Transformations: women’s art from the late nineteenth century to 2010

An exhibition of women’s art from the collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, curated by Nessa Leibhammer, Reshma Chhiba and Musha Neluheni
1 Aug 2010 to 31 Jan 2011
At the Johannesburg Art Gallery

Johannesburg Art Gallery. Credit Nessa Leibhammer

The subject matter, medium and approach that women have embraced in their art making has changed dramatically since the 1900s. Early work shows strength largely in the fields of still life, landscape and genre scenes. Lace making, embroidery, ceramics, tapestry and beadwork have also been the preferred media for women’s creativity. However, gathering momentum from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the content and mode of production explored by women artists has widened exponentially in response to the broadening compass of their lives.

Transformations is a selection of women’s art from the Johannesburg Art Gallery collection that reflects this changing vision. It celebrates National Women’s Day and will be open to the public from 11 August 2010. Fourteen themes that include ‘Abstraction’, Buildings and Townscapes’, ‘Interiors’, ‘Mother and Child’ and ‘Social Commentary’ make up the exhibition. These themes were chosen in response to the range of works in the JAG holdings. Choices within each of these themes were driven by the curatorial premise to show continuities, ruptures, contrasts and commentary evident in women’s art from the nineteenth to the 21st century.
In the section ‘Women’s Media’ a small work - The Seamstress, attributed to Rosa Brett (second half of the 19th century) - depicts a woman demurely sewing while seated in a walled garden. She is turned three-quarters to the viewer, with her gaze away from her work. She does not confront the viewer but, rather, stares blankly into the distance. A high red brick wall behind, and the plants and flowers around her, create a shallow and claustrophobic space. This work speaks not only about the woman depicted in the image, but also about the artist Rosa Brett. It points to the social and economic limitations placed on respectable middle-class Victorian women who were restricted in their social activities and prohibited from engaging in any commercial pursuits. Psychologist Freud believed that constant needlework was one of the factors that ‘rendered women particularly prone to hysteria’.

Below the Rosa Brett hangs a work by Frances Goodman. This mixed media, lozenge-shaped relief encrusted with golden glass beads, and with the letters ‘oozing sex’, picked out in brownish-red beads show how far women have come since the late 19th century in engaging issues of their own sexuality. It, and Billie Zangewa’s Pillow Talk (2004), deal with subjects that would have been taboo for women to reveal publically before the second half of the twentieth century. 

Billie Zangewa,Pillow Talk, 2004, cut silk and cotton

Like Rosa Brett, Zangewa’s work Pillow Talk reflects something about herself in a contemporary environment. Her environment is, however, quite different from the one in which The Seamstress was created. Social constrains on women have lessened. There is a freedom to choose, not only regarding the process of art making, but in the content reflected in the work. By choosing sewing combined with raw silk and satin fabric collage - art forms that are traditionally and essentially female - Zangewa is placing a new ownership on this medium and deconstructing the idea of what “Women’s Media” is. Images of the artist and an unnamed man are stitched onto the background. Text has been embroidered onto this surface in the form of a written letter – a declaration of love complete with its imperfections and hesitations.

While the section “Women’s Media” shows shifts in the way women’s personal world has changed, ‘Landscapes’ reflects a growing awareness of the dynamics of power embedded in the South African landscape. The genre of landscape is very broad – it includes naturalistic depictions of mountains, rivers, fields and hills but can also show ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ landscapes. More recently, a number of artists have explored the dynamics of possession in relation to South African land and its ownership. Bertha Everard’s Peace in Winter (Mid-Winter on the Komati River) (1909) is a large oil painting of a place she cherished. Her passion for the land, intimately known, and painted directly from nature, shows it empty and burnt by sun and frost. No human activity disturbs this poetic rendering. This rural idyll is in sharp contrast to Christine Dixie’s Bloodspoor (1998).
The descendent of 1820 settlers in South Africa, Dixie reveals her ambivalent relationship to land in the Eastern Cape owned by her ancestors. Her work explores the history of the colonial landscape and deals with issues of land ownership, surveillance and documentation. The Eastern Cape is a region particularly fraught with frontier wars and their associated brutality. In this work Christine Dixie researches her ancestors, Philip and Elizabeth Dixie, who settled in the Eastern Cape in 1820 - their portraits an integral part of the 18 separate framed images that make up the total installation. Each framed image explores an aspect of this conflicted region. In Request, Nieu Bethesda, the viewer is placed in a run-down farmhouse, looking out of a window. On the left of the window there hangs a painting of a picturesque landscape. When the settlers migrated from Western Europe to the Eastern Cape, they came with rather grand ideas and idealistic expectations. The reality they faced in the harsh landscape of the Eastern Cape was considerably different. This imagined landscape is captured in the painting hanging on the wall of the farmhouse, in contrast to the real but, much less idyllic, landscape that can be seen outside the window.

