An affair of the soul

On the eve of the gallery's 100th anniversary, Mark Read, son of Everard, talks to Oliver Roberts about his bed-ridden childhood, his love for science and art, and why his 'shop' has endured

Somewhere in another life - a parallel universe even - Mark Read is peering down at DNA through the cold tubes of a microscope. Now he's got an ancient bone in his hand - the gnarled femur of a mammoth, maybe - and he's holding it up to the light. Nearby there is a bookshelf stuffed with volumes about the wonders of mankind. Read picks at it randomly. And, sometimes, when he reads, he rubs the back of his balding head. When he displays this tic - let's call it the cerebellum stroke - you know he's giving something a lot of thought.

Here, today, in this universe, Read is not a famed archaeological professor or a bushy-eyebrowed zoologist, but the director of Joburg's Everard Read Gallery, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Zoologist or not, the head rub persists. He's doing it this second because you've asked him whether - considering his father was Everard Read - he could have been anything other than a gallery owner. This is when he tells you about zoology, his brother, and a terrible disease.

"I had a strange entry into it," he says. "My brother Trent, who now has a gallery in Knysna, was the original heir to the gallery. The energy used educating him in the arts was more heavily spent on him than me. I was always biologically minded. When I was a little kid, I had a dreadful disease called Perthes that put me in bed for three years. I spent two years in leg irons and only really started to walk when I was nine."

It's probable that all those inert years spent pondering the ceiling of his bedroom led to his penetrating mind. For by the time he'd battled past the hormonal rages of puberty, he had become fascinated with "the planet as an organism" and "enthralled by the wonder of evolution and the DNA molecule", so he did a zoological degree at the University of Cape Town.

"I was hellbent on becoming a research ecologist. I ran out of money as a post-grad student and went to my father to ask for money - at that stage, the gallery was a much smaller business, in town opposite the Rand Club - and my father said no. He suggested I take a six-month sabbatical from academics instead and work at the gallery to earn my own way. I became so fascinated so quickly with the business and I started to see areas where I could make a big difference. I knew this was correct for me. Suddenly I realised why I had been born."

But Read's fervor for archaeology has never dulled. On a cold, windy day last year, he was a pallbearer at his great friend Phillip Tobias's funeral. All day, an earnest yarmulke desperately groped for grip on Read's bald head until eventually, graveside, it lost its will, blew off and landed on top of Tobias's casket.

Read, you can tell, wants to talk more about the minutiae of the universe, about insects and vertebrates and progression, about all the processes that have brought us here to this moment, in The Darwin Room at the top of the Circa gallery, across the road from the 100-year-old flagship. You want to talk about that stuff too - Read is articulate and engaging and would have been a superb professor - but, for now, you need more information, more data, about the history of the gallery, not of bones and mankind.

"A century ago, it was a silver and furniture and art shop in Plein Street, so to call it a gallery is stretching it," he says. "I still sometimes think of this gallery as a shop. I'm wary of the whole art arrogance, of contributions and iconic and cultural leadership, of taste/style benchmarking, of all those things galleries tend to try to measure themselves by. We're just a friendly little firm lucky enough to have been around for some time."

Read's modesty and insouciance are admirable, but the truth is the Everard Read Gallery is at the very centre of the Joburg art scene. Throughout its venerable history, it has exhibited, and often introduced, the country's leading artists. Page through the gallery's hefty archives and all the familiar names pop up: Pierneef, Preller, Meyer, Flint, Kentridge, Boonzaier, Joubert, Sekoto, Stern, Voigt.

"The gallery is dedicated to excellence," Read pauses now, rubs his head, "and not letting people - artists or clients - down. No bullshitting. The art world is full of hot air. We develop a really deep friendship with the artists we show, an affair of the soul. We're not particularly good at selling art to people who buy it because they think it's a good investment. We prefer to work with clients to form collections and relationships. We're not a generic, New York-type of institution. It's not steel and glass. We're a funny, eccentric, weird thing that seems to bumble along. The gallery, I feel, is an institution that Joburgers have always felt proud of."

The pride Read takes in the gallery is apparent in its immaculate appearance. As a man besotted with ancient history, he is obsessed with the events made from dust and fingerprints. But in his gallery, he is infatuated with their absence.

"I am draconian about it," he says. "If I walk around and the gallery is dirty and musty and things are skew on the wall, or if I feel a piece of sculpture and there's grime on it, it's toys-out-the-cot stuff. I cannot stand it. I won't inhabit the gallery like that. There has to be a sense of freshness."

Dedication to detail makes you a good leader. But it can also make you an uptight asshole. Read is only one of those things. He insists that no one calls him Mr Read and, though he has the casting vote on what gets exhibited, he allows himself to be "shouted down vociferously" by staff if they disagree with his choices.

Another thing you notice when you walk into Everard Read is how young the staff are. And, whether it's part of Read's inherent habit to surround himself with beauty, the staff are not only young, they are almost all lithe, attractive, pencil-skirted and occasionally in the habit of wearing fashionable glasses.

Read, who is 56, became director of the gallery 20 years ago. I ask whether he, or more relevantly, his father, ever had trouble exhibiting black artists in the days of apartheid.

"No, not really," he shrugs. "We obviously didn't meet a lot of black artists back then, but those we did meet, we dealt with for decades. But there's no doubt there's much more emphasis on what's happening with young black artists now. People are also starting to educate themselves about forgotten artists from our history."

Resuscitating forgotten things: this is what Read the zoologist does. It's what Read the gallery owner does. It's what Read the museum fanatic intends to do.

"It's tragic what's happened to our museums and I want to re-involve myself there [Read was once on the Museum Board]. The treasures we have. I mean, f**k, in the Pretoria museum we have the biggest chunk of the moon." He says this word with, I'd say, two extra o's in the middle. "It was a gift from the Reagan regime and it's too precious for them to even show. South Africa used to have wonderful museums. We've got staggering stuff. But now, 90% of government grants given to running the museums are being spent on salaries. It's shocking and sad. If the Smithsonian had our palaeontological riches, they'd build a whole new wing just to house it all."

Celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of the gallery are already beginning. A series of "rather powerful" exhibitions is on the way. Some names: Norman Catherine; Harry Voigt; Angus Taylor; Dylan Lewis and Italian artist Alessandro Papetti.

"This is just a vague, shotgun summary, the shrapnel shot of what I envisage the gallery to be about," Read says. That sentence requires that he perform the sternward cranial rub once more. "We're still associated with figurative art, painting and sculpting, rather than conceptual. The last third of the year is a massive group show, which will evolve as the months go along."

And, by now, you know that Mark Read loves evolution. He is convinced it's what makes people besotted with Africa.

"We were part of this continent for nine-tenths of our evolution. We only walked out 200000 years ago, so much of our brain developed here and I think that's the reason people, when they come here - even if they come from outer Mongolia - they feel a certain sense of belonging and it drags them back. I find that absolutely riveting, and it's central to my having the energy I have to make this an interesting institution."

And so, from bed-ridden boy to striding, cerebral man of art, museums and primordial skeletons, he has progressed. It was, of course, embossed in his genes. 

• For information on upcoming exhibitions, visit www.everard-read.co.za