CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR NEVILLE DUBOW

Chairperson of the Acquisitions Committee of the South African National Gallery, 1982 – 1995

Jane Taylor: The exhibition ‘Contemporary South African Art 1985 – 1995’ to be housed at the South African National Gallery from the end of this year is a selection of the works acquired during this period for the Gallery's Permanent Collection. The exhibition is thus conceived and designed within the logics and practices of what we now refer to as ‘the New South Africa’; it forms only part of a far larger body of works. It is a subset of those works acquired by the Gallery from 1985 to 1995. Could you sketch for us some sense of the shifting dynamics within acquisition policies and practices during this period, of which some of the tensions and contradictions might not be evident to the general public through a curated exhibition of this sort?

Neville Dubow: Probably the first thing that has to be understood is that there has certainly been a shift in the dynamics within acquisition policies and practices, to the extent that in the very early days it would have been hard to say that there was an Acquisitions Policy as such. The practice of acquisition was rather ad hoc. I can recall sitting around the boardroom table in 1971, when in fact works were simply politely passed around the boardroom table and people said: ‘Oh, that's nice and that's nice and that's nice’, and there was very little discussion. I don't think that anybody was aware of a particular Acquisitions Policy. The idea was to reach a polite gentlemen's agreement and what was being put forward was generally acceptable and the accent then was on polite consensus amongst gentlemen. I can recall a previous chairman of the Acquisitions Committee, who indeed was a very nice man from Stellenbosch University, and his credo was ‘let's reach consensus in a nice and friendly way’. If there was a contestational view, he used to get awfully upset. So, the idea was that, let's agree amongst ourselves and essentially the process was, I guess, something of an unchallenging one. But in terms of shifting dynamics, I think that one has to understand the Board of the South African National Gallery against what South Africa was like in those days and what role the Board perceived itself as playing. The mood of the Board was conservative, not necessarily in the worst sense of the word but in the sense of ‘let's not rock the boat’. I think that the Board, even those who were Government or State appointees, probably saw themselves as rather more ‘verlig’ than the State that they represented, and when it came to discussing really hard issues in terms of the State trying to direct which way the Art would go, there were various sort of tut tut noises being made by those members of the Board who were there as representatives of the State. The sort of atmosphere, I guess, of the Board could be compared to a gentlemen's club. I think that, with a few exceptions, it was very much a network of people who knew each other. They were fairly comfortable in the corridors of power. There was no talk, as I can recall it, about art and ideology.

JT: So is it accurate, then, to characterise the acquisitions process as a shared assumption by the majority of people there, that they understood what was of cultural value and that anything that they appreciated would necessarily have inherent interest for a national collection?

ND: Yes, I think that, broadly speaking, there was an assumption that members of the Board were civilised representatives of the sort of ruling constituencies who knew what is right. What was chosen was what the National Gallery should have but, of course, these things weren't ever spelt out in those day. Those sort of assumptions were implicit. I think that there was a general consensus among most of the members of the Board about what was good taste and what was not and I think that there were hierarchies of values which were generally not challenged. This does not mean to say, and I must be quite clear about this, that those hierarchies were necessarily always wrong or that some of the acquisitions were not good and informed of their kind, but what I'm trying to get across is that there was generally not an atmosphere of contestation of the thrust and parry of ideas. People were very anxious not to be confrontational. It was assumed that we all knew why we were there and let's get on with the job in the most polite and civilised way, even though it was well known that there were wide differences in political opinion on the part of some of the members of the Board. Board meetings were conducted, as they continued to be until very recently alternately in Afrikaans and English. I think that when there were issues that were discussed which were perceived to be weighty issues which involved State funding and that kind of thing, the voices that one heard were very much those of the Afrikaans establishment speaking in their mother language.

Emma Bedford: Does this apply to the Acquisitions Committee as well, and what period are you talking about?

