Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

PROVENANCE The Artist’s Collection, 2009. The Erik Laubscher Heritage Trust. EXHIBITED This work was exhibited in Cape Town in 1956. The exact details are not confirmed but it was substituted for the work that Laubscher had shown at the Venice Biennale. South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Paris and South African Artists 1850- 1965 , 14 April to 29 May 1988, cat. no. 150. Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Paris and South African Artists 1850- 1965 , 22 June to17 July 1988, cat. no. 150. Sasol Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher , 25 June to 31 July 1994, cat. no. 20. Michael Stevenson and Deon Viljoen (2003) South African Art 1850 - 2003 , Cape Town: Stevenson and Viljoen, cat. no. 12. SMAC, Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher: A Major Retrospective Exhibition , 5 December 2009 to 25 February 2010. EBONY/CURATED, Bordeaux House, Franschhoek, Erik Laubscher: The Landscapes, A Selection Of Works From 1946 – 2012 , 28 October 2017 to 7 January 2018. EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, Modern Masters VII , June to July 2025. LITERATURE Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford and Evelyn Cohen (1988) Paris and South African Artists 1850-1965 , Cape Town: South African National Gallery, illustrated in colour on page 89. Michael Stevenson and Deon Viljoen (2003) South African Art 1850 - 200 3, Cape Town: Stevenson and Viljoen, illustrated in colour, unpaginated. Hans Fransen (2009) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Ar t, Stellenbosch: SMAC, illustrated in colour on page 59. Phillippa Duncan and Marc Stanes (curators) (2017) Erik Laubscher: The Land scapes, A Selection Of Works from 1946 – 2012 , Cape Town: Ebony Curated, illus trated in colour on page 8. In a 2005 catalogue accompanying an exhibition at Johans Borman Fine Art, Amanda Botha wrote on Erik Laubscher in context with Jacobus Kloppers and Walter Meyer. Botha said of the older artist that Laubscher’s experience is ‘located in the expanses of the South African landscape where it is possible, as it were, to breathe freely – [both] in his sensory perception of it and on the canvas’. Upon his return to South Africa in 1951 from France, Laubscher became recognised for his bold use of luminous and resonant colour and his capacity to absorb the influence of contemporary masters without being influenced by their personal idiosyncrasies. His still life compositions (fig 1), which acknowledged the influence of Bernard Buffet, were exhibited alongside the works of the more established New Group in Cape Town. During a holiday to Bushman’s River Mouth in 1953 Laubscher began drawing the local Euphorbia forests. Deciding that pencil was unsuitable for the subject he (fig 1) Still Life with Coffee Pot and Fruit (1952) Strauss & Co, Cape Town 3 March 2018,l lot 605