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The Haenggi Foundation responds: |
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Dear Andries, I trust this finds you well. I wish to comment on your article which does not cover the whole ground and I refer in particular to your statement: “There may be various reasons for this obvious lack, but one wonders whether galleries and dealers representing artists should not, at least partially, be held accountable.” In the early 70s, I participated at the Art Basle as a South African gallery, having the benefit of being Swiss, having lived in Basel in my youth, and speaking the language. It did not help much. I also had an expensively placed gallery in London – what sold were internationally known artists, or English artists, hardly anything important from SA, the odd piece or some graphics maybe. Over the years, lots of art had been sold from our Johannesburg galleries to overseas visitors, mainly businessmen, Chairmen of overseas companies, until this died out due to political pressures and other constraints at that time – this was clearly also experienced by other Johannesburg galleries. When I went back to my home-country in 1993-94, I promptly arranged group or one-man shows in Switzerland, advertised extensively, even had a gallery in Basel from 1997 for a while, etc. etc. – Now South African art was considered “from the Apartheid period“, or offered by a white person, and much more of such nonsense (Basel and Geneva are the two most “lefty” cities on the political scene in Switzerland, which has some bearing, still to-day). Over the decades, I tried many times to put important pieces by leading SA artists, both black and white, on auction houses in Switzerland – the auctioneers’ story was almost always “the auction house only takes approved works by artists who are handled by well-known galleries in Europe and who were covered in a number of publications or who could show published catalogues”. You offered the same works to top galleries in Zurich etc. and the question was “when was the artist sold at an international auction” or what publications have been made about the artists; you tried to print a publication in Switzerland and you were confronted with having to guarantee and pay in advance for 10’000 books or the like. So, there was hardly any exposure of SA art among the top dealers outside South Africa, and museums abroad would at that time not touch SA art. The only chance a South African artist had was to live and work abroad and over the years build up a relationship with dealers in Europe. To my mind come people like Christo Coetzee, Frank Spears, Douglas Portway, Louis Maqhubela, even Desmond Greig, Eben Leibbrandt when they lived for a few years in Europe, or artists like Armando Baldinelli, the Jaroszynskis and others who mostly paid out of their own pockets for expensive gallery exhibitions in the USA or Europe. But a permanent market penetration and an acceptance by the top people that matter internationally (in the top gallery/museum and publishing world) never happened, unless for obvious reasons like Marlene Dumas and to a very limited scope artists like Richard Wake, Basil Frank, in which case local groupings were interested in their work. You must just check on how many South Africa dealers tried their luck to have their own gallery or offices in Europe or the USA – nobody made it on South African art alone, not much came out of it in the end. The artists that make it to-day are mainly new and younger acceptable and accepted artists, but I feel it is a crying shame that thousands of overseas buyers came to SA over the years, they acquired art from SA artists because they loved it, or as a memento, and now that their children want to sell these works, where do they go? All they can do is sell back to SA collectors via Sotheby’s in Johannesburg ONLY (if they even know about Sotheby’s in JHB) or go to a second-hand shop or flea-market. This is also part of the reason I have invested many years during my retirement – with much pleasure – in putting up our various websites – they offer plenty of free information on the SA art scene from the 60s to the late 90s – hundreds of pages and images. Weekly, we are being asked by current owners outside South Africa for information on some artists from the 60s to the 80s whose work was picked up e.g. on some flea market in the mid-USA and the like, unless they inherited these works which they did not want to keep. It is all very sad, really, so much should and could have been done by official, semi-official, corporate and private parties – but as you probably know, galleries in SA hate to work together for the long-term benefit of the SA arts in general. Every gallery is frightened to loose out, and yet it is the owners and the SA art that looses out in the end. Gallery owners do not last for ever, but the artist’s creation does, websites a little bit less long! Good luck, Fernand |
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