Egon Guenther


Egon Guenther was a South African gallery owner, art teacher, print-maker, art photographer and collector. He had an influence on the development of South African art, notably the artists Giuseppe Cattaneo, Peter Haden, Hannes Harrs, Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Cecil Skotnes, and Edoardo Villa. Guenther died on 30 January 2015 at the age of 94.

Early life

Egon Ferdinand Guenther was born on 24 January 1921 in Mannheim, Germany. He started out as a goldsmith, following his jeweler parents Jakob Nikolaus Günther and Hermine Sommer.
In the late 1940s he opened an art gallery, Galerie Egon Günther, in Mannheim. This was the first German gallery to be listed after World War II in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the leading French bulletin of arts, published in Paris. The gallery specialized in African art, and abstract and surrealist German art.
In 1947 he married Hannelore Ingeborg Schmitt and they had three children: Miriam, Nico and Thomas.

German exhibitions

The first exhibition opened on 1 February 1947 and was a showcase of paintings by German artists renowned at the time; it included:
In 1948 he staged an exhibition of German, Austrian and Swiss expressionists:
His final exhibition in Germany took place in December 1950.

Moving to South Africa

In 1951, Guenther moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. He was described as saying "I never left Germany, I came home to Africa". In 1955, he opened a goldsmith's studio with Edy Caveng, a partnership which continued until Caveng returned to Switzerland in 1965. In 1969 Guenther sold his jewelry workshop to Kurt Donau, a Swiss immigrant, who had worked for him from 1958 to 1961.

Print-maker

Guenther was a print-maker, using letterpress and woodblock printing. He published several woodblock series.

Photographer

Guenther was also an art photographer, and he was hand-picked by Edoardo Villa to photograph his sculptures for inclusion in books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs. Similarly, Guenther took many of the photographs of the works of the other artists that he represented, for art magazines and newspaper articles.