Shining the spotlight on female artists with Strauss & Co’s auction event

Strauss & Co’s marquee live-virtual auction event will be taking place Tuesday, 28 March at 7pm. A stellar mix of modern and contemporary art, jewellery, silver, furniture, and fine wine will lead up to an evening sale of spectacular important art, spotlighting the sustained contribution of South African women artists. 

Renowned modernist artists like Ruth Everard-Haden, Maggie Laubser, Freida Lock, Irma Stern and Maud Sumner lead a strong selection of works by influential vanguard artists Deborah Bell, Marlene Dumas, Vivienne Koorland, Esther Mahlangu and Diane Victor, and acclaimed new contemporaries Virginia Chihota, Sethembile Msezane, Thania Petersen and Ruby Swinney. The line-up also includes a watercolour by French artist Marie Laurencin, best known for her delicate depictions of young women.

The opening lot of this much-anticipated sale is Maggie Laubser’s expressionist composition Cape Dutch House with Trees (estimate R180 000 – 240 000), painted shortly after the artist’s return to South Africa from Germany in 1924.

The 111-lot catalogue affirms the robust contributions made by women artists to the South African canon between 1924 and 2019 – the date of Ruby Swinney’s ethereal oil on silk diptych Kindergarten (estimate R120 000 – 160 000), the newest work by a woman artist in the sale.

“Women artists have frequently been at the forefront of innovations in painting, introducing bold new ideas, forms, media and subjects of interest,” says Jean le Clus-Theron, Head of Sale, Strauss & Co.

“But, in a country with a strong tradition of travel and landscape pictures, women have also asserted their right to move freely to make work. Our in-sale focus on South African painters who explored East Africa includes two important works by Freida Lock and Irma Stern, both produced in Zanzibar. Among the contemporary works, Sethembile Msezane and Thania Petersen are represented by photographic self-portraits that innovatively speak to contemporary social issues.”

Stern’s devotional scene Children Reading the Koran (estimate R10 – 11 million) dates from 1939, the occasion of her first of two professional visits to the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar.

Freida Lock’s Hashimi, a 1947 study of a dhow harbour, was produced during the artist’s 18-month stay in Zanzibar. Both the Stern and Lock paintings are presented in their original wooden frames made from carved Zanzibari door frames.

Other notable historical works by women artists include Maggie Laubser’s Bird with Tomatoes (estimate R400 000 – 600 000), an iconic distillation of the artist’s later interests, and Irma Stern’s bountiful Still Life with Flowers and Pumpkin from 1948 (estimate R5 – 6 million).

There are two Parisian street scenes by trailblazing earlier 20th-century painters, Maud Sumner’s 3 Rue Campagne Premiere (estimate R100 000 – 150 000) and Ruth Everard-Haden’s Rue de la Grande-Chaumiere at Night (estimate R80 000 – 120 000).

Paris is also the context of Deborah Bell’s remarkable café scene, The Dance of Salomé (estimate R300 000 – 400 000), which was started in 1986 during the artist’s residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

Sumner’s Paris work is one of two pieces by this artist from the Stellenberg Collection, which takes its name from a grand Cape Dutch homestead founded in the late 1600s in what is today upper Kenilworth. The other is Sumner’s watercolour Trees, De Vaal Drive (estimate R90 000 – 120 000).

Strauss & Co will also be handling works from the Naspers Collection, including Irma Stern’s Malay Quarters (estimate R800 000 – 1.2 million). This lot from Stern’s golden age of the 1940s is socially important. In 1944, the Malay Quarter was declared a slum and numerous houses were expropriated by the city government, inspiring a strong preservationist movement.

Diane Victor has frequently and directly responded to social events. The 1992 charcoal-and-chalk composition Nastagio, Degli Onesti, and the Difficult Decision (estimate R400 000 – 600 000) is a narrative triptych that explores the mistreatment of women, an on-going problem in South Africa.

The removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town in 2015, a local event that reverberated globally, is the context of Sethembile Msezane’s Chapungu The Day Rhodes Fell (estimate R50 000 – 70 000), which shows the artist in an elaborate costume.

Also from 2015 and informed by the social protests that gripped the country’s tertiary institutions, Thania Petersen’s Queen Colonaaiers and her Weapons of Mass Destruction 1 (estimate R60 000 – 80 000) uses humour to make its point.

Collectors can view these extraordinary works in the catalogue for Cape Town Auction week at Strauss & Co’s public gallery at Brickfield Canvas, 35 Brickfield Road, Woodstock, Cape Town, from 10am to 5pm until 28 March 2023. 

Please visit www.straussart.co.za for details.

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Feature Image: Supplied by Strauss & Co / Coffee on Verandah in Onrus by Marjorie Wallace