ND: The period I'm talking about now is really the period of the 1970s. To be frank, I can't recall exactly when it was that the Acquisitions Committee was formulated as a coherent body in its own right that made the decisions that were then presented to the full Board. My sense is that it happened in the 1970s, but I may be wrong there. In terms of the documentation that you provided, I see that the first attempt at making a coherent Acquisitions Policy statement goes back to 1980, and in fact I think that that statement speaks for itself. It says that the policy of the South African National Gallery was directed at the extension and enhancement of our collections in several different areas: art from European founder countries as well as South African art should be represented in the Gallery. This means that Netherlandish, British, French and German art of all periods should be acquired as well as traditional art from Africa. The policy is also aimed at acquiring important examples of twentieth-century Western art. There is a very important rider paragraph that goes on: ‘With the limited funds available to the Gallery for the purchase of art, no significant additions to the modern Western or the older European collections have been made for many years’. Now, I think that these emphases actually describe what the Gallery was about in those days. There is a curious irony here which I think has to be taken into account in terms of the previous dispensation, and this indeed applied even before the cultural boycott of South Africa. Those members of the Board who saw themselves as being in any way ‘progressive’ saw their duty as keeping an open window to the world. In other words, they thought they should try to keep in touch with international developments — to come to terms with international abstraction, for argument's sake. I think that this has to be seen in the face of the increasing chauvinism and parochialism of the Total Onslaught era. Against this kind of thinking to introduce abstact art into the Gallery was in a curious way some kind of a victory. There was the notion that abstaction was some kind of foreign importation which was not really the way in which things should be done in South Africa. On the other hand, it was possible for artists working in abstract terms here to be motivated by whatever it was that motivated them without their clear meaning and intent actually being clearly spelt out.

JT: Recently, the position has often been expressed that the South African National Gallery holds in trust a collection of works that belongs to the broad community of South African citizens. Is there a distinction to be made between this function of the Gallery as a repository, and a more interventive role to be played by the Acquisitions Committee? To what extent should the Committee challenge, provoke, and direct attitude towards and markets in South African art? Should it buy controversial, experimental and provocative works?

ND: In general terms I think that the thrust of an Acquisitions Committee should be somewhere between conventional received wisdom and being sharpened by the particular insights of the people with distinctive expertise and training who make up the Acquisitions Committee. I think that any Acquisitions Policy which seeks to operate at the cutting edge of challenging art is by definition going to challenge and provoke and, in the words of your question, direct attitudes towards art making in ways which are distinct from those which are represented by the conventionally successful commercial galleries. In other words, I think it is important for an Acquisitions Committee not to give people the kind of things that they might necessarily expect to find in a national gallery, and to this extent I think that an Acquisitions Committee should be as adventurous as it can, whilst at the same time not compromising on quality. I think that the notion of quality should be there as a constant and, as far as possible, as an absolute. If one abandons the notion of quality to a completely relativistic position then one is on some kind of a slippery slope. So I think that, yes, one can be adventurous, one can buy work of an experimental kind, but I think that one can only do so if one has the necessary skills on the Acquisitions Committee to be able to make some kind of a meaningful distinction between an art experiment that actually works and an art experiment that ends up in a clumsy kind of blunder. What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that the Acquisitions Committee should present a national gallery filled with walls only of art that is comfortable to live with.

JT: In recent South African art production, artistic experiment frequently also meant political engagement. Do you recall any particular episodes in the recent history of acquisitions practice at the Gallery that would illustrate some of the links between issues of ‘quality’, artistic experiment and politics?

ND: Well, let me tell you about the acquisition of a work by Paul Stopforth. This was in a way a key acquisition, and it is probably one of the more important works that the gallery acquired in the days of the old dispensation. I think it was 1979; the Director was Raymund van Niekerk and it was probably not too long after he took over. The work was a three-part work by Stopforth, quite large, showing three male heads, somewhat sinister, shaded by sunglasses; the work was originally called The Interrogators.

The title, of course, gave the clue to the work. The images were taken, I imagine, from newspaper photographs of three of the most prominent secret police interrogators of the days of Total Onslaught and these were mounted one above the other in a vertical way; it was quite a large-scale work. The manner of the piece was a sort of heightened realism, almost with a cinematographic eye, if you like. The technique was very distinctive.

EB: Yes, graphite powder on wax on canvas and he'd scratched into the wax in a sgraffito technique.

