The Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG) is South Africa’s premier art museum, housing outstanding collections of South African, African, British, French, Dutch and Flemish art.
The museum has a full programme of temporary exhibitions of contemporary and historical paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, beadwork, textiles and architecture. Although ISANG hosts many important international traveling exhibitions, the museum always includes on its schedule exhibitions curated from the permanent collections, with an emphasis on showing art from Southern Africa.
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company’s Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections. Iziko is a Xhosa word meaning “hearth”.
The museum is organized on four levels and hosts a variety of exhibitions, from rock art to fossils, marine animals and meteorites.
Ground level:
People past to present consisting of three separate exhibitions: The Power of Rock Art (on the ideas, knowledge and beliefs expressed in San rock art); African Cultures (material culture of Southern African hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists in historic times, as well as displays of material from Nguni people and Sotho–Tswana people, also collections from the Great Zimbabwe; Lydenburg Heads (artifacts from the early Iron Age, symbols of the ritual life of early agriculturalists in South Africa).
Karoo fossils dioramas of mammal-like reptiles (they look like dinosaurs but are not) that lived in the Karoo region 250 million years ago.
World of water depicting life in South Africa’s oceans, comprises: Coelacanth (the caste of the first Coelacanth discovered in 1938, with information on the biology and evolutionary history of this “living fossil”); Ocean Giants (features the longest and heaviest species of bony fish and the largest of all invertebrates).
Southern oceans animal life in the Subantarctic region.
Whale well a unique collection of whale casts and skeletons, to be seen from all floors; includes a 20.5 metre blue whale skeleton. You can also listen to the song of the humpback whale.
Discovery room a “hands-on” experience of real specimens and activities that encourage learning through discovery.
Level 1:
Sharkworld all about the diversity, biology and conservation of sharks, skates, rays, and chimeras. Includes massive megatooth shark jaws and an audiovisual centre.
Iziko planetarium an extraordinary audio-visual experience expounding the wonders of the universe. Monthly flyers on current productions are available at the museum’s entrance.
Our place in the universe a display depicting a cosmic zoom to view the universe on an ever-increasing scale, reaching back to almost the very beginning of the universe.
Meteorites features three large iron meteorites.
Level 2:
Mammals mainly Southern African mammals, including a foal of the extinct quagga.
Birds Southern African and exotic birds, avian evolution, dioramas of waterbirds and seabirds.
Wonders of nature found on the mezzanine level overlooking the bird gallery. Features a selection of objects showing the beauty and diversity of natural form.
History of the SA Museum shows the history of the museum from its beginnings in 1825 to until 1975.
Mindspace on-line resource centre.
Indigenous knowledge an important part of South Africa’s heritage. This exhibition is a window on indigenous ways of using natural resources.
There are also a collection of South African and foreign minerals, an exhibition on the biology of bats and a geological model of Table Mountain.
Level 3:
Stone bones of the ancient Karoo focuses on 250-million-year-old mammal-like reptile (therapsids) fossils from the Karoo with reconstructions of what they might have looked like. Features the evolution of mammals from the therapsids, and the End-Permian Extinction – believed to be the biggest extinction event Earth has ever experienced.
Collections:
African Art
The collections of African Art in the Permanent Collection of the South African (SA) National Gallery mirror the histories of independence, division and democracy that have shaped the character of our country over the last century and a half.
Approximately 3 000 works primarily representative of the diversity of South Africa reflect expressive styles across the region. Aesthetics are expressed in media such as beadwork, sculpture, metalwork, weaving, carving in wood, bone and horn, and our collection includes exquisitely crafted items for use as adornment, regalia or for ritual or personal use.
The collection originated in the 1970s with the contribution of former curator and sculptor Bruce Arnott – also Deputy Director at the time – whose interest in West African sculpture eventually led to the acquisition of a small selection of works from such regions as Central Africa, West Africa, Benin and later, beadwork from South Africa.
Modern Painting and Sculpture:
Modernism is not easy to define, but refers roughly to a period dating from the 1860s through to the 1970s, and is used to describe the styles and ideologies of art produced during that era.
Born of great cosmopolitan centres, it flourished in Germany and Holland, as well as in Moscow, Paris, London and New York.
Broadly speaking, Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world: they believed in technology as the key means to achieve social improvement and in the machine as a symbol of this aspiration.
All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning) which held that design and art could, and should, transform society.
Modernism assumes local characters in different countries and, in South Africa, often reflects shifts in socio-political concerns. It is demonstrated in a great diversity of style and technique, ranging from landscapes to abstract art, engagement with the current trends that were burgeoning in Europe, to an intensely local sense of what it meant to be an artist in this country during the 20th Century.
The Modern Painting and Sculpture Collection contains excellent examples of many leading South African artists of the early and mid-20th Century, such as Gerard Sekoto, Alexis Preller, Irma Stern and Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef, all of whose artworks are very much in demand today.
Historical Painting and Sculpture Collections:
The historical collections of painting and sculpture within the Art Collections Department of Iziko Museums embrace a wide range of works for art that are both South African and foreign in origin. The founding of the South African National Gallery (SANG) in 1871 during the British colonial period initially established an emphasis on British art, as well collecting works of art from South Africa’s other “founder” nations, such as the Netherlands. Almost all of the works of art in these collections were acquired either by presentation or bequest.
