Strauss & co - 2015 Review

A woman of substance Caro Wiese is a lover of beautiful things. This understated collector, who recently joined the board of Strauss & Co, the largest fine art auction house in South Africa, talks of her enduring love for art and literature. words Sean O’Toole photograph Lien Botha Article appeared in the October 2015 issue of Condé Nast, House & Garden In his well-known 2006 essay on tennis marvel Roger Federer, author David Foster Wallace remarked that, journalistically speaking, there was ‘no hot news’to offer about the dapper Swiss athlete and anything one wanted to know was ‘all just a Google search away’. The same cannot be said of Caro Wiese. This retiring Cape Town publisher and collector, who recently assumed a directorship at leading auction house Strauss & Co, has achieved something remarkable for a woman of her stature: privacy. This is no mean feat. Two formidable and highly visible men feature prominently in Namibia-born Caro’s life story. The first is her father, Japie Basson, a colourful politician and journalist, referred to as ‘the complete politician’ and often likened in the Afrikaans press to an Atlantic petrel for his indomitable spirit and endurance. Then there is her husband, retail mogul Christo Wiese, hailed by Forbes as ‘one of the continent’s most successful entrepreneurs’. But this is well known, all just a Google search away. Beyond the abbreviated details of Caro’s biography scattered online, there is, however, an untold story, one in which art, books and a Clifton home all feature centrally. This untold story begins in 1950, three years after the arrival of Japie and Clare Basson in Namibia, then a South African protectorate. Politically active since his days as a law student at Stellenbosch University, Japie was dispatched to Windhoek as chief secretary of the United National South-West Party, an organisation with affiliations to Jan Smuts and his United Party. Life in Windhoek wasn’t all politics. Clare, who is originally from Kenhardt in the Northern Cape and currently lives in a bungalow adjacent to her first-born of two daughters in Clifton, befriended Olga Levinson, a prominent society lady married to mining magnate Jack Levinson. An art critic and dealer, Olga introduced 118