The art in Martin
Marilyn paints government into a corner
One needs to be a little bit mad — but brave and bold
● Marilyn Martin sits in Irma Stern’s dining room. Martin, the former director of the South African National Gallery (SANG), has a hot-off-the-press copy of her toe-trampling book Between Dreams and Realities — a fascinating account of the country’s neglected cultural treasure trove.
Stern’s home, now a museum, is one of Cape
Town’s hidden gems, bursting with the energy of her thick oil portraits, striking still lifes and lush landscapes, as well as the masks and artefacts she collected. It’s a fitting setting for an interview with Martin for two reasons. Firstly, Martin, like SA’s most famous artist, is a woman who has broken boundaries and, secondly, the cluttered and colourful museum has an edge of eccentricity. You see, if activist and former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs is to be believed, 75-year-old Martin may be a little mad.
In his foreword to Between Dreams and Realities, Sachs writes that great leaders of art institutions require three special qualities. “The first is a thorough understanding of the inner rhythms and nuances of the particular art form involved. The second is an ability to see the big picture in the tiny detail, and the tiny detail in the big picture. And the third is to be a little mad.”
He leaves it to the reader to decide, but there is no question that Martin has been a great leader of SANG.
Martin laughs. “One needs to be a little bit mad, but one needs to be brave and bold — that might be a little bit mad. Some of the things we did were mad, but we did it properly. You can’t do things that are too mad.”
She pauses. “Although the Bruce Gordon artwork was pretty crazy.”
SANG has some unusual artwork in its mighty collection but Bruce Gordon was perhaps the most curious. In 2002, artist Edward Young submitted Gordon, the owner of a Cape Town bar, as his conceptual art piece for an auction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art to raise funds for student bursaries.
After an opening offer of R100 by renowned artist Sue Williamson, the bidding escalated and soon Martin and art buff Suzy Bell were involved in a bidding battle. Bell’s R52,000 bid triumphed and she donated the work to the gallery. Bruce Gordon was sent off to SANG’s acquisitions committee, which approved it, and the acquisition number (03/02) was tattooed on Gordon’s arm.
“I saw Bruce recently and told him he should apply for some conservation as an artwork,” says Martin.
That work prompted chatter, but artist Wayne Barker caused an even bigger buzz when he installed his artwork — live bees — in the atrium for the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2007.
“That was tricky,” grins
Martin. “We worked with artists who came with what we think are crazy ideas but these are not random acts of craziness
— the art makes sense.”
Astonishingly, no-one was stung — which is perhaps not the case with the people mentioned unfavourably in Martin’s meticulously researched book.
Between Dreams and Realities tells the story of the national gallery. Martin examines the role of its former directors, who faced pressure from within and without the institution, reflects on exhibitions and controversies (some forgotten, some still bubbling), documents her frustrations and recounts highlights (the 2006 Picasso and Africa exhibition) and lowlights (the 2011 Tretchikoff retrospective — “Tretchikoff, the people’s painter? Puhlease!”).
‘Political undertones’
The story starts in 1871 when Thomas Butterworth Bayley donated 45 paintings and money for the establishment of a public art gallery in Cape Town;
148 years later the gallery, in a grand building in the squirrel-rich Company’s Garden, houses a remarkable collection of historical and contemporary local and international art.
Martin, an art and architecture historian with a passion for museums, was appointed director of
SANG in January 1990. It was a job she was born for. “Art” is even in her name, M-ART-IN.
Her task was to transform the public institution, and bring art to the people.
“There was a small entrance fee when I took over and we scrapped that immediately because I regarded it as a human right for South Africans to have free access to our patrimony,” she says.
Her predecessor and mentor, Raymund van
Niekerk, took on the National Party government in the 1980s. Martin recounts how Van Niekerk conspired with Neville Dubow, chair of the acquisitions committee, to purchase Paul Stopforth’s The Interrogators, a painting showing the faces of the security policemen who interrogated Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Van Niekerk and Dubow succeeded because the board didn’t know what the work was about.
Martin was determined to continue the task of guiding the national gallery into the democratic era. She initiated a wider acquisitions and exhibitions policy, started to develop highly imaginative curators, and, like Van Niekerk, fought fiercely for the independence of the institution. “Although the government was the hand that fed us, we fought to keep it at arm’s length,” she says.
Martin was not going to be bullied by the powers that be — she’s not a soldier in Napoleon’s army for nothing (see sidebar) — and, as Sachs explains in his foreword, was prepared to trample on toes that stood in the way of her vision.
“The institution comes first,” she insists.
The first person to have his toes crushed happened to be one of the country’s richest men, Anton Rupert, chair of the Rembrandt Group. Rupert expressed concern about Martin’s “unnecessary controversy and minefield of political undertones” in the 1991 Triennial, from which Rembrandt withdrew its sponsorship.
At the same time Die Burger, for which Martin once worked, launched a crusade against her. An article wondered if there was a petticoat protruding at SANG and whether the colours of the petticoat “are provocatively green, yellow and black” — the colours of the ANC.