Early benefactors such as the South African-born Alfred de Pass added works by British and international artists between 1926 and 1949. The gallery’s holdings were expanded by gifts from Sir Edmund and Lady Davis in 1935-38, and the Sir Abe Bailey Bequest, which has been on long-term loan to the SANG since 1946. Over the years, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, more modern works augmented and updated the British collection.
The British holdings include works by JWM Turner, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, Daniel Maclise, William Orchardson, Edward Ward, Edward Burne-Jones, George Fredrick Watts, Charles Shannon, Charles Ricketts, Frank Brangwyn, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Gillian Ayres, Alan Davie, Ronal Kitaj and Gary Wragg.
It was De Pass who initiated the collecting of work by South African painters and sculptors from the 1930s, a policy which was pursued more vigorously from the early 1950s, thanks to the State making a small acquisitions budget available from 1949. This saw the purchase of modern South African works by Walter Battiss, Alexis Preller, Irma Stern and others.
The collecting of South African works dating from the 19th century was minimal because of a policy decision that deferred acquisitions in this area to other “Africana” museums in South Africa whose chief area of collecting this was.
Contemporary Collection:
Unlike Iziko’s collections of Historical or Modern art, the ambit of the collection of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture shifts with time, as works once considered “contemporary” recede further from the present and are incorporated into “history”. Currently, the Collection of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture extends temporally from approximately the 1960s-1970s to the present day, and consists predominantly of works by South African artists. This is one of the most actively acquiring collections, and while the Art Collections acquisition policy considers the redress of historical omissions as vital to the collection, it is also forward-looking with regard to the output of emerging and established artists in South Africa.
Some noteworthy recent acquisitions include Mary Sibande’s 2010 large-scale sculpture titled The Reign, Noria Mabasa’s 2008 wooden sculpture Ndi Mukegulu a ne a khou thsimbila na vhaduhulu vhaue vhavhili / Grandmother and her two Children, and a crocheted lace portrait by Pierre Fouché titled The Kiss (2008).
While the contemporary collection is continuously growing, it also has houses works which for some years have been favourites with our visitors. These include Jane Alexander’s well-known sculpture The Butcher Boys (1985/6), William Kentridge’s series of five Soho Eckstein short animated films (1989-1996), and one of Jackson Hlungwani’s variations of Christ Playing Football, a large wooden sculpture smaller variations of which are included in other major collections in South Africa.
The South African Museum was founded by Lord Charles Somerset in 1825 as a general museum comprising natural history and material culture from local and other groups further afield. In time, it developed greater systematic organisation and classification similar to the evolutionary models that were prominent in European and American museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus on natural history encouraged the notion that very little divided the animal world from the human subjects who were documented.
This continued until the 1990s with the reservation of cultural history museums for the display of settler histories and the relegation of material culture from other cultures to natural history and anthropology museums. “Bushmen”, referring collectively to San and Khoi indigenous groups, were considered lowest on the evolutionary timescale and as living remnants of “civilised” man’s prehistory, akin to the highest form of ape. As such, they became the subject of intensive research, particularly from 1906 onwards under the directorship of Louis Péringuey. Subsequent research on Bushmen was informed by the rise of physical anthropology, a discipline in the European scientific community that drew direct correlation between physical type and evolutionary status and therefore intellectual, cultural and social status, as discussed in a 1988 article by Annie Coombes.
Between 1907 and 1924 Péringuey initiated a casting project, carried out by museum modeller James Drury, in which sixty-eight body casts of “pure Bushmen specimens” were taken in a process that was both humiliating and painful for the participants. The title of Drury’s book, Bushman, whale and dinosaur, detailing his 40-year affiliation with the South African Museum, gives some indication of the status these specimens were given.
Some of the casts made by museum modeller James Drury were displayed in the South African Museum from 1911 but without any contextualisation or acknowledgement of the Bushmen’s complex social and cultural networks. With accompanying museum labels in which they were continually referred to in the past tense, the Bushmen were consigned to history and extinction. It was only in the late 1950s that Drury’s casts were given any contextualisation in the form of the Bushman Diorama when they were displayed in an invented cultural setting based on an early nineteenth-century painting by Samuel Daniell. However, the newly revised label once again emphasised the narrative of extinction and lacked any historical contextualisation or information about the Bushmen’s individual histories.
The Bushman Diorama was not the only South African Museum display that historicised ethnic groups in this way. The African culture gallery also featured a series of displays of casts or models of “dark-skinned people” (in ethnically-defined groups) who “live in rural areas and are located in timeless places such as ‘tribes’ or ‘groups'”. The Bushman Diorama deserves particular attention though, as it has been at the centre of much contestation but also a popular tourist attraction for foreigners, locals and schools. The focus of tours was largely the physical appearance of the figures; teachers and tour guides would routinely use the display to emphasise racialised physical features such as skin, hair type, body shape and genital forms.
In 1989, in recognition of the ethical and unequal power dimensions involved in the display, the South African Museum took the first steps to mediate the diorama. This came in the shape of an adjoining exhibition that investigated the rationale for the casting project and explored the backgrounds and identities of the people who had been cast. Photographs from the casting process were shown and one of the figures was dressed in early twentieth century (instead of hunter-gather) attire to alert viewers to the constructed nature of the diorama. Continued revision occurred in 1993 with Out of Touch, an auto-critique that added “dilemma labels” and contrasting superimposed images to the display cases in the African cultures gallery (and the diorama) in order to destabilise the narrative and to “qualify previous notions of cultural stasis by acknowledging urbanisation and other changes”.