The collection of the late Jack and Helene Kahn - Highly important South African Paintings
reviewed by Bettina Malcomess
The documentation of the late Jack and Helene Kahn collection provides us with a little more than a price list and guide to potential buyers. However, it does not quite approach the status of catalogue.
The reproductions are of a very high quality, with many pages folding out to give a fuller view of works. A short biography of Jack and Helene introduces us to the collection's history, and is complemented by a charming studio photograph of the stylishly dressed and suitably serious couple. What is so charming about the couple, who never moved far from Sea Point and the city bowl is that they did not collect art for investment so much as love. Jack and Helene Kahn were not the wealthiest of collectors, nor the heirs to great fortunes. Jack's father ran the Orient Candle Factory in Roeland Street, which was close to what later became the 'Palm Studios', home to Wolf Kibbel and Lippy Lipshitz. They collected the art of their friends, and the catalogue documents their closeness with figures like Paul Du Toit, the reason for the 'large number of superb Du Toit's in their collection'.
The catalogue firmly places the Kahn collection within the history of South African art. Most of the artists are introduced by a text that establishes their place in the tradition of South African painting, often outside of European Modernism. Tinus De Jongh, for example, falls within a tradition of 19th century romantic landscape painting, 'subjects easily accessible to the South African public'. The catalogue emphasises that South African tastes remain essentially conservative, with the most 'modernist' influence perhaps being post-Impressionist. Strangely, certain works have no accompanying text, such as Lippy Lipshitz's Room to Let and Head of a Woman, whilst painters such as Stern have each painting extensively discussed and contextualised, supported by both biographical and academic texts. In fact the text is shot through with a kind of defensiveness around Stern's 'exoticisation' of her subjects. It is here that the book's status as auction versus academic catalogue comes into question.
Attending an auction is a strange thing. Vanity Fair's inaugural art edition quotes a London based Sotheby's auctioneer who asserts that auctions are more honest than private sales. While a private sale takes place between dealer and client behind closed doors, the auction is a public, open forum where value is decided in a kind of communal, even democratic way. Contrary to the opinion that this is business, the auctioneer says that in his experience the buyer has to 'love' what they are buying, not feel they are getting a good deal. This might explain the record price of over R6 000 000 fetched by Irma Stern's Indian Woman, which seems to have set a precedent for the rest of the night's proceedings.
As such, there may be a relationship of direct proportion between the weighting of the text and the location of value. I remember the hush that had fallen over the room when the first Stern was held up on white gloved hands. As such this book serves as document, not catalogue, of a particular moment in the history of particular kind of South African art. It is as much a document of a particular history of South African art as it is a document of those with a taste for it.
To order a copy tel: (021) 794 6461 or (011) 880 3125 or visit www.swelco.co.za
Softcover
Publisher: Stephan Welz and co. in association with Sotheby's (2007)
Language: English
