South African Art

The Antiques Trade Gazette is reporting on a recent (March 23) specialty sale of South African Art held at Bonhams, London.  The article reports many of the top lots did exceedingly well, but there were also many buy ins and selective buying. As an example of the top end not performing, 18 works in the sale were deemed "masterpieces" by Bonhams, only half sold.

The sale offered 168 lots, with only 96 selling for a 56% sell through rate.  That is an interesting statistic as the buy through rate was higher for the full sale, than the 50% achieved from the "masterpieces". The sale totaled 7.7 million GBP, and the items that did sell appear to have done well.

The top lot was Irma Stern's (1894-1966) Arab Priest, setting a new record for the artist at £2.7m against a £1.5m-2m pre estimate (see image).

The ATG reports

The sum seen for Arab Priest was just shy of the record for any South African artist. That accolade belongs to Marlene Dumas (b.1953), whose 1995 painting The Visitor made £2.8m at Sotheby's in July 2008.

Another Stern broke the million-pound barrier at Bonhams' sale – a rare painting of a nude by the artist which took £1.5m – but five of the ten works by her featured in the Masterpieces sale failed to get away.

Elsewhere, an auction record was set for the leading black artist in the South African market, Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993), whose Yellow Houses, District Six drew strong competition against a £200,000-300,000 estimate and sold at £520,000 to a South African-based buyer on the telephone.

The picture itself was a scene of the poor neighbourhood in Cape Town to which Sekoto moved in 1942 and was an evocative example of the rarely seen works he produced before he left his homeland for Paris in 1947.

A picture of the same subject, although somewhat different in terms of composition, can now be found in the Johannesburg Art Gallery and was the gallery's first acquisition of a work by a black artist. Famously the artist had to pretend to be a cleaner to see it on display because of the racial restrictions at the time.

To read the full ATG article, click HERE.