Strauss & co - 2019 Mid-year Review

Irma Stern cemented her status as the most sought-after South African artist at auction when three paintings from her celebrated Zanzibar period (1939-45) sold for a combined value of R52.3 million (R52 348 000) at Strauss & Co’s March sale. The top-selling lot was a previously unrecorded Stern portrait of an Omani nobleman from the court of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Painted during Stern’s second visit to Zanzibar in 1945 and acquired directly from the artist by the late collector Sol Munitz, Arab sold to a telephone bidder for R20 484 000. The Munitz Collection consigned 15 lots to Strauss & Co’s March sale, including Stern’s The Mauve Sari from 1946, which sold for R14 794 000. Consigned from the Shill Collection, Stern’s 1939 portrait of a young woman wearing a yellow headscarf, Meditation, Zanzibar , sold for R17 070 000 in March. Stern also topped the May sale in Johannesburg with Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias , an attractive genre work presented in a coveted Zanzibar frame, establishing a new world record for a still life by the artist when it sold for R16 159 800. Earlier twentieth-century moderns continue to record significant results at auction. Also consigned from the Shill Collection, Alexis Preller’s seminal cabinet painting Collected Images (Orchestration of Themes) fetched R10 014 400 in March. In May, two works by Preller lots reliably placed in the top-ten individual lots sold: Profile Head , a late work from 1969, sold for R1 138 000, and the mythically-themed painting Boy on a Horse , from 1950, sold for R910 400. Twentieth-century moderns retain their lustre 14