The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) is the OG of the city’s cultural experiences, and a visit to its beautiful complex in Joubert Park forms part of the urban memory of Johannesburg and its residents. The Homecoming exhibition, featuring 145 of the gallery’s top works, has been travelling the world for the past two years, visiting Hungary, Italy, and South Korea, where the exhibitions attracted close to 300 000 visitors.

Johannesburgers have therefore been delighted to have these works back home, accessible to the public for free.

Visitors can expect works by some of the world’s most important artists, including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Roy Lichtenstein, and Francis Bacon, alongside important South African artists such as Irma Stern, George Pemba, Gerard Sekoto, Maggie Laubser, Ernest Cole, Gladys Mgudlandlu, and William Kentridge.

The exhibition is organised around themes such as landscapes, portraits, death, nudes, and food, allowing viewers to see how similar subjects have been approached by different artists, in different periods, and through different media.

The curators have deliberately placed works together according to theme rather than separating European artists from local ones. Like almost all South African museums, the JAG feels the need to grapple with the fact that much of its collection was acquired during the colonial and apartheid periods.

The thematic approach is potentially an intelligent response. Having such a wide range of works on display simultaneously gives them an opportunity to have a conversation with one another and allows viewers to ask questions about the art, its journey, and the societies in which it was created.

Indeed, the curators promise precisely this. The introductory panel explains that “collections can reveal much about how and why they were assembled and how, in South Africa, this is imbued with the complexities of the country’s history and social fabric”.

Evaporates

Had the curators lived up to that promise of a genuinely South African conversation about art it would have been great. But once the opening panel has been read, any meaningful South African conversation evaporates at the stroke of one of Picasso’s pens.

Not a single artwork is interrogated. Instead, each thematic section receives an abstract treatment almost entirely detached from the works actually on display. The descriptions read like paragraphs lifted from a postmodern art journal, shorn of context, perspective, and almost any local grounding.

Now, I should say that I am to art history what Old MacDonald Had a Farm is to veterinary science. But I do know agitprop when I see it.

In the section on nudes, we are told: “The difference between terms nude and naked has less to do with the state of dress or undress of the body [and] which body is in the frame and how that body came to be in such a state.” What this has to do with Rodin’s beautiful sculpture of Eve is unclear.

On landscapes, we learn that these paintings can be “anachronistic fits of nostalgia in the face of social upheaval”. Perhaps. But it seems an odd lens through which to approach the Monet on display, with his fascination with light, water, colour, and sensation.

Then there is sailing. We are informed that “In popular culture sailing represents adventure and discovery. The popular television franchise Star Trek is the embodiment of this fantasy. From the perspective of the colonised and the descendants of the enslaved and indentured labour this fantasy represents ‘the horror’.” A passage that is entirely correct, except for the parts about sailing, Star Trek, and the history of colonisation.

If the curators were serious about showing how collections “can be reimagined as sites of recognition, dialogue, and healing”, they might have started by treating the artworks as individual objects with their own histories and meanings and then go on to their wide contexts with each other.

Artists

Tell us about the artists. Why were they acquired? How did they arrive in Johannesburg? Where do the artists overlap and where do they conflict? Why might a Stern and a Matisse be worth viewing together? Create an actual conversation rather than imposing one from above.

Oh, and on the question of exclusion, an elderly woman repeatedly asked me to read the names of artists and paintings because the exhibit labels were too small and indistinct for her to read. So much for accessibility.

But there is something deeper going on at Homecoming.

The JAG collection owes much to the wealth, collecting instincts, and philanthropy associated with Johannesburg’s mining establishment, a core aspect of the curators’ apparent resentment. Now, after travelling the world, these artistic treasures, neglected by a dysfunctional city administration, can currently be properly viewed only in a space maintained by the epitome of the private sector: a major bank, in a part of the city that remains attractive and functional in significant part because private capital has invested in keeping it that way.

Given the provenance of the collection, there is something particularly profound about the fact that this is where it has had to come home to.

Homecoming, on until the end of October at Standard Bank Gallery, is an outstanding cultural experience in the heart of Johannesburg. Everyone should go and see it.

Just don’t read the curatorial treatments.