Philip Stein

( 1926-2010) Bookseller, entrepreneur and arts sponsor. Born in Piketburg in the Western Cape on July 29 1926. His parents had come to South Africa from Lithuania in the early1920s. In the mid-'40s the family moved to Johannesburg. Stein's involvement in the arts began with a boyhood passion for books which he bought and sold for profit. He was a "book smous " (pedlar), he used to laugh. After studying history and music at the University of the Witwatersrand, he got a job at the Vanguard bookshop in Hillbrow, run by Trotskyites. Here, in the '40s and '50s, he met black intellectuals and white left-wingers such as Ruth First, Harold Wolpe and Denis Goldberg. He was invited by CNA to be its retail books director and in 1962 founded the CNA Literary Award. He spent many years in publishing. While recovering from a bout of ill-health, he came up with the idea of a series of theatre awards which in 1983 he sold to the then MD of AA Mutual Life, Brian Benfield. The result was the Vita Awards for performing arts. In 1987 he came up with the idea for Dance Umbrella, which would be a local equivalent of Dance Umbrellas in Austin, Texas and London. It got off the ground two years later and has played a central role in popularizing contemporary dance and facilitating the emergence of talented choreographers and dancers. Stein, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years, died on the 4th July, 2010 two weeks after his wife of 60 years, Shirley. The couple had 5 children. While he did not launch corporate sponsorship of the arts in this country, he certainly breathed vigorous life into it in the 1980s and made the notion of corporate engagement with the arts more widely acceptable than it might otherwise have been. Much of the money that today supports the visual arts, poetry, short stories, opera, ballet, contemporary dance, crafts and community theatre does so because of him. A small man of great charm, huge drive and impressive intellect, he was passionate about art, its importance to society and its relevance in the modern world. He was highly effective in communicating this passion to company bosses and, at least as important, selling them the business case for pumping their shareholders' money into art. It wasn't about charity, he told them, it was about a long-term return on investment. And over the years his various initiatives paid them back handsomely. There was an enormous wealth of potential talent in South Africa, he told them. With their money they could unlock it. "Spread it around like manure and see what grows," he famously challenged. "You'll find gold in dross," he told them. "You've got to fund, experiment, be brave."

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