ND: The work was first submitted to the Acquisitions Committee as I recall it and there were certain uneasy feelings as to whether this would be acceptable to the full Board, or not. In those days anything that the Acquisitions Committee was not completely unanimous about would be submitted to the full Board and the work was then submitted to the full Board, and I had known of the work earlier of course, and I had known of it under its original title which was The Interrogators. I did note, however, that the title under which the work was submitted to the Board had been changed. It was no longer labelled The Interrogators, it was just simply labelled Triptych. I think that only the Director, Raymund van Niekerk and myself really knew what the work was about and what its real provenance was. There was a lot of uneasy humming and hawing amongst the members of the Board and I got the sense that those members of the Board who were there as State representatives had a kind of an uneasy feeling that they had seen these people before and they more or less knew who they might be but they were not prepared to say so, and there was a general feeling of unease. Nobody was prepared to say an outright ‘no’; nobody quite knew what the work was about; nobody was prepared to say ‘yes’. In the end that particular decision was referred to me and I was asked to give a view and I said that yes, I definitely thought the work should be acquired by the Board because for many reasons I found that the technique of its presentation was rather interesting. I phrased this in a way to allow those members of the Board who actually had their doubts to think that I was simply referring to the techniques whereby the work was realised. This was partly true, but I was also thinking of the technique whereby the real title of the work was withheld and was submitted under a rather more bland title. In the event, the work was acquired; it went on display. I seem to recall seeing it hanging in the front room and after a certain passage of time the bland title Triptych was withdrawn and the real title of the work re appeared and it was there under the rubric of The Interrogators. I don't know whether the members of the Board who were party to the acquisition had cause to raise the matter again. There came a time when people generally became more aware of what was going on in the country, where it became quite clear what the work was about. At the time that it was actually acquired by the Board, many of the Board members could affect not knowing what the work really was about. In a sense, I think that they themselves would not have wished to have been interrogated beyond a certain point as to why they would not wish that work to be acquired.

JT: So to actually challenge the acquisition in some way would have been to disclose their too close intimacy with the system of State control?

ND: Precisely, because it would then be to acknowledge a process which they would prefer not to have to acknowledge publicly.

EB: In a different way the meaning of the work was quite clear amongst staff and I think to many of our audiences. It became a focal point for much of the work that was done by the Education Division of the Gallery. I can remember being an Education Officer at the time and conducting tours for large school groups around this work. The three faces are portraits of the security policemen who interrogated Steve Biko and the chair that appears in the work is the one to which he was bound. And so this piece became a springboard for us talking about very important people and events in our history, things which weren't being talked about in their school history texts or in other ways; and so it enabled education staff at the gallery to engage in people's education at the very time in which the cultural boycott was also building up and being directed against the National Gallery as a State institution.

JT: So, there are very interesting and curious dynamics at work because on one hand one could have said that Stopforth had almost reneged on his own contract with himself by changing the title. So much of the meaning of the work is entailed in the title of The Interrogators; however, by withholding the title he actually got it into a public institution that gave you, Emma, access to use that work for all sorts of other purposes.

EB: Yes, but I wonder if Stopforth changed the title. I think it would be more likely to have been the Director at the time, Raymund Van Niekerk.

ND: Yes, that's a very interesting point and I don't know the answer to that. I don't know who was instrumental in changing the titles but whichever way, it was a ploy that that could be likened to a kind of Trojan Horse tactic. In the end, the horse slips into the citadel, the horse is opened up, and all sorts of things spill out.

EB: The Director was very much aware of the power of this work. From time to time when we had visits from key people in the Education Ministry, the work had to be taken down and replaced with a less ontroversial work.

JT: But he would have been part of the Acquisitions Committee that bought the work, so he was integral to its acquisition but at the same time very definitely managing when and where it was strategically screened. One of the other questions that I wanted to ask is about the racial demographics of acquisition.

EB: Part of the Acquisitions Policy in the last couple of years has been a drive to be representative of the majority of South Africans or South African artists and we've tried to address that in various ways, and of course this has thrown out all sorts of debates around what we acquire and why we acquire works.

JT: How does one address or make redress for the kind of racist and culturalist practices of a past policy without perpetuating the same or related racist practices? If one did not buy black artists in the past, should one now buy black artists? There is a dynamic of a kind of compensatory racism that one gets caught in; how do you implement a policy that, on one hand, makes redress for historical inequities, but which is not racist? Also, can one get a sense of this history from the list of how many works by so called black artists have been bought in the past ten years? Should one also consider what these purchases represent financially? If works by black artists represent one percent of the acquisitions expenditure, even though they make up thirty percent of the works acquired ... these questions raise issues about how one makes redress.

