In 1930 Rhodes University acquired a portrait of its first Master, Sir John Adamson, which it hung in Founders Hall.
But a formal policy of commissioning painted portraits and hanging them in the Council Chamber dates from early 1962, when Dorothy Kay completed a representation of the University’s second master, Cullen Bowles.
In 1930 Rhodes University acquired a portrait of its first Master, Sir John Adamson, which it hung in Founders Hall.
But a formal policy of commissioning painted portraits and hanging them in the Council Chamber dates from early 1962, when Dorothy Kay completed a representation of the University’s second master, Cullen Bowles.
Kay was not the only woman artist to receive a commission for a work of this type, and we also have portraits by, for example, Fleur Ferri and Joyce McCrea.
But the nature of the genre – which calls for primary emphasis to be placed on the identity of the sitter rather than the artist – has made these works seem part of a masculine tradition.
Further, the only black sitter thus far has been Jakes Gerwel (who was painted by Tanya Poole in 2002) and the portraits at Rhodes have all been produced by white artists.
Unsurprisingly, some people have begun to read these portraits as a testament to histories of exclusion or inequality on the grounds of race and gender.
I happen to like some of the portraits individually. But I believe that the current location of most of them – where they loom over proceedings in the Council Chamber – is problematic.
Other universities have moved their portraits out of their Council Chambers, finding alternative venues for them or placing them in storage.
This is the case with the University of Pretoria, the University of South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand, for example.
Hence if we were to move our portraits we would not be doing something unprecedented.But a matter that still needs to be considered is not simply where and how portraits are displayed and the demographics of sitters and makers but also the style of these representations.
Artists commissioned to create portraits of chancellors, vice-chancellors or chairs of council are not only almost invariably expected to replicate the appearance of sitters, albeit through a filter of idealisation, but also to adhere to various conventions which would affirm the hierarchical importance of university leaders.
For example, portraitists are usually expected to place emphasis on the academic gown, the marker of office and status.
What happens then when a portraitist does not view prior representations of chancellors, vice-chancellors and chairs of council as prototypes for emulation but instead as a discourse for critical unpacking?
Tanya Poole’s portraits of David Woods and Jakes Gerwel, which hang outside the Council Chamber, are sometimes dismissed by people at Rhodes who seem to assume that good paintings will slip quietly into the background, like discreet wallpaper, and that any artist who fails to comply with such an expectation is either incompetent or unsocialised.
What such viewers fail to recognise is that Poole has quite deliberately deployed visual language to engage critically with the portrait tradition.
Feeling that the appointment of David Woods signified a shift away from the top-down relationship between senior management and academic departments, she sought to convey a sense of a new ethos of accessibility by increasing the relative scale of the faces of Woods and Gerwel and creating a very direct engagement between sitters and viewers.
Poole’s portraits emphasise the importance of using visual language in ways that query and resist conventions.
Indeed, we need to recognise that – precisely because they defy tradition – transformative portraits will bother us.
I therefore believe that, while we clearly need to think about where we place our portraits and recognise that keeping them in the Council Chamber is inappropriate, an even more important step towards transformation will transpire through us welcoming – rather than being resistant towards – visual languages which challenge our preconceptions about what a portrait ought to look like.
