1914-1996
BY FRANCIS ILAHAKA
The closing of Gallery
Watatu in Nairobi one of the biggest art Center in Sub Sahara is a blow
to East Africa artist who depended on it
The Gallery was founded in 80s by one of German top art
collectors of our time as far as art work is concern.
According to art books the late Ruth whose work are now going to waste collected the highest numbers
of art work ever collected by a single art collector in Africa something which
we should be happy of.
While in Nairobi he motivated and promoted numerous painters
among the Jak Katarikawe Francis Kahuru and Ngecha artist who later nicknamed her Mama art.
In perceiving paintings and judging artists,
Ruth’s success proved that her vision included an eye for work that deserved a
place in the world. Throughout her life maintained an objective, encouraging
and open manner.
Ruth.S.Schaffner was born in 1914 in Mannheim,
Germany and educated in Berlin until until when her father, Dr.Hans
Staudinger-secretary of state in Prussia and MP for Hamburg-was imprisoned.
Upon the arrest of her father, Ruth and the
family did what appeared to be appropriate at that moment-migration. The family
fled Germany first for Switzerland and then to France. While here Ruth started
studying photography which she graduated in together with economics later after
moving to the United States in 1935.
During the World War II she was a photographer
with the Free- French Information Service. She later became a film maker and
photographer with her first husband Hassolt Davis, on expeditions first to
French Guiana in South America and in 1948-49 to West Africa’s Ivory Coast.
Together with Davis the film maker-journalist
husband, she wrote two books about these expeditions and made two documentary
films for Warner Brothers in Hollywood.
Ruth spend most of her life in the 1950’s
working as a television producer in New York. It is during this period that she
got married to a French painter Michael Cadoret de L’Epinneguin through whom
she became part of the European art community.
Having interacted with renown artists like
Fernanrd Leger, Marc Chagall, Juan Miro, Marcel Duchamps; with surrealists
Salvador Dali and Tangui and Americans Mark Rotho and Alexander Calder, famous
for his mobiles, Ruth realized that she developed a knowledge and strong love
for art.
As she would later tell her friends, “I suddenly
realized I had an eye and that it was a good one. I had not really had a
teacher. I learned what good work was by osmosis. It was an incredible time to
have been in New York.” Armed with intense intellectual and artistic feeling,
Ruth together with the late Husband, Joseph Schaffner of the Chicago men’s
clothing chain ‘Hart Schaffner and Marx’ made several ‘artistic’ trips and
travelled extensively in the 1960’s to see the emerging contemporary art of
Japan and Australia among many other.
Ruth’s first full taste of the world of
contemporary art came after the death of Joseph Schaffner in 1972. Using the
inheritance left to her by him, Ruth opened a large art gallery on State Street
in Santa Barbara, California.
The gallery was in the words of a local
sculptor, Doug Edge, “not just ahead of time for Santa Barbara, but really
years ahead of Los Angeles. Her gallery at the State Street was much larger
than any other space in L.A that I remember.”
Ruth Schaffner was the first major contemporary
art dealer and gallery owner to see that Santa Barbara had the potential not to
become not merely a charming, provincial art colony, but because of its
proximity to Los Angeles, to become an important centre for arts, operating
outside Los Angeles which showed the work of a number of now famous artists,
among them David Hockney and Robert Therrien. She returned to Santa Barbara in 1980 and opened a small gallery in Ortega
Street, where she showcased the work of emerging artists.
Driven by what had controlled her life
throughout her stay in this world the need to see young people, unknown people,
get a chance to show their work- Ruth thought wide and hard and decided to run
an art gallery in Africa that would make this dream realizable.
On the decision, Ruth remarked, “I’m certainly
not going there to buy and sell souvenirs. In any case all that sort of thing
is finished. Much of what was essentially of value to the African culture, or to
western collectors was bough up ling ago.”
“I intend to open my gallery in Nairobi in order
to participate primarily to provide artists there the kind of professional
viewing space and professional representation that their art demand. I could
say it is to give them confidence to provide a credibility. That is why I want
to be part of it.” She quipped.
Schaffners involvement with Africa goes back
nearly 40 years when she first came to the continent in 1948 to film the
customs of some West Africa peoples. A film that is said to have become
priceless because it documented much of African culture that has been changes
in the past 40 years by the influx of foreign influence and the modernization process
She moved to Nairobi in 1984 with her husband,
businessman Adama Diawara and took over Gallery Watatu on December 1, the same
year, after looking at the possible gallery sites. She brought to the gallery
her years of experience in the international art scene and her fierce
commitment to promoting artists.
What Ruth did immediately she took over the
gallery whose roof-garden the
current multi-storied Lonrho House stands on, was to enlarge the scale
of its operations, extend the premises, increase local commercial patronage, create
Watatu Foundation (a separate organization for development and archives), and
expand the stable of artists to include
many who had little formal art education.
The dimensions of what she accomplished during
her tenure as director and owner of Gallery Watatu are numerous. Her acute
sense and knowledge of hot who to spot talented and hard-working artists, how
to nurture personal and original elements in their work, and how to foster
their sense of professional identity left an indelible mark on the face of
Watatu.
One of them being the Ngecha artists which
consists of Sane Wadu, Eunice Wairimu (his wife) , Sebastian Kiarie, Meek
Gichugu, Wanyu Brush, Chain Muhandi and others not quite Ngecha but close to
the gallery like Joel Oswaggo, Kivuthi Mbuno, Zechariah Mbutha, Francis Kahuri among
others.
Already in existence at the gallery at the time
of Ruth’s take-over were a group of other artists like John Diang’a, Jak
Katarikawe, Theresa Musoke, Ancent Soi, Etale Sukuro, Timothy Brooke, Samuel
Wanjau and of course two other founders of the gallery Robin Anderson and Jony
Waite.
Ruth’s achievements are also indicated by the
list of prestigious group exhibitions in which Watatu Artists participated:
“Wegzeichen” (signs)-1991, “African Explores” 1991-1994, “Africa Hoy” (Africa
Now) 1992-1993.“Recontres Africaines” (African Encounters) 1994, “Africus”
(Johannesburg Biennale) 1995, “Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa”
1995-1996,” The Osaka Triennalle” 1993 and the Dakar Biennale 1993 and 1996.
There were also many other solo showings in commercial galleries in New York,
California, Germany and Japan.
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