Strauss & co - 2015 Review

Obituary: Stephan Welz Stephan Welz, the renowned art auctioneer who passed away on 25 December at age 72, was distinguished by his tall, rugby-player physique and air of unforced confidence around art. Welz’s assured and charismatic manner, coupled with his wide-ranging knowledge of South African painting and sculpture saw him rise to the top of his profession. Central to Welz’s decades-spanning success as South Africa’s go-to expert and auctioneer was his longstanding association with the world of art and artists. Born in 1943 in the Breede River Valley town of Worcester, Welz was the third of five sons born to émigré parents Jean Welz and Inger Christensen. A family photograph included in Elza Miles’s 1997 monograph devoted toWelz’s father, an Austrian-born architect who in later years excelled as a painter, shows the future auctioneer, aged three, with his father in the Hugo Naude Art Centre where he gave lessons. Welz’s aesthetic education, the foundation of his professional achievements, was decisively influenced by his proximity to artists. This fact is beautifully illustrated in a 1948 oil painting by Jean Welz entitled Bathers, White River, Ceres. The painting depicts five-year-old Stephan playing next to a river in the company of his younger brother Martin (best known as the publisher of Noseweek ), his Danish-born mother (a journalist who in South Africa turned her hand to running a gallery), and Free State-born expressionist painter Cecil Higgs. Speaking decades later, in 2007, Welz warmly recalled Higgs and her gift of a budgie to him as a child. He also remembered an overnight stay at painter Gregoire Boonzaier’s home, an early championof his father’s austerebut lyrical paintings. Irma Stern–who, along with JH Pierneef and Maggie Laubser, Welz once described as “names to conjure with”– was also a frequent houseguest. In an aside typical of Welz in his later years, he once smilingly recalled his mother remonstrating with painter and mischief-maker Walter Battiss when his fondness for nudity got the better of him during a visit to theWelz family home. Welz’s formal education in the art business began in earnest after his decision to move upcountry. During the late-1960s he held an administrative position in UNISA’s fledgling art department in Pretoria. He worked alongside Battiss. Welz was a first-hand witness to his mentor’s transformation from respected modernist painter to Fookian trickster when, in 1967, he attended Yes-No, Battiss’s landmark happening in Pretoria. The exhibition included cellophane- wrapped drawings and watercolours displayed in a darkened venue. Welz’s decision to pursue a career in the art business coincided with two notable trends: the professionalization of the local marketplace for art, and the uptake of influential Euro-American changes in the form of art. Painting and sculpture, his metier, were increasingly challenged by new modes of expression. It prompted a bemused smile from Welz, who in 2010 quantified the changes: “Feathers, newsprint, animal carcasses, found objects etc. stuck to anything which comes to hand, embalmed in formaldehyde or carefully scattered about a room.” Despite his reservations, Welz was nonetheless supportive of new art and successful presided over record achieving sales of key works by contemporary artists, notably in 2015 sculptures by Jane Alexander and Ed Young. 13 April 1943 - 25 December 2015 137