Stephen Gray When, in 1914, Henry Rider Haggard inspected Pietermaritzburg’s newly opened Voor-trekker Museum, including the Church of the Vow and so on, he recorded in his diary that it was suitably packed with interesting mementoes of none but the “old Dutch”. Nowadays its ambit is hardly as exclusive, as I visited it for one of the last displays one would have expected there.
These were the remains of an unrepentant Englishwoman, one who made it her life’s work to portray the lounging locals as provocatively and as beautifully as she could.
So a wing of mostly nude blacks in stone, wood and bronze is now on display in the red-brick school building across the way, through which parties of South African children gleefully flow, and even touch. The Mary Stainbank collection has found a home on the balcony gallery, beautifully lit over parquet floors, spacious, sculpted eyeball to eyeball. One corner shows her workbench and all the four-pound hammers and chisels she wielded over South African sandstone and jacaranda, her plaster casts and many maquettes. Another is closed off as the vast archive of her own collection of art documentation, including the library of her and her partner of 60 years that, on her death as a lonely old arthritic in 1996, was left to the nation she so adored. Previously I had known Mary Stainbank only as the battleaxe old biddy whose last major public work was the 10-foot bronze John Ross, striding down Durban’s embankment. For the foyer of the new Johannesburg library I now noticed she had in 1934 designed four Della Robbia-style ceramic roundels of book-readers, still in great nick (for which she received a mere oe28, plus railage). For Natal Technikon in 1950 she devised a stone panel with her students there – of no less than a naked African woman rasping all hell out of a cello, so astounding an image that it is worthy of being the national emblem.
But not many of her works are in public collections. The Tatham Gallery nearby has on display only two roly-poly figurines squatting as bookends, gorgeously art deco but hardly major pieces. So the new exhibition, which she would never sell and is of what she called her “own true and honest work”, may really assert her place as the one who brought the controversial modernism of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore to KwaZulu-Natal. I made an appointment with the collection’s curator, Estelle Liebenberg, in order to have the privilege of donning cotton gloves and sliding apart the 600 drawings she has catalogued so far (600 to go). Then to study some of the thousands of letters and photos in files, being preserved in cellophane, not to mention scrolls, plans, diagrams and cuttings. Some snapshots of the gutsy lady: her in baggy dungarees up the scaffolding, outside Port Elizabeth’s law courts, moulding cement. She was pelted with stones by children whose parents disapproved of her male attire. But she had to impress the contractors of the public works department by being one of them. On the job she batted about in a two-seater Rugby Durant. If it broke down she would fix it herself, consulting an oily, dog- eared copy of Dyke’s Automobile and Gasoline Engine Encyclopedia, still on hand in the stacks. When she was a student at London’s Royal College of art in the early 1920s, women had been banned from the sculpting section, but she insisted on her right to learn and to practise. Incredibly, she was permitted only a separate room, on the side, and on condition she did not exhibit her work. Apparently llllback home, in lll the granary she lll used as her Ezayo lll Studio near Bellair, the Zulu women would remark that she needed never to go through the travail of marriage: did she not make her own children herself? At long last her bulky, wonderful offspring are out on permanent display. Against all the old prejudices, and in such an unlikely shelter.
For information about the Mary Stainbank collection, phone Estelle Liebenberg of the Voortrekker Museum at (033) 394 6834