The Dead Can’t Defend Themselves, Can They?

Kenya Sat 18-12-2010

The Dead Can’t Defend Themselves, Can They?
By Osei G Kofi | AfricanColours.com

Ruth S. Schaffner, the wiry passionaria of post-war art and one of the expatriate notables of the East African art scene has had to endure so many baseless criticisms since March 15 1996 when her Good Maker gave her a six-foot deep eternal home in Nairobi-Langata. As the Romans used to say, cui bono? Who benefits? It’s about time we let the old lady sleep in peace. The dead can’t defend themselves, can thy?

Ruth Schaffner and her husband Adama Diawara | SOurce: Ruth Shaffner Foundaion

Latest of the unwarranted darts at the departed Schaffner was Frank Whalley’s “At last, EA art is coming of age” published in The East African edition of December 13-19, 2010. Mr Whalley wrote: “The happy splashy sort of painting promoted by the late Ruth Schaffner at the Watatu Gallery in Nairobi is being overtaken by work that is both technically and intellectually rigorous … Schaffner favoured an unschooled approach … and a naivety presumed to appeal to the European vision of what African painting should be”.

It’s getting so tiresome, isn’t it? For years now a sundry of commentators have trotted out this view of the old lady ad nauseam. It would have been sad if it was true but the fact is, buddy, it ain’t.

Casting my mind back, this erroneous narrative was started by a disaffected expatriate reviewer at the time when Ruth was traipsing along the red earth pathways of Banana Hill and Ngecha encouraging the young unemployed and school kids she found there, to get them to try their hand at painting. She took along crayons, art paper and dollops of auntie love.

Jak Katarikawe, Ruth Shaffner Protogee

Untitled by Jak Katarikawe| Ruth Shaffner Protogee | Source: Gallery Watatu

How dare she go to these unschooled simpletons, even to bring them to her famed gallery when Nairobi, Kampala and Dar es Salaam had graduates coming out of the fine art colleges was the sort of huff and puff shots leveled at her - out of earshot, of course. Mind you, these were the kind of places most wazungu never get to know in a lifetime in Kenya.

The sour grape write-up of the early nineties was picked up by one lazy journo after another. It was reproduced by lazy art students, at home and abroad, in their dissertation on African contemporary – and presto, it became the peg that every reviewer on the evolution of Kenyan or African contemporary art trotted out. Whalley is the latest victim of this disinformation.

“Mama Ruth,” as she was affectionately called by her artists, went for character and she instinctively knew how to spot talent. When she didn’t find many among the crop calling themselves artists in Nairobi at the time she decided to nurture some of her own.

Untitled by Anabelle Wanjiku | Ruth Schaffner protogee | Source: Gallery Watatu

The results, excluding Jak katarikawe who was already a master when Ruth met him, include Meek Gichugu, Wanyu Brush, Sane Wadu, Anabelle Wanjiku. Whalley commendably cited these growing masters whose work speaks volumes as a product of Ruth. But he contradicts his own core assertion about the old lady then; by claiming she favoured “naivety” and the “unschooled approach.” Are the works of Katarikawe, Brush, Meek and Wadu naïve, unschooled, unsophisticated?

Perhaps this is a moment to run some ink on this exceptional Mzungu American who in her seventies left her rich limelight-suffused life in Paris, New York and California to come to live quietly in East Africa, to do her bit to take the then nascent African contemporary to a height it merited in global art. By the way, Ruth donated $20,000 to the organization of the inaugural Dakar Biennale

God sleeps, 1994 by Kenyan Artist Sane Wadu | Ruth Scaffner protogee | Source: Gallery Watatu

I got to know Ruth from the moment she arrived to join her businessman husband Adama Diawara in Nairobi in 1981-82. Modest to a fault she hid her pedigree and artistic chops from those she came in contact with including the incomparable Jony Waite founder of Gallery Watatu and her two creative musketeers Robin Anderson and Rhodia Mann. When the “watatu” (Kiswahili meaning of the three) sold their beloved gallery to Ruth they knew she was just the right person to take it to the next level. She quickly went beyond their expectation. She was the first dealer to fetch top dollar prices for Kenyan artists. There were the odd art pages writer who grumbled she was inflating the local market and “spoiling” the artists!

