Michel Strauss
Sotheby’s modern art supremo who presided over a spectacular boom in the Impressionist market
MICHEL STRAUSS, who has died aged 85, piloted the Impressionist and Modern Art department of Sotheby’s auction house in London through the highs and lows of the international art market over four decades. Born in France, fluent in French, the grandson of a foremost French collector of Impressionist paintings and a man with family connections to people of culture and money in Europe and America, Strauss, passionate and knowledgeable about his subject, was peculiarly well-qualified for the job.
Of the many dozens of auctions in which he was involved between 1961 and 2000, two in particular testify to his discriminating eye and acuity: the sale of the 144 Impressionist paintings and drawings of the late Robert von Hirsch in 1978, and that of the British Rail Pension Fund’s collection in 1989.
Strauss had family ties to von Hirsch’s nephew, who consigned his uncle’s collection for sale, and had known the collector himself, having previously supplied valuations of his pictures. In 1971 he had sold for him Signac’s Herblay, Temps Gris, Saules, at a price well above expectations.
By the time of the von Hirsch sale in 1978, Sotheby’s were advisers to the British Rail Pension Fund on buying art for investment. In the sale, which offered important works by van Gogh, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse and others, the Fund bought, on Strauss’s advice, works which were to shoot up in value.
Cézanne’s watercolour Nature Morte au Melon Vert was bought by the Fund in the von Hirsch sale for £300,000 (top price of the sale was £310,000, for a Matisse) and 11 years later sold for £2.2 million. A drawing by van Gogh was bought for £205,000 and in 1989 sold for £2.1 million.
For an overall outlay of £3.4 million on Impressionist and Modern art, the BR Pension Fund’s sale organised by Strauss in 1989 made almost £35 million, with some works fetching 20 to 30 times their purchase price of 10-15 years earlier. This was testament to Strauss’s mastery of his field.
Michel Jules Strauss was born in Paris on September 23 1936, the first and only child of André Strauss and his wife Aline, née de Gunzbourg. The place of his birth was a bedroom in the spacious apartment his parents occupied at 54 Avenue d’iéna, his mother’s family’s extensive hôtel particulier.
His grandfather Jules Strauss had left his native Frankfurt for Paris, where he set up a private bank; his mother’s father, Baron Pierre de Gunzbourg, came of a line of Russian financiers in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. His maternal grandmother’s family had made a fortune in oil. All were Jewish.
When Michel was two his father died from cancer, but not before, fearful for his family’s well-being in Paris as war loomed, he had bought the Château de Brécourt in Normandy. From there, in May 1940, Michel’s mother whisked him away from the German advance, eventually to safety in America. Michel had a difficult childhood. Helpless to defend himself against bullying nannies and a disciplinarian stepfather (the physicist Hans von Halban, whom his mother married in 1943,) and picked on at various schools for being French and Jewish, Michel developed a stammer and asthma.
It was, though, when he was a boy in New York that the seeds of his future career were sown. Taken by his mother to the Metropolitan Museum when he was six, he saw pictures by Manet, Monet and Degas for the first time, and was amazed. He greatly admired Degas’s La Femme aux chrysanthèmes.
Aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see The Art and Life of van Gogh, an exhibition of 80 of van Gogh’s paintings on show at the Wildenstein Galleries. When he got home, he drew his own clumsy versions of van Gogh trees and decided that he would like to be a museum curator.
In 1946 the family returned to Europe to live near Oxford, where Hans Halban had been appointed to a professorship. Michel attended Magdalen College School before going to board at Bryanston.
Visits during the holidays to his widowed Strauss grandmother in Paris fuelled his passion for art.
He discovered that his grandfather had been an early collector of Impressionist pictures, by 1900 owning six Monets and two Cézannes among others. By the time Jules Strauss sold the last of them in the 1930s, more than 200 Impressionist works had passed through his hands. Michel’s grandmother introduced him to the superb collection of Impressionist paintings then exhibited at the Jeu de Paume.
She taught him how to look at and to appreciate a work or art, and also the importance, where possible, of lightly touching the surface of a painting to feel its physical state.
It was on a visit to Paris in 1949 that Strauss made his own first serious art purchase. With a little money left him by his father in a bank account which his mother had recently discovered, he bought, from the Rodin Museum shop, a duplicate bronze cast of the sculptor’s Tête d’hanako.
After Bryanston and an unfulfilling year of reading PPE at Christ Church, Oxford, Strauss returned to America at the suggestion of his sympathetic new stepfather, Isaiah Berlin, to read History of Art (and Russian Literature) at Harvard. This programme suited Strauss to a tee.
It was during a further spell of arthistorical study at the Courtauld Institute in London that he came to the attention of Peter Wilson, the chairman of Sotheby’s, and in 1961 he joined the firm’s new Impressionist and Modern Art department, working as a cataloguer alongside Bruce Chatwin.
Strauss cut his teeth on two collections sent for sale in 1962, those of Somerset Maugham, which included Picasso’s “Pink Period” La Mort d’arlequin, and of Sir Alexander Korda, which boasted van Gogh’s Nature Morte aux Citrons et Gants Bleu, the first picture that Strauss both catalogued and fell in love with. In 1965 he and Chatwin were made co-heads of the department, but within 18 months Chatwin had left to pursue other interests, leaving Strauss as sole head, which he remained until 1992, whereafter he concentrated on business-getting.
He retired from Sotheby’s at the end of 2000.
Claude Monet was for Strauss the quintessential Impressionist painter. The artist’s beautiful Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil twice passed through Strauss’s hands. Monet’s ravishing Bateaux de Plaisance, Argenteuil, sold by Sotheby’s in New York in 1981, had belonged to a Strauss cousin.
In 2011 he published a fascinating memoir, Pictures, Passion and Eye: A Life at Sotheby’s. While he only once took an auction himself (he found the experience too nerve-racking), he took credit for introducing bidding at auction by telephone, which was to become a commonplace.
All his life Strauss was a great reader, having found refuge in books as a small boy. As a young man he was a keen skier – during his year at Oxford he belonged to the university team – and enjoyed climbing. After marrying he bought a house for holidays in the south of France.
Strauss married first, in 1959, Margery Tongway; they had a daughter and a son. He married, secondly, Sally Lloyd Pearson.