It is one of life’s great joys to sit down for a lunch at the Strauss & Co offices in Houghton. The long table is set in the midst of the sublime art, the food is light and delectable and the wine flows. But the pièce de résistance is the wonderfully erudite walk through delivered by Dr Alastair Meredith, the head of the art department, whose passion for making art history tangible for a wider audience is both palpable and infectious.
Spread across multiple flagship May auctions, the collection gathers nearly 130 years of South African art making into one extraordinary encounter: from an 1896 landscape by Frans Oerder depicting Middelburg before the Anglo-Boer War, to works painted as recently as last year. Alastair describes the collection as “exclusively Southern African,” noting that it stretches across “nearly 130 years of South African art making.”
What emerged from his tour de force talk was not simply the breadth of the work on view, but the sense of cultural memory briefly being reassembled before dispersing again into private hands. “Many of these works will never be seen in public again,” he reflected. “They’ll go into private collections, local and international. Some will pop up again, of course, but many won’t.”
Among the most arresting works are sculptures by Ezrom Legae and Sydney Kumalo, both central figures of the Amadlozi Group. Meredith lingered over Legae’s Lamenting Woman from 1966, describing it as “this woman on her knees, sculpted with this wonderful African simplicity and angularity,” before adding: “Frankly, I think it’s one of the most special sculptures we’ve handled in a very, very long time.” Of Kumalo’s Seated Woman, cast in 1959, he pointed out that it was “the second of his works ever cast in bronze,” one of only a tiny number produced.
Again and again Meredith returned to the question of how apartheid-era isolation interrupted the international recognition these artists deserved. Speaking about the Amadlozi Group, he said: “They were really on the cusp of breaking it internationally. But when the cultural embargo really set in, they never exhibited internationally again.” He paused before adding: “These are all South African mid-century artists that should be sitting in a museum in New York, whose international careers were ruined by the cultural embargo.”
There are equally extraordinary rediscoveries throughout the sale. A luminous 1951 painting by Alexis Preller returns to South Africa after more than seventy years in Canada. Rare township scenes by Gerard Sekoto capture Sophiatown before exile and erasure. Standing before one early Sekoto street scene, Meredith remarked: “If you wanted to know what a street scene looked like in Sophiatown in 1939 as the world breaks out into war, something like that is the only way to see it.”
There are also major works by Penny Siopis, William Kentridge and David Goldblatt that speak to mining, labour and memory. Meredith described Siopis’s monumental Al Fresco as “a sort of deeply political colonial statement about resources being removed from the land, about wealth being built on slave labour.” Looking closely at its layered surfaces of excavation and ruin, he noted how the artist “worked with this idea of history being this pile of debris, wreckage upon wreckage, debris upon debris, which built up this narrative of South African history.”
Walking through the galleries, one has the feeling of encountering not only masterpieces, but a conversation across generations about beauty, violence, labour and belonging. “The works will never hang together again,” Meredith said quietly. For a few fleeting days, though, they do. I highly recommend a visit.
Strauss & Co’s flagship live-virtual Evening Sale of modern and contemporary art will take place in Johannesburg on Tuesday May 26 at 7pm. The online-only Day Sale includes a focus on painterly abstraction in South Africa and will conclude in staggered increments on May 26 from 2pm onwards.
A preview exhibition of works from the Evening Sale is on view at Strauss & Co’s gallery in Houghton, until May 27. A small selection of works will also be on view at RMB Latitudes Art Fair at Shepstone Gardens, Johannesburg, from May 22-24.
