Glynis O’Hara reports on the return to South Africa of a huge body of Grard Sekoto’s works. Brenda Atkinson considers the state of our art heritage
In an unprecedented victory for the South African art world, 2 000 works by acclaimed South African artist Grard Sekoto, who died in Paris in 1993, have been returned to South Africa by France. A selection from the works will be unveiled at a ceremony on National Heritage Day, September 24, at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
“It’s taken a long time to negotiate this return,” said Barbara Lindop, an acknowledged Sekoto expert, founding trustee of the Grard Sekoto Foundation and author of three books on the man. “So we’re feeling triumphant. Also because there was a time, for four weeks, when it looked like the entire collection was lost. We simply didn’t know where it was because we thought it would be flown out of France.
“It turned out it was shipped and stuck in a port because of taxes. I don’t think there’s such an enormous collection of one artist’s work anywhere else in the world,” she added.
The size of the collection, which ranges from some of his earliest known drawings in about 1938 right through to 1993, makes it unique, as does the feat of having art repatriated to its country of origin, or the artist’s origin.
There are paintings in oil, watercolour and gouache, drawings, hundreds of thumb-nail sketches, studies, sketchbooks, letters, photographs, slides, books, palettes encrusted with years of accumulated paint and the artist’s own easel, said the gallery.
The return of art in the “wrong” country has long been a bone of contention – as with Greece’s demand a few years back that Britain return the Elgin marbles, taken off the Parthenon; the Nazi theft of Italian art; or economic plundering, which has drained Africa of large sections of its precious work over the past few decades. New York museums in particular hold a great deal of ancient African art that arguably should be returned to its homelands.
But this case was somewhat different – Sekoto lived and worked in France from 1947 and the work in question had not been bought by French museums or galleries.
Nevertheless, because Sekoto died in France and the will was signed there, there were huge logistical, legal and tax problems in bringing the work back. “Technically we would have had to pay 60% of the estate to the French government,” said Lindop.
Instead, the Sekoto Foundation, which held the work in trust in the interim, asked the South African government, via the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, to intervene, which it successfully did.
The works were left by Sekoto in his will to be used for the upliftment of black South African children, according to Lindop, and to the South African public, for the spreading of public knowledge and education in the arts, according to Themba Wakashe, director-general of arts and culture in the department.
“Through the embassy we negotiated with the French government for the return of the works, with the understanding that they would be kept in the South African National Gallery to carry out the sentiment of the will,” said Wakashe.
“We’re very pleased,” he added, “it’s very rare to find so much work assembled in one place by one artist.”
Indeed, it seems no one knew of the existence of all this work until after Sekoto’s death. “Dealers would go and see Sekoto in Paris and come back and say there was nothing left,” said Lindop. “Either Sekoto lied to them, or else he forgot about them.” (Sekoto was sickly in his later years.) “At one stage when Sekoto was depressed in exile, he recreated African stories for himself, with sketches on one side of the paper and poetry on the other, and that work is there too.”
Some of the exciting work in the collection, she said, includes original sketches for now famous paintings, such as Donkeys Pulling a Cart in Eastwood (c 1946), a painting which was last year used on our R2 stamps. Another extraordinary find is a photograph of workers on which he based some of the painting The Song of the Pick, which is probably his most famous work.
The photograph is by one Andrew Goldie and it shows that the painting was not imagined, but from an actual work.”
On the broader issue of repatriation Wakashe commented: “I think there is a trend internationally that countries should return the heritage of other countries.
“But it’s complicated, firstly by the level of relations between the governments and the willingness of the parties to negotiate. And secondly, it’s a technical issue. Most of the work is now in museums and the patrimony (heritage) of these countries is protected by law. To give those works back, the laws would have to be changed. It’s very complex.
“In the case of Sekoto we were fortunate – the work was not housed in any museum or institution. People who knew Sekoto had stored it privately. So we had no patrimony problems.”
“The real problem was the tax implication, but our embassy got France to waive it.”
The next step was getting the South African authorities to waive import duties, which they did after further negotiations a few weeks ago.
The collection, said the gallery, demanded “serious academic and museological attention” and a research project was being put together to classify, analyse, restore and study the works. “The small exhibition curated for Heritage Day 1997 is only the beginning of the process of revealing this previously unseen collection of Sekoto’s work and memorabilia to the public,” said the gallery.