition of household objects is crucial to an understanding of the collecting practices of the private buyers who began to show an interest in southern African material long before public institutions--in South Africa and elsewhere--started developing an active interest in acquiring southern African material. Jay Last, for example, says that he came gradually to realize that objects such as clubs and staffs are characterized by a remarkable variety of form. In his view, the simpler and more abstract these forms, the better. Likewise, Udo Horstmann refers again and again to his love for what he terms "simple forms." When Horstmann and his wife Wally decided to publish a book on their collection in 2002, they called it The Power of Form. In one of the contributing essays to this book, Ezio Bassani points out that "The fascination of the 'form' ... explains why household objects and weapons--selected for their perfection transcending the mere utilitarian function--are so numerous in the Horstmann collection" (2002:13). In another essay, in which Patrick McNaughton tries to make sense of the differing interests of private collectors, such as Horstmann, and academics and public institutions, he notes that Africanists have in most cases focused on studying contexts of production since the mid-twentieth century. As he also points out, this attitude, which is premised

   on a limited understanding of both
   aesthetics and form ..., often flies
   in the face of the experiences many
   African individuals have with the
   art they make, use, and love. Form
   is not a remote consideration, divorced
   from meaning and use.
   Form is the articulation of thought
   and action, and it lies at the heart
   of what an artwork actually is
   (2002:18).

Until quite recently, the lack of interest in aesthetic questions and considerations evidenced in much of the research on African, and especially southern African art, has also been apparent in public displays of this art. Thus, although there were large missionary and ethnographic collections of southern African material in museums throughout the world, these collections hardly ever attracted the interest of private collectors. Throughout South Africa itself, at places such as the Africana Museum in Johannesburg, the South African Museum in Cape Town, and the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, exquisitely conceived and finished artifacts, including large quantities of beadwork, lay for decades in badly lit, often dusty display cabinets. Despite the wealth of material in the storerooms of these institutions, virtually no effort was made to rotate the items displayed in their public galleries.

The gradual academic and institutional shift toward an interest in the aesthetic qualifies of nonfigurative African arts following Sieber's 1980 exhibition helps to explain why some South African galleries and museums began to purchase African art from the southern African region in the course of that decade. But in South Africa itself this shift was also informed by the 1985 "Tributaries" exhibition (Burnett 1985), which showcased the work of local rural artists alongside that of established fine art practitioners, and by the burgeoning academic interest in southern African art from the late 1970s onward. (15) The concurrent effort to collect material in the field by Johannesburg-based dealers such as Vitorino Meneghelli, and the purchase of beadwork from, and dissemination of information on the Ndebele (Fig. 8) by Suzanne Priebatsch and Natalie Knight, who published two articles on the art of this group in African Arts in the late 1970s (Priebatsch and Knight 1978, 1979), (16) also played a significant role in bringing southern African art into the public domain. Together, these developments created an increasingly secure framework for numerous new private and corporate collectors, (17) who began to purchase works made by southern African carvers and beadmakers in large quantifies.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

The then-nascent conviction among some museum curators that they needed to repatriate the country's cultural heritage is also relevant to this growing interest in southern African art. In keeping with this development, in 1986 Jonathan Lowen sold a large part of his collection to a well-known South African businessman, who loaned it to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Christopher Till, who was the Director of Culture in Johannesburg at that time and who spearheaded a project to mount a major exhibition based on this collection in 1991, wrote in the preface to the catalogue for that exhibition that "The return of this collection to its continent of origin is of major significance to South Africa ..." (Till 1991:2). As Till also pointed out, this was the first time that such an important collection of southern African material had been shown in an art gallery.

