Strauss & co - 2014 Review

The Harry Lits Collection of Works by the Amadlozi Group The story of the Harry Lits Collection, an important holding of 34 works by key members of the Amadlozi Group, pivots around one collector’s unwavering commitment to a group of post-war South African artists, notably Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Cecil Skotnes and Edoardo Villa. But it is also a far simpler story, one involving an enquiring young man and his influential neighbour. Harry Lits is that young man. Born in 1930 into modest circumstances in Potchefstroom, art was not part of the Lits family curriculum. “In my matric year we went to our school hall and I looked at these things on the wall called art,” recalled Lits in an interview preceding the record-breaking sale of his private collection in November. “I thought if I ever had money I’d get into the art field. But I forgot about it.” 1 Lits went on to study pharmacy, married, had a family, prospered in business. In the late 1950s Lits acquired a property on a rocky hill in Linksfield. As luck would have it, his neighbour was Egon Guenther, a noted collector of African traditional art and enthusiastic local promoter of German Expressionism. Guenther, who immigrated to South Africa in 1951, lived in a remarkable home with whitewashed walls and low wood ceilings. Designed by architect Donald Turgel, the home featured Skotnes-carved double doors at its entrance and a separate gallery annex. By the early 1960s, when Lits was settled in next door, Guenther’s suburban gallery was one of Johannesburg’s leading commercial dealerships. But the Egon Guenther Gallery, as it was known, was also more than simply a place of commerce. Alongside the adult recreation centre at Polly Street, where Skotnes, Kumalo and Legae met and worked together, Guenther’s home was the epicentre of a newly emerging urban South African art. “Egon’s art gallery was a centre of Johannesburg cultural life,”records poet and arts journalist Lola Watter in Snippets of Time (2001). “Here he promoted black and white painters and sculptors. Egon also directed many incipient talents towards the African tradition.” 2 Like Guenther, who was instrumental in founding the Amadlozi Group in 1963, Watter was an influential early champion of this group’s syncretic style, which synthesised the formal experiments of European modernism with the distorting and reductionist idioms of West and Central African sculpture. For Lits, the brave new world being cultivated by his neighbour was initially strange – like a “foreign climate”, as he put it decades later. 3 But Guenther’s commitment and passion, which was total and expressed through architecture as much as art, reminded Lits of a dormant ideal. The pharmacist engaged his neighbour’s services in acquiring key works by Amadlozi artists. Lits also drew on Guenther’s advice to model his home for the display of his collection. “When we built this house, a friend of my wife’s asked if I had built it for her,” Lits stated just before the once-in-a-generation sale of his collection. “She looked rather taken aback and said: ‘No, he built it for his art.’” 4 The sale of the Harry Lits Collection was a highlight of the Strauss & Co November sale in Johannesburg. Younger collectors responded enthusiastically to the obvious connoisseurship and integrity of the Harry Lits Collection. Kumalo’s iconic bronze Figure with Outstretched Arms (1969), a key piece in the collection, achieved R1 250 480, more than doubling the pre-sale estimate. 1. Peacock, Brendan (2014) ‘Fond memories of yesteryear for sale’ The Times , 9 November. timeslive.co.za/businesstimes/2014/11/09/fond-memories-of-yesteryear-for-sale 2. Watter, Lola (2001) Snippets of Time: Memoirs of a Maverick , Johannesburg. Page 218. 3. Peacock, Brendan, op.cit. 4. Mkele, Yolisa (2014) ‘Harry Lits’ Jozi Life . http://www.jozilife.co.za/art/1200-harry-lits Sean O’Toole previous page Sydney Kumalo Figure with Outstretched Arms signed with the artist’s initials and numbered I/X, executed in 1969 bronze with a brown patina height: 118cm, including base Sold R1 250 480, 10 November 2014 16