ND: This is a very complex question indeed and I think that there's no one easy answer to it, so I will try to answer it by approaching various issues that need to be teased out of this. The first thing is that we do definitely see things completely differently now to how they were perceived — even as recently as the decade of the 80s, particularly the early 80s. Let me answer it in these terms: What had previously been seen as a South African provincialism in the days of high modernism is now seen as a kind of a worthwhile regionalism. The old paradigm of an art world that had as its centre, say, an axis that ran from New York to Paris on the one hand, or New York to Britain on the other, has been replaced by a model where what is happening at the margins is really seen as being extremely important. I think that the art world began to doubt itself and to think that the centre really wasn't holding, that things were falling apart, and when it came to looking for energy, it was perceived that energy may lie at the margins. I saw this very clearly in 1989 in Paris when they held the ‘Magicians of the Earth’ exhibition. When I saw that exhibition, I had the feeling that I, as a South African, was no longer at the outermost margin of an artworld. I felt that what was happening in South Africa had anticipated what was happening in Paris. I think one has to make the distinction between deliberately not buying black art in the 1980s, as opposed to not really knowing or caring about the fact that black art was being made. So, it is a question really of awareness; it is a question of what was judged the most important part of a value system. Reciprocally, I think that what was being done by so called black artists in the late 1970s and in the early part of the 80s might not even have been perceived (even self-perceived) as being the kind of stuff that was meant to end up in art galleries. It was rather seen as the kind of stuff meant to supply a commodity that would be of interest to certain commercial art galleries, notably in Johannesburg, who were interested in what was becoming known in their terms as ‘the township style’. Artists were very happy to supply what was being demanded of them. The National Gallery at that stage had a particular mindset. It did not see that as the kind of art that necessarily should be inside a national art gallery — it was the kind of stuff that was being flogged in Johannesburg commercial galleries.

EB: They were being bought by the National Gallery but not many works or much money being spent.

ND: Yes, but I think that it was being bought very much as the exception rather than the rule — not really the kind of thing to start looking for. I think that there is the realisation now amongst practicing black artists generally that there is more to making art than the kind of thing that is readily disposable in commercial art galleries in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. But keen eyed buying on the part of the National Gallery can, in fact, stimulate art production where artists themselves do not make incorrect assumptions about the kind of art that can end up on the walls of a gallery. So, I think that in this sense it becomes very much of an interactive process and there is a new dynamic at work, which I think is an important one.

EB: What about the whole issue of ‘art as a weapon of the struggle’ and the extent to which South African artists have engaged with the politics of the day? There were major political events which provoked art works, particularly during the last decade, and much of the art that was acquired by the Gallery is the art which engages with those political issues.

ND: Yes, but I think that that is as it should be. I recall particularly a large work done by Paul Grendon when he was senior student at the Michaelis School.

EB: Yes, about 1984 to 1986.

ND: The centre panel of that work is Ons vir jou Suid Afrika and the iconography is very much that of a militarist/colonialist process. The interesting thing is that Paul Grendon very consciously said that he wanted to produce work that would not end up in a State institution. The idea was that this work would be done on a series of screens and it would be pre eminently suitable to be shown in community centres. In other words, it could be shared, it could be packed — the panels could be packed and it could be shown elsewhere. This was an attempt by him to confront or to confound the institutionalised system of showing art. In the end it never really reached its target audience for whatever reason and ultimately the work was acquired, as you know, by the National Gallery. What I'm trying to say is that there comes a particular point where, even though the final battle has not been won, it becomes quite clear that what is being said is so important that it can't really be kept out of a State institution. There is a sense that artists are pointing very clearly to things which people, reluctantly at first perhaps, but afterwards with increasing urgency, begin to realise that they simply have to take stock of. I think that probably one of the most exciting elements of art making of the ‘protest’ kind is art that does seriously engage itself with social and political issues of the day, art that is really at the cutting edge, because there is an urgency in its making, because there was a reason for such art to be made. Arising out of this, there were very clear reasons why such work should be acquired, both in social and political terms and also purely in terms of the formal strength of the work itself. Work of that kind preceded then by at least five years or so, the climactic turning points in our political history; the De Klerk speech of February 1990 and the release sometime after that of Nelson Mandela. The kind of work being done by students in art schools immediately before it became quite clear that the revolution actually was going to happen, was really of a very much more challenging kind than the work that has been done since. Particularly if one looks at work that students are doing post-1994 — the work itself is less certain than it was in the era when there were very clear divisions between us and them, between the good guys and the bad guys. Once art is made in celebration of a struggle already won or a revolution already achieved, it tends to act as an endorsement and a reinforcement, and that kind of art can very easily be manipulated by the new power brokers in a way which I think we need to look at very carefully indeed. What is an artist going to be doing after 1999 when we will have passed the messianic period of the South African political scene and when there is no longer the supreme icon of Mandela in South African paintings and on flags and banners? Now, I have very clear sense inside myself that there is a role for the artist to play here, and in a sense it is not all that far removed from the role of the artist under the old regime. The artist has to continue to question control and to challenge perceived conventional wisdoms. In fact, I think that after the revolution has been won the role of the artist becomes even more crucially important than in the pre revolutionary phase. He's still got to formulate those very tough and very difficult questions that are going to somehow stop the ‘fat cats’ in their stride. The period that we are going through at the moment is a kind of interregnum. For me the role of the artist in this is very crucial and the role of the National Gallery and the role of the Acquisitions Committee in allowing artists who wish to ask difficult and awkward and challenging questions and the degree to which an Acquisitions Committee offers such artists a venue to confront and to challenge — I see that as being a very key role indeed. In other words, I would like to think that the National Gallery should buy work of a kind that might cause a future Director to wonder whether that work could still hang when the future Minister of Culture comes to visit the Gallery. I would like to think that the answer would be yes, that work must stay on the walls — I would like to think that the work would not be taken down. Equally well I like to think that that kind of challenging work would still continue to be made and would still continue to be acquired.