This was a woman who as a young lass made adverts and filmed documentaries in West Africa, a young photographer who managed to get her work shown at the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery, New York. She was best friends with and hung out with many among the Dada-Surrealist-Abstract gang, their spouses and their rich patrons - Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernest, Man Ray, Betty Parsons, Peggy Guggenheim, Holly Solomon, Elaine de Kooning, Humphrey Bogart and the Arbuses.

Untitled by Kivuthi Mbuno | Ruth Scaffner protegee | Source: Gallery Watatu

Peggy Guggenheim bayed for Ruth’s blood for Max Ernst, her husband, couldn’t resist the self assured allure of the German-born Ruth, with her drop dead gorgeous glamour. Ernst pursued her and they consummated a secret short-lived love affair. Calm and quiet in personality Ruth was no shrinking violet though – she bagged four husbands in her lifetime, the third being Joseph Schaffner of the Hart Schaffner & Marx clothing fortune.

By the 1970s, she had galleries in New York, Newport Beach, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she nurtured young non-conventional creative souls such as Marsea Goldberg, who today is big in the west coast art scene and is doing the same for up and coming artists as Ruth did for her.

But, Ruth left all that jazz behind in the west for a new page in Kenya.

At Gallery Watatu, there was certainly the odd college educated aspiring artist who cut no ice with her when they came up the pre- and post spiral staircase to show her their work. There were also the university or polytechnic educated aspiring artists who did cut ice with her and were duly inducted in the Holy Grail that became Watatu. Think Theresa Musoke, Gakunju Kaigwa, Charles Sekano, Mary Collis, Justus Kyalo, Chelenge van Rampelberg, Kamal Shah, Zacharia Mbutha, not to mention Timothy Brooke, and the young Dutch Islam-convert Hans Seuren. Fiona McDougal exhibited her ground breaking black and white portraits of people who had contributed to Kenya’s development at Watatu.

Honky Tonk Woman, 1984 by South African Artist Charles Sekano | Ruth Scaffner Protogee

Honky Tonk Woman, 1984, by South African Artist Charles Sekano | Source: Osei G. Kofi

That some of these masters are no longer with Watatu is a case of the ebb and flow of the sea. For crying out loud, the very seed that was planted to flower into the talent-packed Kuona Trust of today was plucked from Ruth Schaffner’s tree! Go figure.

Let me conclude with this: were Ruth Schaffner to be around today she would unreservedly embrace many of what I’d call “East Africa’s Turks”, the crop of brash, talented college educated artists from Makerere, Nairobi and Kenyatta art schools, who show none of the bland Europe-apeing didacticism of their fathers and uncles of the seventies and eighties. They blend so splendidly their innately inspired natural-born killer verves with a strong grounding in techniques and media-use as can be acquired in art school tutorials.

I am talking Anwar Nakibinge, Beatrice Wanjiku, Camille Wekesa, Yassir Ali, Ssali Yusuf, Tabitha wa Thuku – and of course, Wangechi Mutu, a class act of her own! Yup, these new kids on the block would surely have made Schaffner’s grade, trust me.

Osei G Kofi, Art Africa Investment, Geneva

Posted By: Hirum Ndungu

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Your Comments

margaretta wa gacheru: i write extensively about Ruth and she definitely had her strengths, and many Kenyan artists will testify to the incredible support she gave them. She was a shrewd business woman, especially knowledgeable about the business of art, and those who criticize her most severely are often those who either envied her or didn't understand her artistic vision, love of African art and acute business acumen.

Christina Forrer: Hi Margaretta. I live in Los Angeles and am very interested in the articles you have written about Ruth or Adama. Where could I read them and is there a link you could send me?

Donna Pido: Just to set the record straight, Katarikawe and Mbuno were well established artists long before Ruth arrived in Kenya. Calling them protegees of Ruth is a bit inaccurate though she did support themthrough some rough times.

Marsea Goldberg: Wonderful to see an article on my mentor Ruth Schaffner. She was married 6 times not 4! I miss her deeply and continue to be inspired by her and her vision.

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