SEATED LADY WITH FOLDED ARMS

Signed

Provenance: Stephan Welz & Co, 2016

Accompanied by a letter of authentication from the Renzo Vignali Foundry

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Kumalo for more information on the artist, career and artistic practice.

The work should not be confused with a similar work that is illustrated on page 38 of “The Neglected Tradition – Towards a New History of South African Art (1930 – 1988)” – Steven Sack. Not only is there a significant difference in size, closer comparison reveals marked differences in ALL of the details of the work (face, neck, arms and folding of the hands, size and positioning of the legs – all features that are relatively easy to copy more closely if that was the intention of the artist). The work is therefore an entirely different work, but forms an integral and important part of the series of “seated women” that Kumalo produced during that period.

Despite this, the confusion leads to doubts being cast on the work’s authenticity and importance in Kumalo’s oeuvre.

The provenance of the work was traced back to Dennis Hotz who had an art gallery in Johannesburg until sometime in the 1980s, before moving to the UK to establish international art publishing powerhouse ArtReview. Artworks from his South African collection and gallery started being offered on South African auctions regularly only recently.

Unfortunately Mr Hotz has been unresponsive to our requests for the further information required to trace the provenance of work beyond himself.

We therefore took the work to Carlo Gamberini, the current owner of the generational Renzo Vignali Foundry in Pretoria (perhaps most famous for being the foundry that Anton van Wouw used for his South African casting) that did all of Kumalo’s casting in South Africa, for physical inspection and authentication.

On inspecting the work, Carlo commented as follows:
• It is definitely a Kumalo bronze.
• The signature (or what is visible of it) is correct/ authentic (with the downward diagonal of the K coming out of the upward diagonal and the O over the L as opposed to next to it).
• It was not cast at their foundry, but given the patina he dates it as being cast during Kumalo’s lifetime. It is therefore likely that it was cast at the Fiorini & Carney Foundry in London, before Kumalo’s return to South Africa.
• He was actually in the foundry (as schoolboy he used to spend his afternoons there) when Kumalo took the original terracotta maquette for this bronze & reworked it to the more elongated one more commonly known and that is illustrated on page 38 of “The Neglected Tradition – Towards a New History of South African Art (1930 – 1988)” – Steven Sack. (Carlo actually thought the reworked maquette was in their storage area for that period and spent several minutes looking for it, but unfortunately could not find it. They had to destroy a lot of the maquettes from that period to make place for new works.)
• The fact that there is no edition number on the bronze and that the maquette was reworked may in all likelihood mean that it is a piece unique (since the planned edition numbers are typically on the maquette, with individual edition numbers applied only after casting to each individual cast).
• The work is therefore a very good example of Kumalo’s well-known common practice of revisiting and reworking maquettes in order to produce a series of thematic new bronzes.

Carlo subsequently provided a formal letter of authentication (please see the last image above). Gerard de Kamper, the curator of the Unversity of Pretoria Museums and Collection regards Carlo as a credible expert in Kumalo and the other Renzo Vignali artists’ works and confirms that Carlo's opinions have never subsequently been proven wrong by forensic chemical analysis of a work.

Carlo also stated that:
• It is not professional or at least best practice to express an authentication opinion on a work without physically inspecting it.
• Since most artists accept private commissions for their work directly from collectors (outside of the gallery/ dealer channel) and/or sometimes finance the production of new works themselves if their gallery(/ies) / dealers are not willing/ able to assist and they are passionate enough about the work themselves and can afford it, one cannot and should not fall into the trap of lazily concluding a work is a fake if there is no record of it at any gallery/ dealer. Instead, the more rigorous and diligent approach would be to acquire all foundry records for the artist for orders from ALL sources (the artist, private collectors, galleries and dealers). They in fact have records in their archive that proves that Kumalo had works cast independently from his galleries/ dealers (for a direct client or for his own account).
• One should be wary of self-appointed experts that have considerable collections of certain artists’ works, since they have an inherent conflict of interest insofar as it is in their financial interest to limit the supply of these artists’ works to the ones in their collections (and sometimes then also documented in their self-published books).

Following Carlo Gamberini’s feedback, we therefore inspected two works that had paperwork from the Grosvenor Gallery that showed that they were cast at the Fiorini & Carney Foundry. The physical comparison of the work on offer with these 2 works revealed that the texture/ finishing, patina and even the dremel marks where the base has been levelled on these works were consistent with those of the work on offer.

An online search for the Fiorini and Carney Foundry in London lead us to www.artsheritage.co.uk and we approached them to find out if they would be able to assist us with access to Fiorini & Carney’s records for the artist. After some inquiries they responded as follows: “Unfortunately we have been unable to find any paper record of the piece. All reference to works of that time by Fiorini Carney (Which no longer trades) are not available to us as the grandson of the owner did not keep the records after that company was dissolved.”

The work has been submitted to the University of Pretoria Museum for inclusion in their project to establish a comprehensive database of forensic profiles for authentic Kumalo bronzes.