The love or ordinary things which her paintings spoke about was precisely the quality she brought to her relations with people. She would always ask what you had been doing, never steal the limelight for herself, thus making everyone important. And no matter what someone had made - a beaded doll, a necklace, some printed cloth, a great wooden aeroplane with moving propellers and removable wings - each would be considered with identical seriousness.
That is not to say that everything delighted her equally. No matter that you had taken a month to carve a head and made a six hour journey to bring it to the African Art Centre, no matter that she had praised the previous one, if she felt this was not up to standard she would say so.
Although she believed that every person had the potential to make art given encouragement, training and opportunity, she did not believe that artists automatically made art each time a knife cut into wood or a chisel into stone. The judgements were never hasty. As in all things, time was of no consequence. But one could be certain that the opinions came from the heart and were informed by experience and an intuition for what was right.
More than anything else I believe that this insistence on standards is what distinguished work from the Art Centre. There was room only for the best. Young talent is fragile. It must be nurtured with care. The 1970s and 1980s are littered with the corpses of aspiring artists stifled by the enthusiasm of an indiscriminate, over rich and uneducated public gobbling up township art as a way of expiating guilt.
The Tributaries exhibition of 1985 overnight altered the face of South African art and we are still living in its wake. Not only did we discover that there was a great deal more happening than we had imagined, but also that our art was richer, more diverse, more intense and more relevant to its time. And there were a lot more people making art.
In that exhibition the famous stood alongside the unknown. the self taught with the university trained, the naive with the sophisticated. Country people were granted the status their urban counterparts had always enjoyed.
Hardly had the exhibition opened than the dealers descended for a killing. Raiding parties competed for the spoils of former Venda and Gazankulu, expeditions set out for places too small for any map. Soon the metropolitan galleries were festooned with the trophies of plunder - artefacts in the main with, occasionally, the living maker of the object, the supreme prize. Installed for viewing by the newly curious, they were supplied with materials and clothing and food and even some money, and made to work.
In months the unknowns had become household names, their works de rigueur on the decorator circuit, while they themselves adapted to television celebrity. Some survived, some were successful, some grew, many were scarred, and lots were abandoned when the fashion changed.
During the cataclysm, there were quieter voices preaching caution. With hindsight we see how Jo Thorpe maintained stability and sanity. Yet she was shrewd enough to realise that it would be foolish not to capitalise on the new interest in black art which was sweeping the country. She kept her vision.
Younger and more established artists must sell if their income depends entirely on what they make. But Jo was aware of the pitfalls of the market place and protected her artists by instilling in them professionalism and integrity. Like Matisse she believed that one's bad works come back to haunt one.
The debate about the relationship between art and craft was not one which troubled her. Her mind was in tune with Africa, which accepts without question that when something is made, be it a headrest, a walking stick, a house, a stool, a basket or a village, it must be made well and it must please all the senses. Ugliness has no place.
The hierarchy which sees the fine arts as superior and crafts a lower species was foreign to her, Depending on one's calling, one could express oneself with equal fluency in weaving a tapestry. making a wire basket, cutting a picture out of lino. And in this. as we struggle to come to terms with questions of style and identity, her stand in this debate becomes increasingly relevant. Nor was shea purist. Conservative when it came to tradition, she saw the future as a weaving together of the many influences we are fortunate to have inherited.
She fought for artists rights, realising long ago that it should be not be unreasonable for someone of talent to expect to be able to earn a living from what they make with their imagination and their hands. Why could one be a full-time nurse or a teacher, but have to be a part-time artist? She insisted on fair payment for what one made.
And here, too, I saw her toughness. I happened to be in the African Art Centre one morning when the place was bursting with women sitting, legs straight forward, in a double row from her office, their new beadwork laid out next to them.
In the three hours I was with her. she would excuse herself from time to time and walk slowly down the room speaking to each woman in turn. They were negotiating price, and I gather had been for some time. New offers were made on both sides. New offers were rejected and she would return to her office, and we would continue talking about whatever it was I was there for. |
