Esmé Berman: A pioneering historian of SA art and artists
1929 - 2017
ESMÉ Berman, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 87, was the foremost historian of South African art and artists.
Her book, Art and Artists of South Africa, which was published in 1970, was the foundation text for all subsequent historians and scholars of South African art.
In addition to writing several important books about South African art and artists, she was a riveting lecturer and broadcaster on the subject.
Before her magisterial and comprehensive dictionary appeared on the shelves, very little had been written about South African art. As far as most universities, museums and public galleries were concerned, it barely existed. Collections, libraries, archives and universities focused almost exclusively on British and European art.
An honourable exception was the Pretoria Art Museum, whose dynamic director Albert Werth assembled a small collection of South African art which included the works of Maggie Laubser, Alexis Preller, Walter Battiss, Edoardo Villa and Cecil Skotnes.
He curated and exhibited retrospectives of their work and after the appearance of Berman’s book he asked her to write the catalogue and deliver a major public lecture for Preller’s 1972 retrospective.
Because local art had been ignored and the work of giants like Irma Stern, Laubser, Preller and Pierneef hidden in basements and obscure corners of South African museums and galleries, Berman’s challenges when she began her pioneering book were formidable.
She quizzed museum directors, curators, librarians and dealers. She consulted the records of auction houses, visited private collections and burrowed around in dusty archives and basements.
Above all, she crisscrossed the country interviewing hundreds of artists and poking around their studios. She met and formed lasting friendships with Stern, Laubser, Battiss and Preller, on whose farm in the Magaliesberg she and her children spent many holidays, and whose monograph she co-authored with University of the Witwatersrand art academic Karel Nel in 2009.
Then she would stand at her drafting table in her studio at her Hyde Park home, Lexington cigarette and freshly sharpened soft-lead pencil in hand, writing and rewriting on sheets of white typing paper.
The book was sold out, reprinted several times and became a standard reference work.
In 1972 she published The LEADING AUTHORITY: Esmé Berman, author of ‘Berman’s Art & Artists of South Africa’, pioneered the study of local art and artists at a time when the field was dominated by European and British works South African Art Market 1971/2, which ranked local artists. She underestimated the artistic ego. There was an aggressive campaign to discredit both the book and Berman. She withdrew it and had the full run pulped.
Berman (nee Cohen) was born on July 2 1929 in Johannesburg. She matriculated at Johannesburg High School for Girls in 1945.
In 1946 she went to Wits where she got an honours degrees in art history and psychology, and a teaching diploma in speech and drama.
The famous art history lecturer Maria Stein-Lessing, a refugee from Nazi Germany, became her friend and mentor. Significantly, Stein-Lessing was an admirer and avid collector of African art. Berman was profoundly affected by her suicide in 1961, and published a tribute to her in 2009.
Fellow students in the fine arts department, including Cecil Skotnes, Larry Scully, Christo Coetzee, Gordon Vorster and Berman herself, who did so much to promote their work, formed the revolutionary “Wits Group”.
Another contemporary at Wits with whom she formed a lifelong friendship was the palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias. Novelist Nadine Gordimer was also a contemporary but it was her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, the founder of Sotheby’s in South Africa, that Berman became friends with.
In 1952 she married Hymie (“Hi” as she called him) Berman, a quietly perceptive art collector whose acumen as a businessman provided her with the means to devote herself to the far from lucrative pursuit of art history.
He introduced her to the Italian sculptor Villa, whom he’d befriended at Zonderwater prisonerof-war camp where Villa had been held during the war.
In 1962 the art dealer, critic and writer Harold Jeppe asked her to co-host an art review programme on SABC radio. She became a regular and respected broadcaster.
In 1968 she became an art adviser to the Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation. Started by Anton Rupert in 1964 it was a major sponsor of the arts. She wrote educational material and press releases for the many exhibitions the foundation sponsored, featuring the work of Rodin, Brancusi, Moore, Villa, Sydney Kumalo, Pierneef and many others.
On a visit to New York she became friends with the most influential US art critic of the day, Clement Greenberg. In 1975 she brought him to South Africa for what turned out to be a highly controversial lecture tour. He was underwhelmed by the work of local artists and local audiences were underwhelmed by him.
In 1974 she completed her book, The Story of South African Painting, an extraordinarily courageous achievement given the death in a motorbike accident the year before of her 18-year-old son Russell.
The first ambulance on the scene was for “non-whites”. In accordance with the law he had to wait for the arrival of a “white” ambulance, by which time it was too late. Berman and her husband were tortured by the belief that he needn’t have died.
Unable to stomach the cruel idiocies of apartheid any more they went to live in Los Angeles in 1987, where she lectured at the University of California. They returned in 2002 just in time for her husband to be buried in Johannesburg, which was his dying wish.
In her 80s she wrote monographs on Battiss, Laubser, Stern and Pierneef. She had Parkinson’s by then, but her memory was as formidable as ever and she seldom had to look things up.
In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Wits University for her services to art.
She is survived by her son David and daughter Kathy. — Chris Barron
There was an aggressive campaign to discredit Berman and the book