Portrait of an art auctioneer with an eye for winners
Stephan Welz shakes his head in dismay at the prices some pieces fetch and bemoans the supremacy of brands in determining value, writes Ray Hartley
IT’S hard to miss Stephan Welz, a large man in a large dark suit making his way slowly among the white tablecloths of the Tortellino d’Oro restaurant in Johannesburg’s Oaklands shopping centre.
The lunch crowd is made up of well-to-do suburbanites — the men are dressed gingham-style, their checked shirts offset by pale chinos; the women in crisp white-collared shirts and beige jodhpurs, large dark sunglasses embedded in well-brushed hair.
We are meeting at this restaurant because Welz, who runs art auction house Strauss & Co a few blocks away, often takes a break here.
He is a softly spoken but towering presence.
“I think I’m fast becoming a grumpy old man. People are missing out,” he says as we start a discussion of the state of the art market.
He exudes disappointment, even annoyance at the disappearance of serendipity.
“You used to pick up a hundred things you weren’t looking for.
“I’m stunned at how human nature adjusts so quickly,” he says. He has heard or read somewhere about the diminishing “half-life of facts”.
“Take a medical student in the US. Half of what he learns in his first year will be wrong in his final year. Something like that,” he says.
Around twenty-five years ago, Pierneef’s Baobab Tree — its large rippled trunk topped by fine branches filling the frame — couldn’t sell.
“It resurfaced 25 years later at Bonhams in London and was sold for around R10-million.”
Welz has a simple answer for why some works increase in value and others don’t.
“In art, as in everything else, it’s a question of brand names, of developing brand names.”
He illustrates his point by turning to South African artist Marlene Dumas. A brilliant marketer of her works through prints, Dumas has amassed a fortune of $90-million — “that’s over R1-billion”.
“Is this work really so much better than the others?” he asks. He clearly has his doubts.
South Africa’s megastar, William Kentridge, has also developed a potent brand. “I’m not denying that William is brilliant. But is he streets ahead of Deborah Bell?”
To pick art winners in South Africa, you have to look at what foreign buyers will go after. “When the art market has gone into the doldrums, it’s always been a foreigner who has brought it out of the doldrums,” he says.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, the local art market entered “an absolute nose dive”.
Then along came oil rogue Marino Chiavelli. He announced his presence by buying 3.2ha in Johannesburg’s exclusive Hyde Park neighbourhood and building a grand mansion.
He commissioned sculptor Danie de Jager to create a large sculpture of Apollo — complete with chariots and maidens — to serve as a fountain in a large swimming pool.
Still not satisfied that he had made his point, he turned to art.
“He came to an auction and WB Coetzer of General Mining introduced him, saying he was good for the money. Then he literally bought the first 40 lots on offer.”
When Princess Alice’s paintings — which had been removed from Kensington Palace and included works by sculptor Anton van Wouw and paintings by Pierneef and Gwelo Goodman — were auctioned by Welz, Chiavelli once again bought the whole lot.
The effect of these two interventions was to ignite domestic speculation, the feeling that “we’re missing out, something’s happening here”.
For someone so central to the art market, Welz makes a surprising comparison between buying art and other investments.
“Your transaction costs are high and while you’re holding it, it doesn’t give dividends or bear interest.”
Working out the value of an auction object is no exact science. In fact, it’s an educated guess.
Welz recalls a man who wanted to sell an old Dutch Bible, which had belonged to Paul Kruger, plundered by the British during the war at the turn of the previous century, which had been passed down to him by his father.
“I said: ‘Let’s both write down a number on a piece of paper,’ ” says Welz.
“I wrote down R37 000, he wrote down R40 000. I asked him how he came up with his number. He said: ‘My father always said that for what he paid for it he could have bought a very comfortable American car.’ ”
Welz is once again the sceptic. “Collectors are like gamblers. They always tell you of their successes. The failures? They give them to their nieces as wedding presents.”
These days there are few passionate collectors. “You’ve now got what is described as ‘flipping a work’ — selling very quickly afterwards at a quick profit.
“Having grown up in an artist’s home, you realise what it takes to be a serious artist — what it takes to produce a major work. You then walk into a collector who says he was lucky to meet an artist when he was down and out. He’ll tell you: ‘I could squeeze him down.’ ”
Trust is everything in the art business, says Welz.
“You don’t know me. I walk into your house with a little piece of paper and I walk out with R15-million of your property. How often don’t I walk out of a house with a painting under my arm that’s worth more than the house?”
He has seen the market move in slow waves during the 40 years he has been in the auction world. “In the 1970s and 1980s it was 80% in Jewish hands. Now the biggest buyers are Afrikaans people.
“I’d like to believe that many of them took their lead from Anton Rupert. Ask who Schlesinger was and nobody knows. But ask who Anton Rupert was and they all know him.”
Actually, I tell Welz that I grew up with the name Schlesinger. Whenever I asked my mother to buy me something out of the ordinary, she would reply: “Who do you think I am? Schlesinger’s daughter?”
But the point is well made. The well-heeled and therefore the owners of art collections have shifted from old money to new.
The rise of a new post-apartheid middle class is once again changing the market. The early conspicuous trappings of wealth inevitably give way to a search for something deeper, like owning art.
“You saw it with the Afrikaners. The Mercedes came before the paintings.”
These days, Welz is restless. “I’ve got to a stage where I would like to give back something. I think it’s essentially a very genuine wish to give something back.”
But I sense that if he could, he would chuck it all in to go back to the days of serendipity.
Like the time a Middelburg farmer called him about two paintings he wanted to sell. They agreed to meet halfway at a hotel in Bloemfontein.
“This Mercedes diesel comes up, the bloke climbs out. He opens the boot and takes out two fertiliser bags, each containing a painting.
“They were breathtaking — two paintings by Thomas Baines. In fertiliser bags.”
Before we go, Welz has one more thing to show me.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a folded photocopy of a page surrounded by a small crowd of pencil annotation. In the centre a quote has been heavily marked. It is by the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert and it reads: “One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it mean-spiritedly avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values.
“Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral) because our world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the old tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.”
It is a powerful quote. Almost as powerful as the pencil line written at the bottom of the page: “Originality is a pernicious myth.”
My father always said that for what he paid for that Bible he could have bought a very comfortable American car