Promoting “African Art” and African Modernisms in Johannesburg in the 1960s

ABSTRACT

In the 1960s, during the years in which apartheid was to become fully entrenched in South Africa and black Africans relegated to second-class citizen status, there was an apparently paradoxical growth of interest in art circles in the art of black Africans. Two major players in the Johannesburg art market who acquired large collections of historical African art and promoted contemporary forms said to be African in quality are identified as having fuelled this interest. This article traces the founding of both the Günther Gallery and the Totem Meneghelli Gallery and the influence they exerted on the artists they exhibited and on other emerging galleries in Johannesburg—such as Gallery 101 (later the Pelmama Gallery)—in their constructions of particular African themes and aesthetics in the 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that many of the gallerists involved in this Africa-philia were immigrants from Europe is examined in relation to the apparent paradox noted at the outset and to the politics of race in the South African context and of “primitivism” in the wider art world.

Keywords:

• art markets
• Johannesburg
• Africanity
• exhibitions
• apartheid
• modernisms