Strauss & co - 12 November 2018, Johannesburg

A ground-breaking exhibition, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930–1988) was hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) in 1988. The Director of the gallery at that time, Christopher Till, had assembled a formidable team of young curators, and he consulted with the late Matsemela Manaka, myself, and others in the art community, about how to transform the Johannesburg Art Gallery into a relevant museum – that would include more of the art of black South Africans. At that point, its collection of work by black artists was tiny. Till’s project began in earnest when he approached me to curate an exhibition of black South African art. Thus began a rapid tour through many private collections, ethnographic museums, universities, and libraries that could assist in such a project. The exhibition eventually brought together 100 artworks from 60 collections, private and public, with a first edition catalogue of 1000 copies and a reprint of 1000. In the introduction to the catalogue, I wrote: ‘As I began the preliminary research for the exhibition, the significant gaps in museum collections with regard to representation of art by black South Africans became apparent. I became painfully aware of how insubstantial, unreliable and frequently conflicting the available written information is. ‘I also hope that this exhibition will serve as a catalyst for re-examining prevailing notions of the nature of ‘black art’ and indeed the very definitions of art which have in many cases been adopted unquestioningly fromWestern art traditions.’ The idea of a neglected tradition involved a very specific use of the words ‘neglected’and ‘tradition’. Museums and public collections in South Africa had established a visual tradition based on an almost entirely Eurocentric pictorial account of our history. There was little or no interest shown in black art: paintings, sculptures, drawings or prints by black artists were simply not collected by municipal, provincial or national art galleries. Furthermore, such works rarely appeared on the auction market. Yet important and extraordinary works by black artists were to be found in other public collections, like ethnographic museums and archives such as the Africana Museum (now Museum Africa) and the Killie Campbell Collection. The situation that prevailed before 1988 was that white artists were trained in the universities and technical colleges – which were, of course, closed to black students. (Other than the ‘white’universities, only Durban Westville University had been teaching art and art history, since the 1970s.) Aspirant black artists shared information among themselves and turned to the Polly Street Art Centre, and mission schools like the Diocesan Training College (Grace Dieu) in Pietersburg, Rorkes Drift Art and Craft Centre, and Ndaleni Art School. The contribution of Polly Street and Rorke’s Drift has now been thoroughly documented, but in 1988 this was still a largely untold story. In too many cases, artists died young, under the age of 40 or 50, and their outputs were often small. An Unsung History: Moving on from The Neglected Tradition Lot 179 Bill Ainslie Pachipamwe No. 5 ( detail)