Some of the government-appointed board members were not happy with her and a disciplinary process was launched.
But she survived. Survival, specifically survival of the gallery and its collection, is a strong leitmotif of Between Dreams and Realities.
Eugène Terre’Blanche
Not every artwork exhibited at SANG has survived.
Soon after she became director, Martin learnt that everyone is an art critic — although some critique with hammers, not words. In January 1992 four members of the right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) stormed into an exhibition and took a hammer to Gael Neke’s ceramic sculpture, Eugène Terre’blanche and his Two Sidekicks.
They smashed the sculpture because, they said, it brought disgrace to their leader. The AWB members warned Martin that if Terre’Blanche was belittled again they would return with explosives.
It wasn’t the first act of political vandalism. Someone defaced — literally — a 1904 portrait of Boer leader Paul Kruger. The vandal slashed Kruger’s nose in half and disappeared into the Company’s Garden.
When Shaun Prince came to the gallery in November 1998 he was there to make money, not a political statement: he made off with L’Hôtel Royal, Dieppe — a small, valuable painting by Walter Sickert (worth between R150,000 and R200,000 at the time). Prince was arrested but the painting has never been recovered.
“This was our only theft,” says Martin — which is surprising, considering some of the collection’s artwork is worth gazillions. But Martin isn’t surprised. “Art is not seen to be important in South Africa,” she sighs.
This indifference to art — not by thieves but by successive governments — is a major source of exasperation for Martin and another strong theme in Between Dreams and Realities.
“My main frustration has been the lack of government support for its institutions, whether it was the colonial government, the apartheid government or the current government. From 1871, the society worked so hard to establish a collection, find a building and ensure the art was properly housed. But in its whole 150-year history the gallery never got the accolades and nobody in government has been all that interested in the visual arts.”
This had its advantages during the censorship years when the apartheid government clamped down on theatre productions and newspapers but ignored paintings and sculptures critical of it.
After 1994 Martin hoped this official indifference to art would give way to the democratic government’s commitment to it. That didn’t happen.
Disaster for the gallery
“It’s a small betrayal in the bigger scheme of things, but it’s a betrayal,” she says. “A museum has a very special role in society to get us to learn and enjoy; the art world has brought me so much joy. Artists are the prophets of our society.”
She talks about the power of art to change lives. During the dark days of Aids denialism the gallery was at the forefront of the HIV/Aids struggle with many initiatives, including the Positive Lives exhibition in 1995. SANG became the first public building to be wrapped in a gigantic red ribbon.
For Martin it was a deeply personal commitment. “I had a close friend, a very talented artist, who was ill. I was reading a newspaper article in the 1980s about this thing called Aids and I realised this is what my friend had. I lived with that pain in a very direct way.”
In 2001, after 11 years as SANG director, Martin was appointed director of art collections for Iziko Museums. This was soon after 11 Cape Town cultural institutions, including SANG, were amalgamated under Iziko, an agency of the department of arts & culture. SANG became Iziko: SANG.
“I thought, well, this is a wonderful moment to be able to work across all the collections.”
Iziko is Xhosa for “hearth”, and Martin explains the new name was meant to evoke the welcoming warmth of a fireplace but in practice, “institutionally at least, it meant the cold reality of centralisation and bureaucracy”.
“The amalgamation has been a disaster for the national gallery and has led to it being understaffed and under-resourced. It has sunk into the shadows.”
Martin hopes that Between Dreams and Realities will remind people that the national gallery is still there and they should visit. She also hopes it will shock those responsible, the custodians of our heritage and cultural wealth, into some realisation about what is happening — and what is not happening — at the gallery.
“Perhaps we can all move beyond the ‘it is what it is’ apathy and re-energise the institution and make the people at Iziko and the department understand what a treasure trove it really is,” she says.
Subversion and mystery
Martin is bracing for a backlash from some of the people mentioned unfavourably in the book.
“I had to be extra careful so that everything is substantiated, which is why there are hundreds of footnotes and it has been peer-reviewed. I’m very critical of the structure at Iziko and of the way the museum is marginalised. I’ve never been afraid and I wasn’t going to be afraid to put on record my concerns,” she says.
She describes President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent merger of arts & culture with the department of sports & recreation as an insult and a signal that art is not taken seriously, which is why so many South Africans are not visually literate.
Being visually literate, she argues, helps us move beyond seeing things in black and white so that we can debate and grapple with the interesting grey areas in between.
Martin says art’s great strength is that it is subversive and mysterious.
“There is an enigma about art. Art is powerful and evokes such intense emotions because it challenges us. It stimulates us emotionally, provides joy and makes us question everything,” she says.
Just like Martin herself. Perhaps Iziko: SANG should acquire a new piece for its collection: Marilyn Martin.
Between Dreams and Realities: A History of the South African National Gallery, 1871 - 2017, by Marilyn Martin, is published by Print Matters Heritage (R699)
Nobody in government has been all that interested