Page 27 - Zimbabwe Stone Sculpure 1st Edition

ThE hISTORY
as well as the local Shona people. Blomefield started a gallery that became known as Tengenenge‚ ‘the beginning of the beginning’. He never imposed any restrictions on his artists and did not have any sort of quality control, which was a source of tension between himself and McEwen. However McEwen became aware of this new source of talent and really liked the raw quality of the anthropomorphic sculptures that came from Tengenenge.
McEwen convinced the artists from Tengenenge to include their work in the Annual Art Exhibition organized by the National Gallery. McEwen judged each sculpture and the ones that did not make it to the exhi- bition were buried in a special garden at Tengenenge, rather than destroyed as McEwen had instructed. Later, Blomefield sold some of these rejected sculptures in South Africa, which irked McEwen who felt this would dilute the quality of the art. After 1969, Blomefield stopped the sculptures from Tengenenge going to the National Gallery because he wanted his artists to make a proper living from their sculpture and felt McEwen’s controls on quality were too severe. He wanted Tengenenge to be evaluated on its own so he exhibited the sculptures in showrooms at the Meikles Hotel in Harare. Only after McEwen left in 1973 did Tengenenge once again resume its relationship with the National Gallery.
Well-known artists who came from Tengenenge include Bernard Mata- mera, Henry Munyaradzi, Sylvester Mubayi, Fanizani Akuda and, later, Brighton Sango. Of these, only Bernard Matamera remained at Tenge- nenge and his grotesque but striking anthropomorphic style became the benchmark style of the artists there.
The first private galleries: Vukutu and Chapungu
In the late 1960s, the number of artists at the National Gallery Workshop had increased to such an extent that McEwen feared that the artists would lose their originality and become over-commercial. Therefore, in 1969, he and his wife Mary MacFadden, the American fashion designer and writer, moved the workshop to a plot called Vukutu in Nyanga, in the beautiful Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. It was a rural place where the artists could work without any pressures and where McEwen could maintain some sort of control over the quality. The artist who took command of the community was John Takawira.
TOM BLOMEFIELD
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