Joburg’s unsung history in paint
Auction of classic works announced by Strauss & Co
Strauss & Co has announced details of its forthcoming live sale in Johannesburg on November 12.
The sale, which has a combined presale estimate of R80m, is a celebration of the city of Johannesburg and its many talented artists, curators and even its collectors.
The sale commemorates the city’s important role in shaping SA art history.
Highlights from the sale include a dedicated session inspired by curator Steven Sack’s landmark 1988 exhibition, The Neglected
Tradition, held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; a single-owner collection of five remarkable paintings by Maggie Laubser; and a magnificent portrait of one of Johannesburg’s most faithful chroniclers, photographer David Goldblatt.
Goldblatt, who passed away in June, is a striking presence in KwaZulu-Natal painter Heather Gourlay-Conyngham’s portrait titled David (estimate R80,000
R120,000), which depicts the award-winning photographer pausing while evaluating a photographic print.
A photograph from Goldblatt’s highly regarded essay on Boksburg, first published in 1982, precedes the sale of Gourlay-Conyngham’s portrait. Taken on a Saturday morning in April 1979 at the corner of Commissioner and Pritchard streets in Boksburg, this wellknown street photograph (estimate R70,000 R100,000) miniaturises Goldblatt’s affection for the ordinary people and places of Johannesburg.
“Johannesburg is seldom a beautiful city; it has its rare moments,” said Goldblatt in 2002. I can t honestly say that I love it. However, I miss it when I am away, and when I am in it I rejoice.”
Maggie Laubser’s biography is strongly tied to the Cape, but Johannesburg collectors have long esteemed her paintings of Swartland farm labourers.
The forthcoming sale includes five Laubser paintings assembled by a single Johannesburg collector.
The lots include Leentjie (estimate R1m R2m), an exquisite portrait of a young domestic worker from Laubser’s family farm, and Harvesters in Wheatfield (R2m R3m), a vivid description of two farm hands, one cutting ripe yellow ears of wheat with a sickle.
“Harvesting was one of Laubser’s favourite subjects,” notes art historian Elza Miles of this work.
“Laubser places emphasis on the worth of the sweat of the farmworker’s brow. These harvest scenes belong to the ‘sickle and scythe’ period in the history of SA agriculture,” said Miles.
Initially mistreated by the press following her return from Berlin in 1924, Laubser’s participation in a 1936 exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery alongside Irma Stern and Wolf Kibel, among others marked the “first significant demonstration of critical recognition” for her work, according to art historian Esmé Berman.
Johannesburg, and in particular its century-old municipal gallery, has been the site of many important exhibitions. They include Steven Sack’s seminal exhibition, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930-1988), which highlighted a largely neglected canon of black artists.
Strauss & Co said it was thrilled to announce the inclusion of a dedicated session inspired by this watershed exhibition. Titled Unsung History, the session draws together a nonracial selection of work by earlier pioneers working in the tumultuous period between 1910 and 1994.
Some of the artists in this session are now well known domestically, but most remain unheralded in global histories.
Unsung History includes works by early pioneers such as Ernest Mancoba, John Koenakeefe Mohl and Moses Tladi, as well as important later 20th century artists Jackson Hlungwani, Noria Mabasa, Cyprian Shilakoe, Winston Saoli and the avantgarde
Lucas Sithole. Standout offerings from the Unsung History session include: Ephraim Ngatane’s entrancing 1971 oil on board, Abstract (estimate R150,000 R200,000); Lucas Sithole’s tall bronze sculpture, Mother and Child (estimate R300,000 – R500,000);
Cecil Skotnes’s idiosyncratic portrait of one of SA’s preeminent historical figures, Shaka (estimate R700, 000 – R1m); Peter Clarke’s 1962 mixedmedia painting describing a woman’s burden, The Watercarrier, Windermere (estimate R500,000 – 700,000);
Gerard Sekoto’s Women and
Baby in the Street (estimate R800,000 R1.2m), which was painted shortly after his return to Pretoria in 1947 at the start of his peak period.
Sekoto, who is also represented on this sale by two cobalt-blue portraits of a man and woman (estimate for each R700,000 R1m), lived in Johannesburg from 1939 to 1942. Despite enduring constant racial prejudice, his sojourn in Sophiatown represented one of his most prolific periods.
Sekoto later told his biographer Chabani Manganyi that his time in Johannesburg was liberating. “For the first time in my life I enjoyed the freedom to see the works of other, white artists and to observe their technique.”
Strauss & Co will put its consignments on display at the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg from Friday November 9 until the start of the sale on Monday, November 12.
DESPITE ENDURING RACIAL PREJUDICE, SEKOTO’S SOJOURN IN SOPHIATOWN REPRESENTED ONE OF HIS MOST PROLIFIC PERIODS