AUCTION ACTION GALORE 2019

Business Art News STRAUSS & CO November sale explores South African art’s love affair with Paris www.straussart.co.za

Strauss & Co is pleased to announce details of the theme for its forthcoming Johannesburg sale, due to be held at its Houghton offices on Monday, 11 November. The summer sale will focus collectors’ attention on the strong influence Paris has exerted on South African art throughout the twentieth century.

“Paris was a beacon for countless South African artists,” says Susie Goodman, executive director at Strauss & Co. “The first South African artist to study in Paris was Robert Gwelo Goodman, in 1895. The list of local artists who followed in his footsteps is as remarkable as it is long. The top three lots in our upcoming sale are by Alexis Preller, William Kentridge, and Penny Siopis, highly acclaimed artists who each spent time in Paris early in their careers.”

The top lot is Preller’s Icon Barbare (Adam), an oil painting quoting his powerful 1969 intaglio Adam (sold by Strauss & Co in 2016 for R6.8 million). Shown on the artist’s 1972 Pretoria Art Museum retrospective, Icon Barbare (estimate R8.5 – 10 million) depicts the biblical first man with Prelleresque flourishes.

“The Christ-like beard and hair are ambiguously transformed with green and leaf-like tendrils thus assuming a pagan quality,” notes artist and Preller expert Karel Nel. “The transmuted presence feels more like an icon of Pan, the Greek god of nature, of fertility, the mountains and wilds.”

The November sale includes a 1954 sketch for the upper part of the central panel of the large three-panel All Africa mural, installed at the former Receiver of Revenue (now SARS) offices, Johannesburg (estimate R400 000 – 600 000). Assuredly loose in style, this oil on canvas reveals Preller’s admiration for French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy, a lifelong friend of painter Othon Friesz.

Penny Siopis, Act I Scene II, oil on canvas, 120 x 120cm, R 2 800 000 - 3 500 000

Alexis Preller, Mapogga Wedding, oil on canvas, 62 x 52cm, R 2 000 000 - 3 000 000

Preller met Friesz, a teacher at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, in 1937 during his first trip to Paris. Lacking funds to study at his art school, Preller invested his energies in the “tireless examination of the works of modern artists on view in galleries,” according his biographer Esmé Berman. During these expeditions Preller recognised in Gauguin “a guide to the direction he himself might follow”. This influence is evident in Mapogga Wedding (R2 – 3 million), a 1952 oil depicting a bride and groom set slightly askew with Gauguinesque figures in the background.

The influence of Paris is also evident in the work of contemporary masters such as William Kentridge and Penny Siopis. In 1981 Kentridge studied mime and theatre at a Paris acting school founded by Jacques Lecoq. A decade later, having decisively returned to making art, he produced the collage Iris, a highly unusual colour work portraying a single flower in Van Gogh’s Provencal tones of blue and purple (estimate R3 – 5 million).

Five years later, Siopis undertook a sevenmonth residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts after winning the Volkskas Atelier Award with her well-known painting Melancholia. The forthcoming sale includes a companion work, Act I Scene II (estimate R2.8 – 3.5

William Kentridge, Iris, mixed media with collage on paper, 142 x 118cm, R 3 000 000 - 5 000 000. Opposite Page: Alexis Preller, Icon Barbare (Adam), oil and gold leaf on panel, 60 by 50cm R 8 500 000 - 10 000 000

million), which was interrupted by Siopis’s stay in Paris and completed upon her return to Johannesburg à la Melancholia. This lot includes various pictorial elements (tortoise shell, porcupine quills, classical statuettes, red arum lilies) appearing in Melancholia.

The upcoming sale is an opportunity for collectors and art lovers to explore South African art’s indebtedness to Paris. Artists from various periods are represented in the catalogue, including Ruth Everard Haden, Clément Sénèque and Maud Sumner, who all studied in Paris during the interwar years. Sumner’s Woman Seated at a Mirror (estimate R350 000 – 500 000) is an intimate domestic scene in the style of Bonnard and Vuillard.

