Strauss & co - 2017 Review

A year of robust sales has seen Strauss & Co achieve a headline turnover of R329 million in 2017. This extraordinary result, which surpasses last year’s annual turnover of R215 million by a significant margin, is the highest annual turnover in the company’s nine years of trading. Quality offerings, a hallmark of all Strauss & Co’s sales, played a key role in attaining this result. The record turnover is all the more notable given increasing competition in the local and international auction markets and the endurance of social instability. Strauss & Co’s stellar performance also bucks an international trend that has seen auction houses post year-on- year declines in sales since 2014. Good fortune always has a backstory, and the story of Strauss & Co’s remarkable success in 2017 was written on the auction-room floor. In June, JH Pierneef’s oil painting, Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond, Stellenbosch (1928), was knocked down to a telephone bidder for R20 462 400 by Joint MD and auctioneer Bina Genovese, achieving a new world record for the artist. It was the second highest price ever paid for a painting sold at auction in South Africa, and only marginally less than the R21 166 000 paid in 2011 for Irma Stern’s Two Arabs (1939). Stern also performed well in 2017. In March, Young Arab (1942), a gestural portrait produced during the painter’s 1942 visit to the Congo, fetched R13 641 000 making it the second highest individual sale of the year. AN EXTRAORDINARY YEAR by Sean O’Toole Jacob Hendrik Pierneef Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond, Stellenbosch Sold R20 462 400, 5 June 2017 WORLD RECORD 12