South Africa Art

South Africa Art

South Africa is home to some of the most ancient and beautiful art in the world - the rock art of the ancestors of today's Bushman or San. It is also the scene of a host of vibrant and challenging contemporary artists producing new and important work.

Locally Rooted Art
During the colonial era, what artists there were in South Africa tended to concentrate on depicting this "new world" in detail as accurate as they could make it - though sometimes this led to selective emphasis. Artists such as Thomas Baines travelled the country recording its flora, fauna, people and landscapes - a form of reporting for people back in the metropolis.

Towards the end of the 19th century, painters Jan Volschenk and Hugo Naudé and the sculptor Anton van Wouw began, through their work, to establish a locally rooted art. Their work is the first glimpse of an artistic vision engaging with life as lived in South Africa, for its own sake, rather than as a "report" to the colonial master. It is the art of the moment in which South Africa, with Union in 1910 and thus the formal end of the colonial era, was beginning to acquire its own national identity.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the Dutch-born painter JH Pierneef brought a coolly geometric sensibility to the South African landscape, finding in it a strict but beautiful order; he also, in a way that fed into Afrikaner nationalist ideology, found it bereft of human inhabitants.

By the 1930s, two women artists, Maggie Laubscher and Irma Stern, brought a different kind of subjective gaze to South African art by using the techniques and sensibilities of post-impressionism and expressionism. Their bold way with colour and composition, and the assumption of a highly personal point of view, rather scandalised those with old-fashioned concepts of acceptable art.

Yet already younger artists such as Gregoire Boonzaier, Maud Sumner and Moses Kottler were rejoicing in the new spirit of cosmopolitanism they were able to bring to South African art.

Art and Apartheid
The apartheid years of South African history (1948-1994) saw a great diversity in South African art, ranging from landscape painting to abstract art, engagements with currents burgeoning in Europe and the United States, to a fiercely local sense of what it meant to be an artist in this country during troubled times. Sometimes South African art seemed to float above the political issues of the day; at other times it tackled them with vigour and insight.

Inevitably, in the early years of apartheid, as in the colonial era, black artists were largely neglected. It was left to white artists (who had the training and the resources, as well as a supportive gallery system) to build a corpus of South African art.

After World War II, returning soldiers and some immigrants brought European ideas to the South African art world. In the 1940s, Jean Welz, for instance, born in Austria in 1900, brought a detailed, nuanced and sophisticated style to still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscape paintings.

Maurice van Essche, born in Belgium in 1906, brought the modernist techniques of his teacher Matisse to specifically African subject matter, with powerfully stylised forms and often bright ("fauve" or wild) colourings.

[Tilly]

The Secret Behind the African Mask
By David Norden and Frank Heirmann


An interview between Frank Heirmann and David Norden:
How to you become an expert?

"It is like Jazz Music, most don't get a clue, because you must listen to it much and for a long time. You must see thousands of mask before understanding the mystery. The Nordens have been antique dealers for three generations. My mother collected African art and from the age of 6 I went with her to auctions. My father had from time to time African art in his shop on the Lange Leemstraat, but my mother kept the best pieces for herself. My father wasn't really an afro-specialist in the same way as my brother Jacob who took up the family shop specialized in antique music instruments. I too had the African virus and opened a double antique shop on the Sint-Jorispoort in 1992 - one for general antiques and one for tribal art. In 1998, I was able to buy a house in the Sint Katelijnevest and started to specialise more on African masks and statues."

What is the use of Masks?

"Masks are coming from animistic cultures, tribes who don't believe in one single god, but rather try to live in harmony with the ancestors’ spirits and nature’s forces. For the ritualistic ceremonies they carve masks and statues that are "empowered" by the village sorcerer. It is only after this empowerment that the masks can call upon the spirits and nature’s forces."

How many different kind of masks exist?

"The Masks are 'danced' during ceremonies. You have death masks for funerals, masks used during the harvest, hunting masks, initiation masks. Many tribes also have disease masks to prevent and heal. The Pende tribe from Congo has splendid objects that show a split tormented personality. Animal figures generally symbolise the forces of nature. The significance of certain masks, however, is still not known."

How old are these masks?

"For an African it's not the age which is essential. Every generation makes new masks. But some special samples are kept for generations. For an antique dealer and a collector a mask must be at least fifty years old, preferably with a traceable pedigree – a documented line of ownership confirming the age of the item. Typically, this means that it has been recorded who brought it back from the colonies, or better, that it was exposed a Museum’s permanent or temporary collections. The best masks are coming from the interbellum, the most valuable pieces were already exposed before the First World War. In Museums you can find masks whish are more than 600 years old, but these are historical curiosities."

Are there many fakes?

"Absolutely. There are two kinds of fakes. The "airport art" means pieces carved fast for the tourist market. These masks have never been danced or used. Then you have the more sophisticated fakes, items artificially made to look older and that give the impression of having been used in rituals. Only experts can tell the difference. There are laboratories that can date objects, but science doesn't know everything either. The style, the patina, and the way it has been carved give more clues to the experts. Real collectors buy only from specialists who can give them some guarantees. In case of doubt, I take pieces back without problem."

Price ticket?

"You get a nice tourist mask at 50 euros, a fine mask half a century old will easily cost 2,000 euros. Top pieces can go up to 200,000 euros. For most people these expensive masks are not relevant because they simply couldn’t tell the difference."

Who are the collectors then?

"With globalisation the interest in ethnic art has grow rapidly. In 1998, I started a website that now gets 3,000 visitors each week. The site has an international discussion platform with 400 members. Survey's showed that ethnographic art constitutes a mere two percent of the general art on offer. But more and more people interested in Western art, are now developing an interest in ethnic arts too. They buy a piece occasionally. Really knowledgeable collectors are rare. In Belgium I think they are only some 300. Luckily for me, I sell worldwide to good clients."

How alive is the mask culture?

"We see a revival in Africa, led by financial and touristic reasons. Also, animistic and tribal culture can be a way to express opposition or resistance to the ( Christian or Islamic) colonialists. It reinforces the identity".

Is there a relation with Carnival masks?

"Our disguises are a remnant from a far past. Did you know that in Germany they found masks from the XIXth century looking very similar to the African ones? Finally we are also animals, with a layer of culture. Halloween, students baptism, groups with signs or uniforms are in the same sphere as African mask rituals. Only in our civilisation it became a game, whereas the African believes in it."


David Norden
Sint Katelijnevest 27
B2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
Tel +32 (0)3 227.35.40
http://www.african-antiques.com
http://www.buyafricanantiques.com

Frank Heirmann.
Gazet van Antwerpen
http://www.gazetvanantwerpen.be/

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