Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

Painted during the brief but extraordinarily productive decade between Kibel’s arrival in Cape Town in 1929 and his premature death in 1938, Young Boy embodies the artist’s singular contribution to the development of South African modernism. Kibel belonged to a generation of Jewish émigré artists who transformed local painting in the 1930s, synthesising the expressive distortions of European modernism into an intensely personal visual language characterised by emotional introspection and painterly immediacy. His art, as Esmé Berman observed, is distinguished by its “exaggerated colour contrasts and expressionistic distortions”, qualities that are powerfully evident in this compelling portrait study. The young sitter emerges from an indeterminate ground of smoky greys and muted violets, his elongated features modelled through a dense accumulation of ochres, burnt oranges and deep shadows. Kibel’s brushwork is restless and tactile, oscillating between description and dissolution. Rather than pursuing naturalistic likeness, the artist constructs a psychological presence through fractured planes of colour and delib- erately unstable contours. The figure’s downcast gaze and inward posture evoke an acute sense of solitude, transforming what might otherwise be a conventional portrait into an exploration of emotional interiority. Portraiture formed a significant and recurring aspect of Kibel’s oeuvre , yet his studies of children remain among his most affecting achievements (fig 1, 2 and 3). They reveal the influence of European Expressionism, particularly the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), whose portraits of anonymous youths similarly privileged psychological intensity over social identity. Unlike Soutine, however, Kibel strips away almost all narrative reference. The sitter is presented neither as an individual of social standing nor as a participant in any recognisable world. Instead, the child becomes a vehicle through which Kibel explores states of contemplation, vulnerability and emotional fragility. The boundaries between figure and space begin to dissolve, as the body seems to recede into the pictorial surface itself, suggesting a consciousness turned inward and detached from the external world. (fig 1) Portrait of the Artist’s Son Joseph with a Ha t, Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 16 March 2015, lot 561, Sold R 2 955 680 (USD 186 209), with the title (fig 2) Boy with Green Waistcoat , Illustrated in Freda Kibel and Neville Dubow (1968) Wolf Kibel, Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, page 27, plate VII.