Art sale explores influence of Paris on South African artists

The events leading up to a Strauss & Co auction are exciting. Earlier this year, school kids with cups of coffee discussing post-modern artistic expression was a clear indication that these events are also highly effective.

Besides the auction and the ins and outs of the secondary art market, Strauss & Co’s sales creates a great microcosm for art to be relished in. Famous artists, newer figures in the secondary arts scene, art history and artists that paint, sculpt, print and create are all represented.

At the Spring Auction in Cape Town, the friendly rivalry between two artists from Cape Town and Pretoria played itself out with Cape Town’s Irma Stern and Pretoria’s JH Pierneef topping the sale.

A peak-period Stern portrait of a young Tutsi woman in a Rwandan landscape was the top lot, selling for R10.25 million, while Pierneef’s monumental study of interlaced camelthorn trees in a landscape near Thabazimbi fetched R2.7 million.

Irma Stern’s ‘A Watussi Woman with Mountains’.

These sort of back stories create room to really talk about the state of art in SA and how it steadily does well.

From today Strauss & Co in Johannesburg will put its new gallery space to good use for the gallery’s inaugural November sale. This morning the auctioneers hosted a group of buyers and art lovers to discuss 10 great stories around 10 great lots – like the tale behind Peter Clarke’s The Red Road.

At the end of 1956, after resigning as a labourer in the Simon’s Town dockyard Peter Clarke travelled to Tesselaarsdal, near Caledon. The small rural town proved an inspiration compared to the gritty dockyard shifts.

Between 1956 and 1960 he returned every year during the spring, but always returning to Simon’s Town in time for Christmas.

Peter Clarke’s ‘The Red Road’.

Forever observing his surroundings, and never without his pencils and watercolours, Clarke quickly filled his sketchbooks with commonplace vignettes: rooster heads poking out of a haversack, men resting on their hoes, a crooked gutter, or a friend sleeping in the sun.

Yet it was in the everyday that he found his most moving motifs.

The current lot, The Red Road, is a case in point, with the shuffling pair and the winding road taking on symbolic significance: the image of lonely figures, backs turned, would later become a trope for displacement, while the road into Tesselaarsdal represented the new and exciting opportunities the artist had found outside of Simon’s Town.

But it’s not just South Africa that shine at the sales. Stories around Christo Coetzee’s time in Japan and how Pierneef sailed to England and the painting it inspired are ingrained in these sales. The latest around South African artists and their time in France, Paris specifically.

Alexis Preller’s ‘Icon Barbare (Adam)’.

“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 million to R10 million) depicts the biblical first man with Prelleresque flourishes. These sales are invaluable.

(Compiled by Adriaan Roets)

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