Mystery surrounds the decision to send 145 valuable artworks from the state-run Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) on tour to South Korea, bypassing the art gallery committee entirely.
The collection includes the gallery’s prize paintings from Picasso, Degas, Turner, Sisley, Pissarro, Rossetti, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet and Millais. It also includes works by South African masters such as George Pemba, Irma Stern and Alexis Preller.
This collection would be a major drawcard in any city – as well as a revenue generator through ticket sales – but many have not been displayed in Joburg since the building’s centenary celebration in 2015.
This has robbed the city’s residents of the opportunity to appreciate these works, even though the donation deed from 1906, when the gallery was established by Lady Florence Phillips, stipulates that these artworks belong to the people of Joburg.
Yet the City of Joburg has refused to say what the terms of these loans are, nor whether there is a monetary benefit accruing to the gallery or, indeed, to any city official.
Currency interviewed city officials, employees at other city museums and civilians deeply concerned about the lack of transparency around an invaluable public asset. Many attribute this to the city’s powerful arts and heritage director, Vuyisile Mshudulu, who they say has created a climate of fear since he was appointed in 2017.
Mshudulu and JAG registrar Philippa van Straaten – city officials whose salaries are paid by taxpayers – refused to answer questions directly about this loan. City spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane accused Currency of “harassment” of people “who are not tasked to engage with the media”, saying “please send a for [sic] query for the city to respond”. Yet Mshudulu has dodged questions around the gallery for months, as the disturbing revelations have mounted.

As Currency has reported, what should be the crowning glory of the city’s cultural heritage is falling to ruin; the gallery building is crumbling, artworks are damaged, exhibition halls stand empty and just 1% of the 9,000 paintings and artefacts in its collection are on display.
In August, law firm Webber Wentzel, acting for the Joburg Heritage Foundation and the Friends of JAG, served the mayor’s office with a letter of demand to move the at-risk collection before Joburg’s summer wet season began in earnest. Yet the city did nothing and, given torrential downpours in recent weeks, it is unclear how much further damage has been done.
Some of the more cynical observers argue that, given the state of the gallery, sending the city’s artworks overseas might, ironically, be the best place for them.
While it is commonplace for art galleries and museums to lend out pieces for exhibitions, both the size of the loan now on tour, and the length of time that many pieces have spent outside the country have raised eyebrows among local curators.
Asked about the collection on tour, Everard Read gallery chair Mark Read, South Africa’s pre-eminent gallerist, puts a conservative figure of roughly $17.8m (R330m) on just 22 pieces from the 145.
“They are marvellous examples of each artist’s work. It’s the heavyweight core of the gallery’s 19th-century European collection and in rand terms they are hovering towards priceless,” Read tells Currency.
The portrait of Vanessa Bell for instance – an icon of the 20th century and a member of Britain’s Bloomsbury set – “would go on the front cover of any catalogue of English works of art”, says Read.
“It’s completely weird that South Africans don’t know where these pieces are. Who’s enjoying them? And are people being charged to look at these objects? These artworks are not pawns in some political game,” he says.


‘Thousands’ of audiences
Since the city has refused to release the terms of that loan arrangement, it remains unclear who is benefiting.
The South Korea exhibition follows an earlier tour to Italy in 2015, when the JAG first sent 33 artworks. By 2022, that loan had grown to 63 pieces. The exhibition in South Korea is the largest loan yet, of 145 pieces. The marketing pamphlets say that Gaudium Associates, a “cultural content” company, is running the Korean exhibition, aiming to showcase “400 Years of Western Art, Reading in Masterpiece: From Monet to Andy Warhol”. The exhibition began last October at the Gyeongju Art Centre, before moving to Busan, and it will travel to Jeju and Seoul later this year.

The curator is Simona Bartolena, “a renowned scholar who has translated and published a number of writings in Korea and has focused on the history of European art in the 19th and 20th centuries”.
Yet Bartolena isn’t a curator at the Johannesburg art gallery; she works with Italian company ViDi, which was pivotal to exhibitions of the JAG artworks in Italy. ViDi’s association with Mshudulu dates back to 2019, which led to that collection touring a number of Italian cities, from Pavia to Turin, as well as Heilbronn in Germany and Debrecen in Hungary.
In an “exhibition publicity document” bearing both ViDi and the City of Joburg’s letterhead, Mshudulu writes gushingly about a relationship that he said is one of the city’s “flagship” programmes.
“The partnership with ViDi has been nothing short of exceptional. It was a wonderful opportunity for the JAG, the city, and the country as a whole,” he said, adding that there are “many benefits” for the city.
“Apart from given [sic] the city’s brand greater global prominence, it also created exposure for the curators, conservators and other staff within the directorate to work with highly acclaimed curators in these cities.”
The Italian exhibitions, he said, “attracted thousands of audiences and millions worth of media coverage. This fits in very well with the city’s objective to protect and promote heritage.”
And yet the claim to creating global “exposure” for South African curators is immediately called into question by the fact that it is Mshudulu’s name all over the advertising posters for the Korean exhibition – not that of Khwezi Gule, who is the actual curator of the JAG.
Emails to ViDi, which specialises in “exhibition production and organisation” and art events, seeking clarity on this relationship have so far gone unanswered.

