Strauss & co - 2015 Mid-year Review

Kees van Dongen [ DUTCH ] Dolly au collier d’argent Sold R5 684 000, 1 June 2015 Wolf Kibel Portrait of the Artist’s Son Sold R2 955 680, 15 March 2015 She is clearly quite the little lady, this vividly captured young daughter of the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen. The gesture of her plump little finger complacently clasped in the expressive penumbra of her glittering bracelet will brook nothing that is not just so, no more than will the bright and challenging gaze of the startlingly blue eyes. It is a wonderfully realised portrait, and a marvellously indulgent one, given to us from the loving overflow of a father’s heart: the flush of cheek, the determined rosebud of the lips, all caught in the most spontaneous of brushstroke, the most assured of plastic modelling in a proto-Fauve drawing with colour on the rich darkness of the ground. In both the tender intimacy of the content and the assurance of its means, Van Dongen’s portrait is both a triumph and a delight, a reminder of all that is most immediate and most universally affecting in the vision of the painterly modernism of the 20th Century avant garde. The relative rarity of works by Wolf Kibel at auction predicts in part the high returns they register, that and the sheer and undeniable quality of the paintings themselves. Nonetheless, something of an event was flagged when Kibel’s Portrait of the Artist’s Son , against an estimate of between R1.5 and R2 million, sold for just under R3 million. A compelling portrait it certainly is, however. Richly textured with a brushmark that is lively and vital in the way it suggests and develops volumes and the flickering animation of shadow and highlight, the painting captures the almost hieratic cast of the magisterially self- contained sitter’s eye against the halo of the straw hat’s brim. 17