There is a settled etiquette to South African funerals, particularly when they are for middling politicos. Tents go up. Caterers fuss. Guests stuffed into fancy clothes arrive. Speeches are read. Time drags. The living wonder if they are not possibly dead, too.
To be clear, Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, which is celebrating 150 years with a new exhibition, Breaking Down the Walls, is not dead, despite prophesies otherwise. But a recent splash to mark the reopening of the country’s oldest art museum after a five-month closure had the air of a funeral.
A tent was erected. There were caterers, police, musicians, freeloaders, VIP guests and a television crew for Deputy Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Nocawe Mafu. Speeches were made. History was dissected. Goals were proposed. Thumbs were twiddled.
It was sunny and windless when the final speech concluded. The heavy-wooden doors of the National Gallery were dramatically thrown open. It was unclear from what presented inside – a DJ playing upbeat music in an overfull room of art – whether guests were attending an after-tears party, or an art bazaar organised by a church group from Caldeon.
Andrew Lamprecht, this public museum’s newly appointed curator of historical paintings and sculpture, has opted to fill every bit of wall space in the first gallery with pictures. This timeworn strategy has enabled him to show off a larger than usual amount of the museum’s impressive 11,000-strong collection.
Breaking Down the Walls explores what 150 years of collecting has netted the state-owned museum, and by implication the South African nation. The lion’s share of Lamprecht’s exhibition comprises paintings, drawings, photos and sculptures. Some of the painting on view is grim, like the gilded Victoriana, but there is far more that is engrossing, even riveting – like two astounding roundels by George Pemba.
These circular compositions, which are titled Harvesting the Wheatfields, are undated but likely derive from the artist’s hardscrabble years before fame softly knocked in the late 1970s. The Pemba diptych was secured for the museum by the South African Heritage Resources Agency in 2011.
There is also a fabulous drawing by Fikile Magadlela that was acquired by the museum in 1977. Untitled and undated, this tall work depicts a blazing sun over a pyramid, which is rooted to an upturned figure. It is vintage 1970s black consciousness with a touch of surrealism.
Breaking Down the Walls includes Jane Alexander’s sculpture The Butcher Boys, which portrays three oil-painted plaster figures seated on a bench. It was made in 1985-86 and has long been a popular drawcard for the museum.
Alexander, who was present at the opening, has long stipulated that the public may not photograph her best-known work. It is a fair request: to photograph does not mean to see. By the same token, the camera has become a prosthetic aid for seeing. A hapless docent placed near Alexander’s work had to negotiate this contradiction. “No photography,” he stated all evening.
Elsewhere in the museum, in a room displaying new acquisitions, a couple made photo faces in front of Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey’s sculpture Don’t Forget Home (2017). This hanging work is made from bits of yellow plastic derived from Ghana’s ubiquitous “Kufuor gallon” jerrycans. It was acquired this year.
In a show featuring fine examples of Japanese woodblock prints and Dutch Golden Age portraits, Clottey’s work sends a strong signal: the National Gallery is rethinking its role and ambit as a museum located in Africa.
When the National Gallery unexpectedly closed its doors in May, the public museum asked for forbearance. Downtime was needed to enable staff to “reimagine” the museum’s exhibitions and collections practices, as well as tweak its education programme. The promised closure of four months turned into five. The museum, it appeared, had slipped back into pandemic time. But then a tent arrived.
Lamprecht’s big renewal exhibition occupies all 11 of the museum’s public galleries, as well as the courtyard sculpture garden, which is devoted to a large installation by artist and activist Sue Williamson. Messages from the Moat (1997) comprises a suspended rope fishing net filled with glass bottles engraved with the details of slaves traded in Cape Town – it is owned by the art museum.
Most of the work on view is from the National Gallery’s collection, but there are also pieces from parent institution Iziko Museums’ collections of social and natural history.
Examples include a 3000-year-old stone engraving depicting a starburst. The petroglyph was found near Kimberley.
This work by an unrecorded artist is displayed near Randlord Sir Abe Bailey’s bequest of equestrian pictures by the likes of English painter George Stubbs. The bequest has been a ball and chain for past directors and curators because of legal requirements around the bequest’s permanent display. Lamprecht has cannily placed Bailey’s horse pictures next to Mary Sibande’s celebrated sculpture The Reign (2010), which portrays a black female figure in a billowing blue dress astride a rearing horse.