Postwar painters also feature prominently. They include Erik Laubscher, who studied at the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger, Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Sydney Goldblatt and Anna Vorster, who all studied at the Paris art school founded by cubist painter André Lhote. Standout lots include Laubscher’s School of Paris work from 1956, Abstract Landscape (R250 000 – 300 000) and Cilliers-Barnard’s international style Abstract Composition (estimate R80 000 – 120 000) painted a year later.

Diane Victor, There’s Fire in the Thatch, charcoal and chalk pastel on paper, 60 by 50cm, R 300 000 - 500 000

Paris was more than simply a workshop for painterly innovation; it provided shelter for dissidents and exiles. Following in the footsteps of pioneering abstract painter Ernest Mancoba, who settled in Paris in 1938, Gerard Sekoto chose to leave apartheid South Africa for the City of Lights a decade later. A highly collectible artist, Sekoto is represented in a wine-coloured composition from 1968, Three Figures (estimate R350 000 – 500 000).

Highlights from the contemporary selection include Diane Victor’s There’s Fire in the Thatch (estimate R300 000 – 500 000), a large charcoal and chalk pastel drawing portraying six figures locked in an embrace hovering over a burning landscape. Victor won the 1988 Absa l’Atelier Art Competition and – like Siopis – stayed at the Cité Internationale des Arts. During her ten-month residency

she produced drawings combining classical references with contemporary social comment and autobiographical detail.

All these works will go under the hammer on Monday, 11 November at Strauss & Co’s new sales and exhibition space at 89 Central Street, Houghton, in Johannesburg. The Paristhemed sale will also include a collection of Edoardo Villa bronze sculptures from the estate of Aldo Carrara, a lifelong friend of the artist, as well as a number of noteworthy landscape scenes by JH Pierneef.

Strauss & Co will be hosting an extensive programme of public talks and social events in the lead-up to this sale.

Art, antiques, objets d’art, furniture, and jewellery wanted for forthcoming auctions

John Koenakeefe Mohl, oil on board SOLD R100,000

View previous auction results at www.rkauctioneers.co.za 011 789 7422 • 011 326 3515 • 083 675 8468 • 12 Allan Road, Bordeaux, Johannesburg

5th Avenue Fine Art Auctioneers

Maggie Laubser, Oil - Sold for R 950 000

Next Auction, December 8 th , at 10 am ~ Now accepting entries for this auction www.5thAveAuctions.co.za Enquiries: stuart@5aa.co.za ~ 011 781 2040

Business Art News STRAUSS & CO October results bode well for the Pierneef market www.straussart.co.za

JH “Henk” Pierneef demonstrated his enduring appeal at Strauss & Co’s R55- million Spring sale, held in Cape Town on 7 October, achieving a total of R9.65 million from nine lots sold. The top lot, a monumental study of interlaced camelthorn trees in a landscape near Thabazimbi, sold for R2.73 million. The results marked a welcome return to form for Pierneef, whose prices had been diluted by a recent fire sale by a distressed collector.

This short-term market trend has been corrected by Strauss & Co, and bodes well for its forthcoming November sale in Johannesburg. The upcoming sale features 14 lots by Pierneef, all paintings, each demonstrative of his great facility within the landscape genre.

Works in Pierneef’s later, monumental style have long represented the summit of achievement for serious collectors. The upcoming sale includes two lots representative of this style. A 1946 work titled Landscape (estimate R2 – 3 million) is a stylised bushveld scene featuring a choreographed vista encompassing trees, mountains and billowing clouds. The desaturated tones of this work contrast with the rusted red and browns of Landscape with Trees (estimate R1.5 – 2 million), which is dominated by canopied camelthorn, familiar patriarchs of Pierneef’s later landscapes.

“Bury me under a camelthorn tree,” Pierneef once said, “with its straight, manly character guarding me and its roots deep in the soil of Africa.” His utterance was an expression of love, not a dictum, a fact evident in another major Pierneef lot on offer.

Landscape with Trees. oil on board, 46 by 59cm, R 1 500 000 - 2 000 000

Marone, District Lydenburg (estimate R2 – 3 million) depicts a settled landscape about to be moistened by light afternoon rain. Dated 1948, the artist’s bushveld landscape unusually features a pair of pawpaw trees as its central arboreal feature. This impressive painting, showcasing Pierneef’s ability to balance harmoniously naturalistic description and stylised invention, was based on an earlier watercolour study, sold by Strauss & Co in March 2017 for R102 312.