JT: What would you consider to be the strengths of the South African National Gallery in terms of its Permanent Collection, so that the Committee can develop that strength and give a very distinctive character to the Gallery? How would you characterise, either in terms of media or in terms of period, what the great resources of the South African National Gallery are?

ND: Historically, I think that its holdings of the Victorian period do constitute a strength, they certainly do show where we have come from and I think that it is entirely futile for us to try to wish away our colonial past and to pretend that it did not happen. I think that, what with the tremendous escalation of prices of the Victorian era in the international art market, it's unlikely that we could afford any more work of that kind. However, I do think that what we do have constitutes a resource. Considering the very small amount of funding that we do have to acquire work, I support the general direction of the policy over the last ten years which has been to explore and to expand areas of art making in South Africa and particularly those areas which would not normally before have been seen, provided that this is done on a selective basis with quality as a criterion. I think that it is very important to make it clear to the artists that work of such and such a kind can in fact find its place in a national gallery. I think that the kind of initiative that happened in the past, where artists were given specific commissions by the National Gallery, allowed them to work on a scale that they normally would not work in, because of the limits of the commercial art market. That was a healthy process and should be continued. I think that with South Africa's re entry into the world, there is no point in trying to compete for the kind of high priced works of the international art market that people have access to in Paris, London or New York. I think that the awareness of that kind of work can be made available by other means. What the National Gallery here needs to do is to continue to expand its collection of South African work in a way that encourages more potent and more powerful and more significant work to be made — I would see that as a major area. At the same time it does not mean that it should close itself to opportunities which are now being presented, of acquiring work in other areas of the world without necessarily actually having to buy them. In real terms, I think that one could perhaps engage in a series of exchanges of work. I see no reason why work of international quality could not be acquired in a form of extended loan or exchange basis. Once we have become part of the world, once we agree to enter the world, I think that we can perhaps gain access to dialogue with the rest of the world in a rather more creative way than has been possible before.

EB: In fact, there's been an example of that kind of extended loan through the Marlene Dumas long loan.

ND: Yes, I'm thinking of that and I'm thinking of that Biennale work from New Zealand which in the end the Acquisitions Committee rather hummed and hawed over as to whether the work should finally be acquired because it was simply too big to be stored.

JT: But what you're suggesting here is quite interesting because there's always been a kind of perception that to buy locally meant to close oneself off to an international constituency. What you're saying is not that we enter a new era of parochialism, but rather that we buy locally and use that as a resource to trade with internationally. So in fact by buying strong, sophisticated, challenging works locally, we accumulate the cultural capital with which we make ourselves enter an international arena; it increases our international capacity rather than limits it.

