Inspiration
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What started out in 1910 as a small art collection to bring colour to a mining town has grown to become Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest art gallery, housing over 9000 pieces. The gallery hosts a variety of exhibitions including old and new works, which are rotated on a regular basis. The museum has a great purpose - to collect, preserve, exhibit and educate. As such, it hosts numerous artistic seminars, as well as art classes for all ages.

Lady Florence Phillips, the wife of a wealthy mining magnate, established the gallery in 1910 after deciding that the small mining town of Johannesburg needed a vibrant touch. To start the collection, Lady Phillips sold a diamond ring given to her by her husband to raise the funds necessary to buy the first three oil paintings for the gallery.

The foundation collection grew to include 19th century and contemporary British and other European art. The collection later expanded to include 17th century Dutch paintings and more contemporary South African and international art. Today, some of the pre-eminent artists on the gallery’s collection list are Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas.

The museum houses some of the most highly valued paintings, antiques, sculptures, drawings, prints and laceworks in the country. The comprehensive South African collection includes works by Gerard Sekoto, Alexis Preller, William Kentridge, Sydney Kumalo and Penny Siopis among others. In recent years, the gallery has made a concerted effort to procure artworks by contemporary South African artists.

New to the scene, and currently exhibiting in the main hall of the
gallery, is South African Johannes Phokela. At first viewing, his work may be seen as beautiful but undemanding. In keeping with the technique of Dutch and Flemish old masters, Johannes paints glowing light and broiling shadows in oils on canvas. He puts his own spin on the familiar European settings however, creating an odd disturbance, prompting the viewer to question the insidious system of colonial values that perpetuates through symbols, signs and icons.

In October, the gallery is hosting an exhibition of 50 years of women’s photography in South Africa, as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings. This exhibition provides a dramatic and unprecedented showcase of photographic talent, from the early pioneers of social documentary, like Anne Fischer and Constance Stuart Larrabee, to the challenging images created by women in South Africa. Seventy-five photographers and almost 400 images are included in this display.

The gallery has recently made a move to include digital art, a medium that has grown in popularity over the past two years. November sees the exhibition of digital artist Berni Searle, who won the Standard Bank Young Artist award in 2005 for her About to forget exposition. In the display she uses a handful of small black and white photographs of three generations of her family as the point of departure for a metaphoric and poetic reflection on a fractured past. Characters in the pictures appear and disappear, because Berni’s family, like many of its time, was divided by acts of racial classification and reclassification. In the photographs, silhouettes of groups of family members, cut out of red crepe paper, float in warm water. The colour bleeds as the water ebbs and flows and the figures become transparent and residual. The structured and defined shapes slowly lose their form amidst the swirls of red ink, illustrating her take on her family’s history.

As artists mimic the world in which they live and express our inner thoughts, the gallery offers us an important glimpse into society, making the Johannesburg Art Gallery an integral part of our cultural heritage.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 17:00. Entrance is free and guided tours are available on request.

Vladimir Tretchikoff
Vladimir Tretchikoff achieved popular acclaim for his vivid oil paintings and is often regarded as South Africa’s leading realist painter. Born in Russia in 1914, he immigrated to South Africa just after the Second World War, where he continued to paint until 2002, at which time he suffered a stroke.

Pressed to define his art, he settled for ‘symbolic realism’ and repeatedly had to reject critics’ jibes that his work was merely successful kitsch. Tretchikoff’s most well known image must surely be his Chinese Girl, with bluish face and bright red lips, which was adapted from studies of the daughter of a San Francisco merchant. His oriental and mixed-race figures include Miss Wong and Balinese Girl. Among the more symbolic or sentimental subjects are Lost Orchid, symbolising a wasted life weeping for itself; Weeping Rose, with its spilt water or dewdrops beside the fallen rose and Blue Monday, with the singer Françoise Hardy behind a rain-spattered window symbolising, as the artist puts it, “the rainy day in every girl’s life.”

Sadly, the self-taught artist passed away on August 26th this year, aged 92.