“How wonderful, now, that the present lot, the magnificent conclusion of the study, has come to light,” says Strauss & Co senior art specialist Alastair Meredith. “Much larger and worked up in oils on canvas, the painting is as dramatic as it is assured, and shows the artist at his latter-career peak.”

Notwithstanding his predilection for tried and tested subjects – camelthorn trees, mountains, cumulous clouds – Pierneef’s body of work contains many surprises. A highlight of Strauss & Co’s October sale was Gold & Green, Rooiplaat, N.T., a phenomenal neoimpressionist study of a riverine landscape northeast of Pretoria. Bidders visibly sat up when it went under the hammer. The work more than trebled the pre-sale estimate when it sold for R2.73 million.

The upcoming sale includes another gem from Pierneef’s earlier career. Replenishing rain is the central feature of An Approaching Storm (estimate R350 000 – 450 000), an evocative canvas painted in 1926 after his return from an influential European tour. Meredith, who is an expert in earlier twentieth-century South African art, describes Pierneef’s works from this period as “thrillingly experimental, stylistically varied and fearlessly expressed”.

A visionary artist who replenished himself through travel, the upcoming sale includes a number of works by Pierneef recording his wanderings across southern Africa. Matopos (estimate R500 000 – 700 000) depicts the granite mounds in present-day Matobo National Park in southwest Zimbabwe.

The two small-scale oils, Kameelberge naby Johan Albrechts Hoogte, SWA (estimate R200 000 – 300 000) and Hartbeeshuisie (estimate R220 000 – 280 000), derive from Pierneef’s two trips to Namibia (formerly South West Africa) in 1923 and 1924. The former depicts

an outcrop in southern Namibia and features dramatic, dusky pinks, while the latter is a gestural portrayal of a home and coop sheltered by trees.

Commenting on the latter painting, Meredith says: “It is the kind of picture in which critics of the time recognised a deliberate attempt at founding a particular South African School of painting: it captured a unique, local light, and gave prominence to the country’s vernacular architecture.”

The artist’s ability to use pigment to translate an ephemeral appreciation of light is abundantly

Marone, District Lydenburg, oil on canvas, 50 by 65cm, R 2 000 000 - 3 000 000

clear in Extensive Landscape, Dusk (estimate R250 000 – 350 000), a small painting that nonetheless compacts vastness, solitude and awe into a horizontal frame.

Pierneef’s work is a felicitous part of the Strauss & Co story. In 2009, at the company’s inaugural sale in Johannesburg, Pierneef’s woodcut of Meerlust was the second lot to go under the hammer. Since then, Strauss & Co has successfully sold a total of 340 lots by this master, achieving nearly R200 million in sales. Fashions may shift, headwinds may blow, clouds may gather, but Pierneef’s status among collectors is assured.

Strauss & Co’s offering of 14 lots by JH Pierneef will go under the hammer on Monday, 11 November at 89 Central Street, Houghton, in Johannesburg. The sale will also include a collection of Edoardo Villa bronze sculptures from the estate of Aldo Carrara, a lifelong friend of the artist, as well as feature a segment devoted to South African artists linked to Paris.

Strauss & Co will be hosting an extensive programme of public talks and social events in the lead-up to this sale.

Business Art News ASPIRE ART AUCTIONS Collecting Contemporary African Art for Contemporary Africans www.aspireart.net

Aspire has a firm and stated commitment to expanding its expertise and its reach beyond South Africa’s borders into the rest of Africa. This is not only because the company wishes to see the local art market grow and diversify into different countries, but also because it feels that art from the rest of the continent could be making a contribution to how the South African market is made up and what serious collectors should be paying attention to.

It’s often remarked upon that Africa is the ‘last frontier’ art market, with the International Monetary Fund pointing out that six of the ten fastest-growing global economies are in Africa. ArtPrice and other sources also point out that there has been a spike in presence and museum shows for modern and contemporary African artists in the European and US markets. And yet, internal to the African continent itself, there remains a lingering reputation that the African market represents risky business. Organic growth is slow, with not many new African collectors buying work in their domestic markets. Coupled with this is the long-standing tendency for African collectors to buy directly from artists.

