Think of the third and final exhibition of the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s (JCAF) three-year series of shows that highlight the work of pioneering female artists working in the global south as a three-course fine-dining experience that caps a series of gourmet outings for art lovers and visitors to the foundation’s home in Forest Town.
Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South profiles three works by Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil and Irma Stern — women who, though they worked in roughly the same period, did so independently and separated by vast distances — from Mexico, to India, to South Africa. And in different but sometimes intersecting, pivotal points in the histories of their countries and that of the world in the years leading up to and after World War 2.
Preceded by a series of lectures earlier this year, the exhibition marks the first time the works of Kahlo and Sher-Gil have been shown on the African continent.
The logistics that curator Clive Kellner and the JCAF team had to undertake to get the work of Mexican mega-artist Kahlo to Johannesburg are worthy of transporting military technology: the painting received a police escort from OR Tambo International Airport to Forest Town; it is housed under strictly enforced temperature and humidity controls — as per the instructions of its owners, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; and travels with two conservationists. The work of Sher-Gil, though little heralded in her lifetime before her untimely death at the age of 28 in 1941, is now fiercely claimed as a seminal moment in the history of Indian modernism by the Indian government and strictly controlled by The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
The show’s amuse-bouche offers three large photographs in the entrance hall of the exhibition space that simply but effectively draw attention to the places that influenced the work of the artists — Mexico City for Kahlo, an ancient Hindu temple for Sher-Gil and the then Belgian Congo for Stern.
The starter brings viewers into their private worlds through curated sections on each, which provide snippets of filmed footage, photos, diaries and artefacts from their collections of pre-Colombian, Hindu and African art, which influenced each of their practices. One of Kahlo’s signature traditional Mexican dresses sits brimming with historical life on a mannequin behind a glass case. There is the added wink of knowing that many of the colour photos of her and the colour footage capturing her and her husband Diego Rivera in a fun-loving, romantic mood were taken by her lover, the American photographer Nickolas Muray. On the opposite wall Sher-Gil playfully interacts with elephants in India and, in her section, the serious and focused Stern goes about the business of drawing flowers at her desk in Cape Town.
Finally, there is the main course and here each artist enjoys one work presented in their own relevantly coloured and architecturally demarcated room: blue with Aztec-inspired walls for Kahlo; red earth-coloured Indian temple walls for Sher-Gil; and deep yellow West African-derived designs for Stern.
If you’ve never travelled to an overseas museum that boasts a Kahlo or two, then believe the hype because to see her Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird in the flesh is to realise why she’s been such a celebrated, mass-commercialised and iconic artistic figure in the almost seven decades since her death in 1954. Her famous eyes burn bright, accusingly following you, and the foliage behind her sweats and breathes with humidity and life that almost places you in the garden of her legendary house in Mexico City. Her beloved pet spider monkey, Fulang Chang, perches on one shoulder, while a black cat sits on the other.
Sher-Gil’s Three Girls in the adjacent room offers a very different but tenderly realised portrait of her nieces in their carefully coloured saris looking tentatively towards an uncertain future in an India that in 1935, when it was painted, was beginning to slowly feel its way towards an idea of independence.
Stern’s Watussi Woman in Red is part of a private collection and one of the less exhibited works by arguably South Africa’s most renowned modernist painter. It depicts with quiet dignity and gentle appreciation the beauty of Princess Emma Bakayishonga, sister of the Rwandan king Mutara III Rudahigwa, lost in a private moment of contemplation and dressed in bright red robes that complement Stern’s vivid yellow background.
Ultimately, the feast for the eyes and mind presented by JCAF offers plenty of new ideas about and insight into the work and the personal and professional lives of its three pioneering modernist women to ponder and digest before returning for a second helping.
• Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South is at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation until February 22 2023. Exhibition viewing is free, by appointment only. For more information and to make a booking visit jcaf.org.za
