Irma Stern leads and Sekoto brings the weight for Strauss & Co’s sale

Having modernised SA painting a century ago, Irma Stern forms an important part of Strauss & Co’s premier evening sale on May 28 in Johannesburg. Stern’s important and paradisiacal 1930 portrait of a seated young woman, Cape Girl with Fruit (estimate on request) anchors the Strauss & Co 85-lot catalogue of modern and contemporary art.

“This commanding oil dates from a period of frequent travel across Southern Africa and regular exhibiting in Europe for Irma Stern,” says Dr Alastair Meredith, head of the art department at Strauss & Co. “It was a time of stylistic reinvention, when the artist actively experimented with colour, using it to describe form and create texture. This work marks the early beginnings of Stern’s celebrated mature style, when the facts of human encounter — something Stern thrived on describing in her drawings — were confidently being translated into sensual, painted images.”

A total of five works by Stern including two oils and three gouaches are represented in Strauss & Co’s sale. Dated 1956, the oil on canvas Still Life with Amaryllis (estimate R5m-R7m) derives from a remarkable period of sustained international attention. In 1950, Stern was selected to represent SA at the Venice Biennale; a feat she would repeat in 1952, 1954 and 1958.

Stern, whose portraits routinely command top value at auction, is once again showing in Venice. Her 1942 portrait of Princess Emma Bakayishonga, sister of the Rwandan King Mutara III Rudahigwa, appears in the main exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

The three gouaches on offer are all portraits. Painted in 1946, Woman with Veil (estimate R250,000-R350,000) showcases Stern’s mature sense of line and restrained use of decorative colour. Painted 11 years earlier, Two Indian Women (estimate R200,000-R300,000) is a pastoral study that uses bolder lines to explore characteristic Stern themes of identity, dress and femininity.

Weightier works on the auction include paintings by Gerard Sekoto, a pioneer of SA’s social realism. Having started his artistic career in Sophiatown where he produced sensitive and beautifully coloured vignettes of black urban life, Sekoto resided in Cape Town’s District Six and in Eastwood on the outskirts of Pretoria before going into self-imposed exile in Paris, never to return home. Out of the five Sekoto works included in Strauss & Co’s evening sale, two are of particular interest: The 1960 oil, Policeman Checking Paper, Paris and the 1968 gouache, Girl In Blue.

“The 1960 oil painting is particularly special because of the irony and the subject. Sekoto died in 1993 never having returned home. So many of his works from 1947 until his death are filled with nostalgia — thinking about home and his people struggling in the apartheid years. This is particularly ironic because it shows a white policeman in Paris in 1960 stopping seemingly black figures in the streets of Paris and asking them to see their papers. To have such a deeply political Parisian work is unusual,” Meredith says.

“A little bit later in 1968, Sekoto paints a fantastic, very beautiful African woman. While he never came back home to SA in his lifetime, he did spend some time in Senegal where figures like this might have come from. The work was purchased by the seller in Paris. This work was painted in Paris, bought in Paris and has been in a collection in Paris until it arrived in Johannesburg two months ago. The gentleman who inherited it is a Parisian, his parents having acquired it from Gerard Sekoto. He’s never set foot in SA but he felt it important that the work return.”

The other three oil paintings by Sekoto encapsulate his life in Paris and themes of community and identity in his expressive style. There’s The Bridge dated 1973 (estimate R200,000-R300,000); Mother and Child dated 1971 (R400,000-R600,000) and Two Striding Figures dated 1975 (estimate R180,000-R240,000) which captures the artist’s reflections on memory and place.

Stern and Sekoto are among a host of modern and contemporary artists including David Goldblatt; William Kentridge, Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Nelson Makamo, Esther Mahlangu, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi and many others. The earliest work on the auction was conceived in 1907 with other works from the last few years.