Antiques Trade Gazette


5


Records for top South African artists, with a more selective approach for rest


■ Stern makes £2.7m and Sekoto £520,000, but market falters except for best works


Alex Capon reports


THE large sums of money currently paid for the very top works by leading South African artists showed few signs of faltering at Bonhams’ latest sale in this category.


But the auction in London on March


23 did see growing selectivity in the market, as the selling rate came in at 57 per cent (96 of the 168 lots sold) and the auctioneers’ evening offering of 18 select lots entitled Masterpieces saw only nine works get away. Overall the hammer total for the sale was £7.75m. Irma Stern’s (1894-1966) Arab Priest


was the sale’s star, setting a new record for the artist at £2.7m against a £1.5m- 2m estimate, selling to a private buyer on the phone. The auctioneers would not reveal the nationality of the buyer but confirmed they were an existing client. The price beat the previous high for


Stern, seen when Bahora Girl sold for £2.1m at Bonhams in London in October. Both works were part of her arresting series of portraits made during her trip to Zanibar in 1945, very few of which


Above left: setting a record for Irma Stern, Arab Priest sold for £2.7m at Bonhams’ latest South African art sale in London. Above right: Yellow Houses, District Six by Gerard Sekoto – a record £520,000 at the same sale.


remain in private hands. Commercially these now are considered her ‘blue-chip’ works. 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. The sale also saw a record for Alexis


Preller (1911-1975) when The Garden of Eden made £650,000 against an estimate of £500,000-700,000, also knocked down to a telephone buyer. The buyer’s premium was 20/12 per


cent. The view of Haarlem from TEFAF Maastricht


DESPITE the ever-increasing international attendance and breadth of disciplines at the fair, Dutch Old Masters still remain at the very core of TEFAF Maastricht. Each year, commentators


look to early big-ticket sales of Old Masters as a bellwether of confidence at the fair. The opening day of the 2011 fair on March 17 saw the sale of this View of Haarlem, right, by the Haarlem artist Gerrit Berckheyde (1638-1698) for around €4.5m (£4.12m). The 16½in x 2ft (42 x 60cm)


oil on panel was offered by Noortman Master Paintings, the Amsterdam


specialists in Dutch and Flemish Old Masters and French Impressionists. Painted in 1671 and signed to the lower centre g. Berckhyde, the view of the artist’s home town looked to have benefitted from a light clean since Noortman bought it in December last year at Christie’s Old Master’s sale in London. Christie’s had estimated the


picture at £500,000-700,000 but, underbid by London dealer Johnny Van Haeften, it sold to Noortman for £2.3m (plus 25/20/12% buyer’s premium), an auction record for Berckheyde.


Anna Brady


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