ND: I think that these are the new trade beads of our re entry into the world and I think that part of the process is the sort of repatriation which is a process that we did engage in over the last years when I was on the Acquisitions Committee, trying to bring back as much as we could into the country. I think that once it becomes internationally well known, that the best collection of South African art in the world of the so-called transitional era between the immediately ‘pre negotiated revolution’ period and the ‘post negotiated revolution’ period, is owned by the South African National Gallery, this becomes a very valuable counter for works that can be traded, works that can be exchanged on the basis of extended loans. So I really do believe that we can still be part of the world. I deplore more sterile extremes of this hollow debate between Afrocentrism on the one hand and Eurocentrism on the other hand — we have to move beyond those — we are part of the world and I think that what we have to say to the world is of interest. I think that we should arm and equip ourselves with the very best of what is being thought of and what is being made in the part of the world that we know. I've always believed in a universalism, but I don't think that universalist works of art are made if one consciously strives to make a universal statement. I think that if you make a statement which arises out of a particular appreciation of the specific sort of situation that one's own society has lived through then you do make a universal statement. I believe that those specificities have a universal implication and they will be understood universally.

EB: Are there any other key works that you want to mention or talk about? I know you've talked about Vivienne Koorland’s work and other work produced by South African artists in exile or South Africans that have left the country for whatever reason and have continued to produce works that resonated with significance for us in South Africa.

ND: The work done by Vivienne Koorland is work that came from a certain cultural experience, a certain kind of Eastern and central European experience (I'm talking of the Holocaust) which was indeed experienced by members of her own family. I'm thinking specifically about her mother. Those works are the kind of things that come from direct and indirectly lived experience; it is very difficult, and in the end futile, to make the distinction between direct experience and indirect experience because the two permeate each other by a process of cultural imagination and cultural osmosis. I do not believe that an artist necessarily has to have been shot to empathise with those who have. For example, what started as an imaginative projection when Kevin Brand made his Nineteen Boys Running did not arise because he was actually one of those boys that was being shot at. That work had its origin in a newspaper photograph that Kevin Brand was able to identify with. I would certainly think that it is an excellent thing to have acquired those heads by Marlene Dumas. In a sense those works are not too far removed from the kind of things that she was exploring when she was a student at Michaelis School. I think that other works which are very special to the South African experience are the works by Jane Alexander, in particular her early Butcher Boys and also of the work that we fairly recently acquired of the man contemplating the TV set. I think that those are works which are very much in line with what I was talking about earlier, as having a universal resonance but coming out of an understanding of a particularised experience. I think that those are the kinds of work that we should be looking for and those are the kind of opportunities that we should be giving artists.

JT: It clearly does take some kind of patronage for these artists to have been able to work with such scale and such seriousness. We are really going to have to find ways of providing patronage to our artists.

EB: None of the examples of key works given were by black artists — is that something that we have to consider?

ND: Let's just think where all the gaps are. Do we really have a good enough example, say of the works of somebody like Hlungwane?

JT: A lot of those great works by black South African artists have been bought by the international community. They're expensive and they are going overseas. A really critical threat to local holdings is that major works by black artists are often being bought overseas.

EB: Even artists in our own community, here in the Western Cape.

JT: Willy Bester’s work sells overseas for tens of thousands of rands, but we can't afford to pay, or won't, pay that sort of price for them locally.

EB: So, to what extent are we at the National Gallery unable to build the best or most representative collection?

ND: I think that there are two parts to this question. On the one hand, what we've done — and it’s a bit of an irony — we have created a platform for artists to be seen on and to be able to leap off into the international art market at a higher level than we can afford to buy ourselves. Which brings me back to a crucial point.

The proportion of the total budget of the National Gallery that is given to the Acquisitions Committee is so small that it is ultimately indefensible. I think that if the National Gallery is going to carry out its mandate and to do the kind of things that we've been talking about, it is simply going to have to find ways and means of increasing its acquisitions budget. Now, as I recall, the amount that we had to spend, up to last year when I was still on the Acquisitions Committee, was something like R200 000,00 annually. In real terms that R200 000 has not significantly increased in the last 5 or 8 or 10 years. In terms of what R200 000 can buy now, it has become absolutely ridiculous. Quite obviously, this situation cannot continue. The example of Willy Bester was mentioned as a case and I'm quite sure I can make the same point about William Kentridge and half a dozen other artists who have now become international high flyers. We have created a particular focus and a shaft of understanding for art coming from South African artists. As a result we are no longer able to buy their works. I suppose there is a kind of a nice irony now, but I don't think that it’s a situation in which we can afford to be complacent. So, probably, the answer is to spot the high flyers before they fly so high that we can no longer afford to buy them.

Jane Taylor
(Chairperson of the Acquisitions Committee from 1996)

Emma Bedford
(Head: Curatorial Departments)

Return to Main Index