The strange case of Alexis Preller

If you’re looking for reliably bankable investment artists in SA, there are not very many to choose from at the high end of the market. William Kentridge and Netherlands-based Marlene Dumas are our most valuable living artists, both of whom continue to make fascinating and vital contemporary work.

Other major artists fetching respectable prices at auction include previously neglected black modernist artists such as Gerard Sekoto and George Pemba, as well as the politically important and visceral drawing and painting of Dumile Feni. If you have access to a couple of Irma Stern’s however, you’re in business! The Cape Town based painter, who has a museum dedicated to her life and work which was converted from her residence and studio after her death in 1966, holds the SA record for a single painting at auction. This is “Arab Priest”, a portrait from 1946 which sold in 2011 for the equivalent of R39m. A recent work at auction, “The Smoker”, sold in March for R17m.

Often overlooked in the roll call of great SA investment art is the singular work of Pretoria’s Alexis Preller. Fascinating in the particularity and uniqueness of his vision and approach, Preller has historically been difficult to fit into art-historical movements and ideas.

Since his premature death in 1975, his work has steadily increased in value locally, with a niche market for his painting, which regularly fetches multi-million-rand sums. Just weeks ago, at auction in Cape Town, his symbolist work ‘Young King’, from 1964, fetched more than R4m, along with his “South African Beauty”, a surrealistic work from 1950, selling for more than R3m. These two sales are representative of Preller’s best-known works on the local market, which can fetch anything up to about R10m. Yet the artist has never really been exhibited outside the country, let alone sold internationally.

Why this should be is something of a mystery. His work was long championed by prominent South African art historian Esme Berman, and more recently by highly respected curator, academic and artist Karel Nel. Together they produced a definitive two-volume intellectual biography and catalogue of Preller’s work, “Alexis Preller: Africa, the sun, and shadows” and “Collected Images” in 2009. Producing critical and archival work like this usually marks a broader and often international appreciation of an artist’s work and life. Preller, however, remains a well-kept South African art secret.

But perhaps this will not last much longer. With the centenary of the European Surrealist movement happening this year, Strauss & Co, the prominent SA auction house, made the audacious move of staging a selling exhibition of Preller’s work in London, deciding that his idiosyncratic symbolist approach is surrealist enough to fit the bill. Despite Preller’s strong links with the city, having trained at the Westminster School of Art and showing in an important group show at the Tate in 1948, he never held a solo exhibition in London in his lifetime. Considering that legacy exhibitions celebrating surrealism’s impact have featured very few, if any, African artists, pitching Preller in this way may have been a bridge too far.

Local interest remains high, however. The Norval Foundation in Cape Town is showing a major retrospective of Preller’s work, curated by Nel. Mythical Lexicon runs until November. This important show continues to build on Preller’s curious and unique legacy. He travelled extensively in both Europe and Africa in his life, though he never became fully a part of any contemporary artistic movements there. Instead, he built up a personal iconography and symbology, which, while it drew on recognisable images such as the so-called “Mapogga” tribal figures he saw in his youth, was consistently individual and idiosyncratic. Over time his influences grew steadily more symbolic and cosmic as his work matured.

The Norval show, like Strauss & Co’s exhibition in London, is designed to expose Preller’s work more coherently to international art audiences, which will in turn further build his market in SA.