South Africa's culture of collecting: the unofficial history

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Sandra Klopper

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).

[FIGURES 2-4 OMITTED]

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.