In room one of the Iziko SA National Gallery, during these turbulent times in our neighbouring country, Cedric, Wayson, Jamie - Zimbabwe, Rhodesia (1979) seems to take on a riveting poignancy. The melancholy of faces who have lost expression and glued viewers to the floor when artist Hayden Proud showed it the first time and the Friends of the SANG acquired it in 1987, now looks ghostly; masks of something forever lost.

How fortuitous of the Friends’ Choice committee, led at that time by the energetic Helen Cherry, to buy the painting. A few years later it joined the museum’s permanent collection.
For Proud, who, as curator at the Iziko SANG, works closely with the Friends and looks after the many artworks that they have bought over decades, the exhibition of his fine triptych as part of this small celebration of the remarkable organisation called FONG, for short, too would bring back sweet memories. The Friends are, indeed, observing 40 years of contributing to Cape culture.

For those of us who have shared the rewarding friendship (mine include being chair from mid-1980
to mid-1990), the exhibition is not only one of upbeat nostalgia, but a proud reflection of the worth, need and achievements of the Friends of the SA National Gallery. Even an outsider, looking at the top-class art that is one show here today, could be surprised at the insight with which the friends’ organisation acquired and supported mostly younger artists.
It was 20 years ago that the collection known as the Friends’ Choice travelled to the Grahamstown Festival to be one of the art highlights there that year. In April 1992, the collection - which by that time had developed repute - had one final, triumphant outing at the SANG in a show.
As recorded by the then chair of the selection subcommittee, Deon
Viljoen, in the handsome
catalogue, the purpose of the
project - to collect young and less well-known artists’ work - had been overtaken by the SANG’s own acquisitions policy. And so the collection, or most of it, was transferred to the permanent collection.

Since those days, the Friends have contributed magnificently to the collection, supporting acquisitions and raising funds. (The fine Bertha Everard landscape Lekkerdraai on show now was acquired with the support of FONG, who contributed an astounding R4 000 to the cost of R9 000 in 1978!)
Founded in 1968 (when the society sponsored a documentary about Adolph Stephan Friedrich Jentsch with R3 600), the Friends of the SA National Gallery are, like
similar associations attached to major art institutions all over the world, the gallery’s first circle of supporters and fans. These are the patrons whose moral and other backing provides the public impetus for its functions and obligations as cultural entity.

The wonderful small exhibition - on until the end of September - is a vivid demonstration of that friendship.

* The Friends of the Michaelis Collection at the Old Town House too are celebrating. Their fifteenth anniversary is coming up and a number of events are planned around this. They have also added to the collection, assisted with conservation work, as well as the funding of workshops and school-related projects involving up to 50 schools in the Cape area.