Another stumbling block to growth in African markets across the continent, apart from African work moving to major US and European markets to be bought by collectors there, is the tendency to consider African Art as one phenomenon or market – this in a continent with 54 countries and over a billion people.

Ato Delaquis, Inner City Market Rust. Opposite Page: Titus Agbara, Figures in a street

“Africa is the ‘last frontier’ art market, with the International Monetary Fund pointing out that six of the ten fastest-growing global economies are in Africa.”

More positively however, African markets are also demonstrating exciting growth trajectories, with a rise in museums, new and prestigious art schools, a growing number of high net worth individuals and rapid urbanisation. Global attention is also growing, with the aforementioned rise in dedicated museum shows for African art happening alongside a jump in the number of Art Fairs showcasing art from the continent. Many of these are in South Africa, but the North and West African markets are also where an explosion of activity is taking place.

In its first foray into the art market in the rest of Africa, Aspire offered in their Summer sale a special section of work from Nigeria and Ghana. The global market for Nigerian art was long dominated by the likes of Ben Enwonwu, who developed in the early twentieth century, much like many black South African modernists, a distinctive response to European

modernist influences. Since then, Nigerian art styles have diversified considerably, with both Igbo and Yoruba traditions feeding into new stylistic innovations.

Aspire has also just announced a groundbreaking new partnership with highly regarded French auction house PIASA. PIASA is one of the largest and most innovative auction houses in France, and is also the biggest dealer in contemporary African art at auction in that country. The companies will collaborate on consigning a properly African art auction, combining South African lots with art from the rest of Africa, in Cape Town in February 2020, in what will be a first for the South African art auction market. In developing and executing the collaboration, Aspire is announcing its intention to expand and diversify its market approach and collector base.

Business Art News STEPHAN WELZ & CO. Final live auction of 2019 www.swelco.co.za

Stephan Welz and Co. will hold their final live auction of 2019 in Johannesburg, in November, at the Killarney Country Club, and will feature a superb collection of works by South African masters such as J.H. Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Pieter Wenning, Maud Sumner and Hugo Naudé.

Leading the auction is a wonderful collection of works by the architect of the Cape Impressionist style, Pieter Wenning, which includes, among others, works such as Landscape With Vineyard, Constantia which featured in Boonzaier and Lipschitz’s book on the artist, and the lush and textured Still Life With Ginger Jar, Vase and Red Plate.

Alongside the works of Wenning are J.H. Pierneef’s rich and expansive Magaliesburg landscape, which features rolling clouds above undulating hills, with small houses nestled at the heart of the landscape. Contrasting in scene and setting to this work by Pierneef is Alexis Preller’s intimate homage to Vincent van Gogh. Painted in 1935, the year after Preller’s initial arrival in London, it is the South African master’s version of van Gogh’s Seated Zouave, created as the young artist began to explore his influences and techniques far from the comforts of South Africa.

Pieter Willem Frederick Wenning, Landscape With Vineyard, Constantia, oil on canvas, R400,000 - R600,000

Alexis Preller, Vincent Van Gogh, 35,5 by 30,5cm, R300,000 - R500,000. Opposite Page: Alexis Preller, Guna Massyn, oil on canvas, 61,5 by 51cm, R800,000 - R1,200,000.

Alongside these works will feature a range of works by artists including Nita Spilhaus, Dorothy Kay, Nelson Makamo, Sam Nhlengethwa and Walter Battiss, amongst others.

Following their successful October auction at their new office space at 14 Dreyer Street in Cavendish, the Cape Town branch of Stephan Welz and Co. is actively consigning for their upcoming February 2020 auction, and the Johannesburg branch is currently consigning for their upcoming March 2020 auction.

If you are interested in having your artwork valued, with a view to consigning for sale, please contact Stephan Welz and Co.

Contact: info@swelco.co.za, 011 880 3125 (Johannesburg), 021 794 6461 (Cape Town)

Whatsapp 079 431 9415 for a confidential and professional evaluation.