‘Undemocratic’ decisions
That this South Korean exhibition is taking place at all is thanks to murky, behind-the-scenes wrangling to overhaul the city’s art loan policy. One well-placed source says the policy has been twisted to suit Mshudulu, bypassing curatorial staff who would ordinarily manage these art loans.
This policy is meant to govern the manner in which heritage artefacts and artworks are handled by the city’s museums. A review of this policy began in 2016, but by 2020 a new policy had been “pushed through by Vuyisile and signed without any input from the curators”, says one insider.
“The original loans policy had the chief curator of an institution in charge, but Vuyisile changed that without talking to the curators, so the authority fell to him,” they tell Currency.
In approving this new policy, there was no discussion around whether art loans should also be approved by the art gallery committee, says the source.
Eben Keun, a member of the Friends of JAG, says the gallery’s original deed of donation specified that the art gallery committee had to approve all loans. But this has not been the case here.
There are “several gaps in the policy, such as the lack of stakeholder involvement and input from the South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra)”, says another source. Despite these gaps, “we later discovered that the policy had been adopted by the city council”.
Objections were made to the speaker of Joburg’s council, citing a lack of “democratic principles and constitutional obligations”, but these were simply ignored.
One city official, who felt deeply uncomfortable about the decision to send these valuable works out on loan, raised this at a meeting of the art gallery committee. Yet curiously, they say Mshudulu insisted that even the catalogue of items out on loan remain secret.
“I asked if the committee had a catalogue of the items and when they would be returning to South Africa. Chairman Joseph Gaylard clearly didn’t know about it and Vuyisile made his usual point about the ‘risk’ of disclosing the catalogue.”
Asked why they did nothing to prevent the collection being shipped abroad, committee chair Gaylard tells Currency: “We defer in general again to the relevant city officials and JAG staff.”
Gaylard argues that “while the art gallery committee has an oversight and advisory role on matters related to the collection, it is not responsible for the day-to-day management, administration and care of the collection nor the gallery infrastructure”.

Surprising ‘haste’
The one state body that does have to approve art loans of this sort is the national heritage agency, Sahra, which issues permits for objects of heritage significance to be moved overseas. It is a crime to remove heritage assets without Sahra’s permission.
Gerard de Kamper, curator of the art collection at the University of Pretoria and a member of Sahra’s advisory committee, says he was “concerned” about the haste with which the agency had been asked to approve JAG’s initial loan of art to Italy in 2015. “When [the JAG] applied for the permit, the art was already packed. We said: ‘How do we know that what we send is what we get back?’,” he says.
De Kamper and another Sahra official then forced the gallery to unpack that collection for inspection. “My speciality is fake art, so I made certain notes so that when the collection came back we could check against that,” he tells Currency.
Sahra’s process is rigorous. Cuan Hanhdiek, a former heritage officer at the agency says: “Every permit I did when I was there had an advisory panel [which] consisted of a range of expert advisers – curators, art historians [and others]. They would provide input and the decisions would be based on the recommendations of the panel.”

De Kamper says fears about original art being swapped out for forgeries are not misplaced.
“It happened in the 1980s at the cultural history museum: art got sent overseas, and from the first overseas location, the art was then sent to a second location. When it came back it was exposed as a fake, and the first location blamed the second and vice versa, so nobody could ever pin down who did what,” he says.
But, says Hahndiek, in the case of the JAG loan, “we took images of tiny minor things that if someone was going to switch it out you wouldn’t think of … so that when they come back you can compare them”.
What worried de Kamper was that the gallery wanted to send that initial collection directly from Italy to South Korea, without it first returning to South Africa to be inspected.
Instead, Sahra instructed JAG to bring the art home, which it did. But, says De Kamper, the JAG “applied for the permit the day before it went out again; none of us who had inspected the collection the first time [did so] when it came back because they didn’t give us the time”.
The upshot was that the collection sent to South Korea was never inspected by Sahra.
“If all the paperwork is correct, lawfully there’s no reason not to permit it, but it does concern me that the most important part of the collection is there. It became bigger and bigger, and I do not see how this is positive for the JAG,” says De Kamper.
De Kamper says the size of this loan raises eyebrows in itself, adding: “I have never seen that you loan an entire collection of a museum like that.”
Read reckons that fears of forgeries may be overblown, since each of the JAG artworks has impeccable provenance, and would be well known to any reputable gallery. “It’s well-nigh impossible to fake any of those without being found out,” he says.
Nonetheless, says Read, “the principal foe of these pictures is neglect and damage”.
All of which illustrates just how much is wrong with this picture.
While the city’s secrecy around these loans raises questions about whether officials like Mshudulu understand their public responsibility of transparency towards those who pay their salaries, the city’s residents are being robbed of the chance to appreciate this invaluable collection.

Sign up to Currency’s weekly newsletters to receive your own bulletin of weekday news and weekend treats. Register here.