The Great Kei River and Moni's Kop, Etching, 1998, MTN Collection

In the image The Great Kei River and Moni’s Kop, we are placed within the Eastern Cape landscape. A man stands on one bank of the river and scans the opposite bank with binoculars. He is oblivious to the two figures, which stand below him. This work subtly makes reference to the violent nature in which land was acquired in these colonial times. There was no thought given those who occupied the land at the time of colonial inroads. Black landowners retaliated in response to being forced off their lands resulting in some of the most violent periods in South African history.

The ‘Mother and Child’ image is archetypal in the history of both Western and African art. In particular, from the Byzantine to the Renaissance eras, images of the ‘Madonna and Child’ were popular with this theme resurfacing later in the works of Modern artists. Whereas the ‘Madonna and Child’ icon relies on the symbolic, the metaphoric and the ecclesiastic, images of ‘Mother and Child’ typically focus on the emotional bond between parent and infant. The works in this section explore this bond but also the instance where it is absent.

Mother and Child (1942), a charcoal work by Irma Stern, shows a child held close to a mother’s breast, captures the nurturing aspect most often associated with this genre. It reflects the warm closeness between mother and child, as does the work by Käthe Kollwitz’s Mutter mit kind auf dem Arm (Mother with a Child in her Arms) (1910) of a working class Berlin mother and child. However, it is in Senzeni Marasela’s graphic work The Comforter on a Park Bench (2009) that the absence of a mother’s care is most poignantly felt. Marasela’s own mother, Theodora, suffers from bipolar schizophrenia and was absent for most of her childhood. This resulted in a sense of disconnection and dislocation with her mother. Her artwork is therefore characterised by a search for this mother figure, and we see Theodora making appearances in much of her work. In Marasela’s performance pieces, she often incorporates dolls, which she alternately deconstructs and reassembles. These dolls become her children and, in essence, her mode of investigating the mother and child relationship.

Senzeni Marasela,The comforter: Theodorah Looking On,2009, Linocut 1/10

In The Comforter on a Park Bench, a figure sits on a park bench bent over a stiff and unresponsive doll. She holds it cautiously between her hands. Warmth, affection and any human connection are absent while the sense of alienation, dysfunction and dislocation is overwhelming. The figure on the bench may be Theodora, disconnected from the doll, which is a stand-in for Marasela. Alternately, we can see this seated figure as Marasela herself, trying to find some way of articulating the connection missing in her relationship with her mother. This image, however, also alludes to an occurrence, which is essentially South African. This absence of mothering is perhaps a reference to the South African experience where black domestic workers left their own children behind in rural areas to care for the children of white employers.
Self-portraiture is an art form with a history that stretches back to the Renaissance. Women artists are considered some of the most notable producers of this genre. This can be attributed to the fact that, in the past, for reasons of decorum, women artists were not allowed to attend art classes where live models were being used. Furthermore, society decreed that a woman’s place was in the home. For the most part, women artists only had themselves and the people around them as models.

Gabrielle Goliath,Ek is 'n Kimberley Coloured, 2007, Archival Print

Most self-portraits tell you who the artist is. The confident Self Portrait (1960) painted by Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell portrays a serious but secure individual – someone who is certain who she is within social context. However, Gabrielle Goliath’s photographic work Ek is ‘n Kimberly Coloured (2007) is about who she is mistaken for - who she is not! While Goliath may know who she is - as someone of mixed race ancestry - her identity is ambiguous to others. In this piece, the artist places herself in the guise of romantic characters that she’s most often mistaken for – Brazilian, French and Spanish. She includes the statement “Ek is ’n Kimberley Coloured” in the local languages of Brazil, France and Spain, in the images. Through these photographs of what she isn’t, Goliath constructs a self-portrait of who she is.

The exhibition Transformations is rich in both the associations that can be inferred between works and in the range of artists represented.  In addition to the artists discussed above, the show includes international artists Lucie Rie, Gwendolen Raverat (granddaughter of Charles Darwin), Dame Elizabeth Frink, Celia Paul, Marlene Dumas and Barbara Hepworth. South African artists include Maud Sumner, Irma Stern, Dorothy Kay, Elsa Dziomba, Dianne Victor, Zanele Muholi and Anthea Moys. All have been selected from JAG’s important international and local holdings.

Nessa Leibhammer and Musha Nehluveni

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