Welgemeend August Art Month 2018

The exhibition Shifting Boundaries: A selection of works showcasing South African women artists of the past 100 years explores the decisive contribution of women artists to the identity and character of South African art. This contribution, which is now irrefutable, was never certain at the start of the twentieth century. In 1911 writer Olive Schreiner, an early campaigner for women’s rights in this country, published the book Women and Labour . Loosely based on a more extensive draft burned by looters during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899- 1902), Schreiner’s landmark book remains an urgent read despite its age. For instance, Schreiner strongly criticises the “wilful and unqualified” wrong of paying women less for doing equal work. This workplace outrage still persists. Schreiner’s book offers useful cues for thinking about the exhibition Shifting Boundaries , which draws together over 80 works by more than 60 artists from the Kilbourn Collection. Perhaps the most striking is the chauvinistic character of the society that women artists made their mark in. In her book Schreiner details how industrial technologies opened up new forms of “honoured and remunerative social labour,” albeit for the betterment of men. In the domain of art, observed Schreiner, “a mighty army of men, a million strong, is employed in producing plastic art alone, both high and low, from the traceries on wall-paper and the illustrations in penny journals, to the production of pictures and statues which adorn the national collections”. Challenging this dominant order required more than simply skill. Schreiner published Women and Labour while Irma Stern was still living in Germany, acquiring a formative grounding in German expressionism. Along with Bertha Everard and Maggie Laubser, Stern is an important pillar of the exhibition Shifting Boundaries . Indeed, the earliest works on view are all by these pioneer moderns. They include Laubser’s frontal portrait Woman with Kopdoek (1926), Stern’s two portraits Pondo Woman and Woman Sewing Karos (both 1929) and Everard’s landscape Delville Wood , painted in 1926 during a two-week visit to this French battle site and recognised by art historian Frieda Harmsen as among her “most profound works”. Of note, all these works predate the passing of the Women’s Enfranchisement Act of 1930, which granted white women the right to vote. The earliest work on Shifting Boundaries is Stern’s portrait Oriental Woman with Clenched Fist (1922). This modest watercolour introduces Stern’s abiding interest in depicting alterity and exploring cultures other than her own German-Jewish heritage. But, and equally important in the context of Shifting Boundaries , it shows Stern engaged in thinking about other women. This feminist reciprocity is an important theme of this exhibition. Oriental Woman with Clenched Fist is important for another reason. In February 1922, Stern held her first solo exhibition in South Africa. Provocatively titled An Exhibition of Modern Art by Miss Irma Stern at Ashbey’s Art Gallery , the exhibition consisted of mostly watercolours with an assortment of oil paintings, woodcuts, lithographs and drawings. Interested lunchtime queues formed outside Ashbey’s at 91 Loop Street. Two policemen even arrived following complaints that the work was indecent. A reviewer for the Cape Times dismissed her work for its “general nastiness”. Stern’s early exhibitions were generally met with “storms of abuse and denunciation” as Hilda Purwitsky wrote in 1925. Rethinking a century of Work by South African women artists Of course, Stern’s reputation is now such that these early slights – “all laughed and slung mud at me,” the artist wrote of her 1922 exhibition – seem incidental. But looking at the early works of Everard, Laubser and Stern from the vantage of now, it is important not to loose sight of the difficulties they faced as women. The feminist art historian Marion Arnold is eloquent on this subject: “Domiciled in a masculinist, frontier African society on the periphery of western influence, women artists such as Everard, Stern and Laubser took the initiative in creating and exhibiting progressive painting. In so doing, they defied popular taste and defined themselves as serious artists contesting feminine stereotypes and the male authority entrenched in a conservative art scene.” This historical statement remains largely true of the conservative and patriarchal present. Shifting Boundaries is not simply a historical show. It includes works by Ingrid Bolton and Maja Marx made in 2018. Just as Everard, Laubser and Stern’s early works from the 1920s recall a time when no women had voting rights, so the inclusion of Sue Williamson’s A Tale of Two Cradocks (1994) marks another significant moment: the achievement of unqualified universal franchise for all South Africans. Williamson’s concertina-folded work juxtaposes tourist guidebook photos of Cradock made in 1989 with photographs of murdered Cradock activist Matthew Goniwe along with the testimony of his widow, Nyameka Goniwe. It is a reminder of the many narratives that constitute South Africa, some – like the important contribution of black women artists like Helen Sebidi and Esther Mahlangu – still in the process of rehabilitation. Sean O’Toole