Soon after this collection had been repatriated, Till managed not only to purchase a major collection of headrests that had belonged to the Swiss missionary A. A. Jacques, but also to convince Udo Horstmann--who had played a role in securing the Jacques collection for the Johannesburg Art Gallery--to sell part of his own collection of southern African art to the same institution (Horstmann 1992). Although Horstmann was originally reluctant to do so, he decided that it was morally appropriate to part with some of his southern African works following lengthy discussions with his wife, Wally. This collection, which included initiation figures, figurative and abstract staffs and clubs, household objects, beadwork, pots, and snuff holders, also contained several additional carvings that Horstmann and his wife had decided to donate to the gallery.

Following the unbanning in 1990 of the African National Congress (ANC) and other political organizations, the clamor to repatriate indigenous art forms for "heritage" collections became increasingly intense. Thus, for the first time in their histories, South African public institutions that had never expressed any interest in collecting works by either African modernists (see Rankin 1995) or their rural counterparts suddenly began to formulate repatriation policies. Among these was the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, which in 1995 acquired an "African Art Heritage Collection" (as the museum labels it) purchased on behalf of the gallery by the Federal Republic of Germany and South Africa's Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology. This collection "of objects that had returned home" (Martin n.d.:147) went on display on September 24, 1995, South Africa's first official Heritage Day (Fig.1). The director of the South African National Gallery, Marilyn Martin, claimed at the time that the gallery's new acquisitions and exhibitions policies had afforded them an opportunity to "redress the imbalances created by our history and by Eurocentric attitudes and approaches, to participate in the writing and rewriting of South African history and art history, and to use the context of art to address the historical problem of cultural differences in South Africa" (Martin n.d.:147).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Laudable though these belated sentiments might be, South Africa's public institutions seldom have the resources to compete with not only established collectors such as Horstmann and Lowen, but also comparative newcomers such as Kevin Conru, who left Chicago to join the Philharmonic Orchestra in contemporary KwaZulu-Natal as a double bass player in the 1980s. Writing in the recently published catalogue of his collection of southeast African art, Conru notes that "After I left the orchestral profession, and after I completed my museum studies degree in London, I returned to Zululand on a number of occasions to travel and collect utensils of everyday life--spoons, platters, and beerpots primarily--and to experience for myself that particular thrill of discovery that comes from finding things in unexpected (for Europeans) places" (2002:7). (18)

Given the increasingly substantial financial implications of satisfying this "thrill of discovery," it is worth pausing to consider the sad cultural legacy of South Africa's apartheid state, which actively reinforced ethnic differences and thereby encouraged the production of work that gave expression to these differences, but which also failed to acknowledge the status of this work as "art." Partly for this reason, South Africa owes an enormous debt of gratitude to dealers such as Merton Simpson who, as Jay Last points out, always had an umbrella rack in his New York gallery full of southern African staffs and clubs. Other collectors also acknowledge the crucial role dealers and early collectors played in opening up the field of southern African art in the mid-twentieth century. Conru says of Simpson that he "was one of the very first individuals to recognize the beauty and modernity of forms inherent in Southeast African art ..." (Conru 2002:9).

Sadly, though, our growing familiarity with the extraordinary formal beauty of much of the art of southern Africa still escapes most South Africans, who were actively discouraged from developing a sense of pride in their own cultural heritage, especially during the apartheid era, when public galleries reinforced the prevailing tendency to equate the idea of culture with the culture of South Africa's European settler community. This devastating lacuna in our education was brought home when South Africa's then-deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, gave a major speech on his vision for a pan-African renaissance in 1998 in which he mentioned the cultural achievements of other African countries but, with the exception of San art, failed to draw attention to the artistic achievements of the local rural producers whose love of abstract pattern and meticulous attention to detail is reflected in a host of simple household objects and items of personal adornment. To quote Mbeki:

   The beginning of our rebirth as a
   continent must be our own discovery
   of our soul, captured and made
   permanently available in the great
   works of creativity represented
   by the pyramids and sphinxes of
   Egypt, the stone buildings of Axum
   and the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe,
   the rock paintings of the
   San, the Benin bronzes and the African
   masks, the carvings of the
   Makonde and the stone sculptures
   of the Shona. (19)