Sibande’s kitchy work, which was acquired during the tenure of former director Riason Naidoo with the assistance of the Friends of the National Gallery, remains a hit. Phones were whipped out by visitors. Click. Hashtag. Post.
The pageantry of being seen next to a showpiece artwork – as opposed to quietly looking at it – marks an ambiguous win for a public museum struggling to assert its relevance in the face of competition from private-owned art musems like Zeitz MOCAA and Norval Foundation. That word “public” is key.
“The exhibition hopes to break down the walls and silos within Iziko Museums,” explains a wall text introducing the exhibition. “It is also the aim to break down boundaries to allow for greater inclusivity and to draw in new audiences.”
The latter ambition has been a habitual goal of the museum’s post-apartheid administrators and curators.
The National Gallery has its origins in an 1871 bequest by farmer Thomas Butterworth Bayley of 45 artworks and money to establish of a public art gallery in the capital of the Cape Colony. It was a grand idea but failed to gather momentum.
The whitewashed building on Government Lane where the National Gallery is located only opened in 1930. Its launch was presided over by an English aristo and his princess wife, who in 1931 bequeathed a monumental landscape painting by J.H. Pierneef to cultivate amity with Afrikaner visitors.
Produced in 1930, Pierneef’s work depicts a mountain vista at Entabeni in the Soutpansberg. It is a remarkable piece of nature worship by an outstanding painter known to trot out potboilers. It is also hard to find. The Pierneef is hidden in a dark recess of the exhibition, near another landscape painting, a view of Lake Kivu by Irma Stern.
Stern, the most valuable artist at auction after Marlene Dumas, has many paintings dotted across the exhibition. They all seem lost, in part because Lamprecht has opted for big ideas and obvious juxtapositions. So Gladys” Mgudlandlu’s bird studies are shown next to a bird painting by Flemish seventeenth-century painter Frans Snyders, for instance.
This strategy tends to overlook context and history. Bessie Head was conflicted about Mgudlandlu’s nature focus amidst political struggle and described her as an “exuberant innocent”. Stern and fellow expressionist Wolf Kibel, also on show, outraged conservative Cape Town when they first exhibited in the 1920s and 30s. The museum’s large holding of 19th-century English art clarifies the outrage, although this bit of art history is not explicitly narrated to audiences.
Lamprecht has however paused to offer verbal context around a 1972 portrait by Hendrik Slijper. The work was once thought to portray disgraced VOC administrator Jan van Riebeeck, who was despatched to the southern tip of Africa to build a food garden. Slijper’s portrait is shown on its side, leaning against the wall, in a room devoted to works exploring nationhood and resistance. There are works by Ernest Cole, Gavin Jantjes, Pat Mautloa, Malcom Payne and Paul Stopforth, as well as a photo of Sethembile Msezane wearing a bird costume. It was taken at the jubilant 2015 removal of a statue portraying Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town.
What does it mean to decolonise and reimagine a museum? Lamprecht is not the first curator to take on this question.
In 2010, Riason Naidoo, then newly appointed as director, put together a big exhibition that also took over the whole museum. Titled 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective, it too explored ideas of nationhood and resistance. It too was framed by bold claims. It too contained eyecatching works but lacked precision and rigour.
Notionally controversial, although really not, Naidoo’s exhibition was followed in 2011 by Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter, a full-colour heart attack guest curated by Lamprecht. In 2015, the museum’s supervisory board opted to not renew Naidoo’s five-year contract. The protracted litigation that followed culminated in Iziko doing away with the role of director.
The National Gallery’s drift into obsolescence has been punctuated by numerous crises, many sparked by poorly conceived and controversial exhibitions like The Art of Disruptions (2016) and Our Lady (2017). To be fair, the exhibitions Women’s Work (2016) and Not the Usual Suspects (2018) were commanding exercises, but they were outliers rather than affirmations of the museum’s responsibilities and capabilities.
More fundamentally, the National Gallery has spectacularly failed to capitalise on global media attention on Cape Town. Its achievements are even missed by locals. Many in the Cape Town art community were unaware that the museum was closed, or had reopened with new wall paint.
Will a brash exhibition showing everything and kitchen sink on walls painted purple, mustard and acid green produce a turnaround for this ailing institution? Sue Williamson, who will be exhibiting with Lebohang Kganye in Philadelphia in 2023, says it is important to support the museum at this critical juncture. I agree, especially since the next tent outside the National Gallery may be for its actual funeral.
