Celebrate spring with the Impression/Expression live virtual sale

It’s spring, and to celebrate Strauss & Co is holding a live virtual sale, ‘Impression/Expression: from Hugo Naudé to Georgina Gratrix’. 

The 90-lot sale, which will be live-streamed from Johannesburg, broadly explores the legacies of two important western art movements, impressionism and expressionism, in South African art.

The period under consideration is bracketed by Hugo Naudé’s uplifting spring composition, Namaqualand (estimate R 300 000 – 400 000) and Georgina Gratrix’s bountiful still life from 2021, All that Glitters (estimate R70 000 – 90 000).

“The sale, which is exclusively composed of works by South African artists, helps make sense of some of the many stylistic and conceptual shifts that have taken place in this country over the past century,” says Alastair Meredith, who heads up Strauss & Co’s art department. “Many of the works in Impression/Expression, whether painted or sculpted, mid-century or contemporary, can sit comfortably in the impressionism or expressionism categories. Works from either school can be grouped together by theme, tone, impulse or style. Impressionist pictures, for instance, typically capture the transience of light, can be stirred by modernity, and are in pursuit of atmospheric sensation”. 

What is impressionism?

Even if you’re completely new to art history, you’ll probably have encountered some of the French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) works, whether in a museum or reproduced on mugs, tea towels and calendars. Monet is considered the founding father of Impressionism, and the movement took its name from one of his most famous paintings, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, Soleil Levant), painted in 1872. He is perhaps most famous for the delightful Field of Poppies (1873), and his evocative ongoing series of Water Lilies, painted in his garden at Giverny, northwest of Paris, over a number of years up until his death in 1926.

Aficionados of 90s teenage cinema may remember the film Clueless where Cher Horowitz refers to one of her classmates as a ‘Full-on Monet’: “It’s like a painting, see?”, she explains. “From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big ol’ mess.” 

Cher was noting a typical characteristic of impressionist painting, the loose, spontaneous brush strokes that create a vibrant optical sensation from a distance. The original Impressionists were rebelling against the staid, formulaic painting tradition of the French Academy of Fine Arts. They bucked the prescription to paint elevated historical, mythological or religious subjects, with firm outlines, carefully controlled highlights and shadows, and realistic detail. Instead, they responded to events around them and the ever-changing conditions of sunlight and weather, and used colour to create the sensation of a particular moment … an experience of modern life. Form, depth, illusion and contrast were created using complementary or opposite shades – red juxtaposed with green, orange with blue – and built up the surface with blobs and patches of paint.

Monet describes his Impressionistic painting process as follows:

“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape.”

Poppies and daisies

Impressionism had far-reaching influences, and its impact can be seen in South African artists’ works especially Naudé, Gwelo Goodman, Pieter Wenning, Irma Stern and Maggie Laubser.

Art historian Esmé Berman describes how Naudé’s work developed from a more academic style in his portraits, where “tone was all-important, brushstrokes were masked and plastic volumes smoothly modelled by means of gentle transitions from light to dark”, to a looser style with more individualised brushwork, freer composition, sun-drenched colour and a focus on “the natural abundance of the verdant countryside around him”. Some of his most popular paintings are of Namaqualand in spring, when the brilliantly coloured wildflowers carpet the landscape in vivid yellows and oranges.

One of the key lots in the auction, Naudé’s Namaqualand is a prime example of South African impressionism and the artist’s ebullient style. It’s also reminiscent of one of Monet’s famous Field of Poppies.

Both artists use a carpet of flowers for their subject matter, Monet the scarlet poppies of a field in Argenteuil outside of Paris, and Naudé the tangerine exuberance of Namaqualand daisies in the Northern Cape. Both artists employ rhythmic brush strokes and juxtaposed colours to capture the lushness of the carpet of flowers and create the impression of a stroll among the flowers on a summer’s day.

Strauss & Co’s Impression/Expression auction will take place on Tuesday, 14 September, 2021 at 6pm in the company’s Johannesburg showroom. It will be live streamed in real time and potential buyers will be able to register for the auction and bid online

Visit https://www.straussart.co.za/ to view the auction lots, download the comprehensive illustrated e-catalogue, and register to bid.