While South Africa has come a long way in acknowledging the creative capacities of its traditionalist artists, it still has a very long way to go before these artists receive widespread recognition by all South Africans. In many respects, the process of education needed to achieve this aim has just begun, not only among those who in the past were led to believe that any art produced by African artists is inferior, even backward, but also among younger people, most of whom have lost a sense of connection both to the past and to the indigenous art forms that in some cases are still practiced in South Africa's outlying rural areas. But even though many challenges undoubtedly await the country in this effort to re-educate both young and old, for the first time those seeking to preserve its indigenous cultural heritage are backed by legislation. Thus, under the National Resources Heritage Act of 1999, (20) which came into effect in 2000, so-called ethnographic art and "objects of ritualistic and symbolic significance and personal adornment such as beads, leather, or metalwork" are afforded protection as "heritage resources of national significance." Whereas, in the past, works of this kind could be exported at will, the Act acknowledges that the art of rural traditionalists is a "unique and precious" cultural heritage that cannot be renewed and must therefore be preserved for future generations of South Africans.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

(1.) See the back cover of African Arts 6(2), Winter 1973, a photograph of old beadwork pieces from present-day KwaZulu-Natal belonging to the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences.

(2.) My sincere thanks to Doran Ross, who introduced me to Jay Last, and to Jay Last, who kindly agreed to an interview, which I conducted on a visit to Los Angeles in September, 2000.

(3.) Judging from a short biography of Joss written by Henrietta Cosentino (1993), his interest in collecting was fuelled by a meeting in 1977 with Helen Kuhn. Thereafter, he was '"smitten" with collecting.

(4.) I interviewed Margaret Carey in London on July 12, 2000. See Carey 1986 for her modest but pioneering study on southern and East African beadwork.

(5.) This information is based on an interview I conducted with Lowen in July 2000.

(6.) I first met Peter Staub through my father, Ben Klopper, in the late 1980s. I am very grateful to Peter for sharing with me his knowledge of African art and his memories of the intellectual Jewish circles in which he moved after leaving Germany for southern Africa in the 1930s.

(7.) The status in the corpus of Buli Master stools is a matter of dispute; see Pirat 1996.

(8.) Part of this collection was sold at Sotheby's, New York, on November 18, 2000. Egon Guenther indicated in an interview included in the Sotheby's catalogue that he first began collecting African art just after World War II, but sold most of this work before he left Germany in 1951.

(9.) My thanks to Udo Horstmann for agreeing to an interview, which I conducted on September 6, 2000, and for allowing me to reproduce works from his collection in this article.

(10.) In my interview with Udo Horstmann he implied that he had bought several pieces from Cecil Skotnes, but Skotnes himself can remember selling only one staff to Horstmann.

(11.) The derogatory tendency to refer to grown men as "boys" and adult women as "girls" is still common among racist white South Africans.

(12.) Udo Horstmann, interview conducted September 6, 2000.

(13.) Michael Graham-Stewart has since relocated to New Zealand.

(14.) This information is drawn from Ravenhill's text for the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.

(15.) At the University of the Witwatersrand, Anitra Nettleton completed her PhD on the traditional and figurative woodcarving of the Shona and Venda in 1984 and Betty Schneider graduated after completing her PhD on Ndebele mural painting in 1987.

(16.) This interest in the art of the Ndebele has a comparatively long history, dating back to the 1940s, when Ndebele tourist villages were established, thus encouraging photographers such as Constance Stuart Larrabee to document their murals and beadwork.

(17.) The Standard Bank Collection housed in the Gertrude Posel Gallery at the University of the Witwatersrand is an obvious case in point.

(18.) My sincere thanks to Kevin Conru for allowing me to include images of works from his collection in this article.

(19.) Speech delivered by then-Deputy President Thabo Mbeki at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Gallagher Estate, August 13, 1998. Issued by the Office of the Executive Deputy President.

(20.) South African Government Gazette, April 28, 1999.

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