Count Luccio Labia: A pillar in South Africa’s art and cultural history
1924-2016
COUNT Luccio Labia, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 92, inherited one of the most valuable private art collections in the world from his grandfather, the notorious Randlord JB Robinson.
Labia rescued the priceless collection from a warehouse in London and shipped it to South Africa where it went on loan to the South African National Gallery. It consisted of 108 paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Velazquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Fra Angelico and Piero di Cosimo.
That they were on exhibition in South Africa created a sensation in international art circles. Eager to capitalise on this unexpected opportunity, the then government put Labia under pressure to donate the collection to the state.
He refused to do so, but indicated he was willing to sell it for considerably less than it was worth. He entered into protracted negotiations with the government, then under prime minister HF Verwoerd. Holding out for a donation from Labia, the government refused to make an offer and the count eventually shipped the collection back to London.
In 1989 he sold a few of the paintings through Sotheby’s. Some fetched more individually than the price Labia had wanted for the entire collection.
It was one of the most spectacular missed opportunities in the cultural history of South Africa.
Labia’s father, Count Natale Labia, was the first Italian ambassador to South Africa. He married Robinson’s eldest daughter Ida, and when Robinson died in 1929 they inherited most of his fortune, including his collection of Old Masters.
Labia snr died of a stress-related heart attack in his 50s in 1936 after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia.
In 1958 Luccio went to London to inspect the collection which Robinson had warehoused in 1912 when he gave up his London house. No one had set eyes on the paintings for 30 years and Luccio expressed his “relief” when he found that they were still in reasonably good condition.
He had them dusted off, packaged and shipped to Cape Town. The opening day of the exhibition at the South African National Gallery, when the paintings were unveiled for only the second time in 50 years, was considered a major event in international art history.
It was treated as a state occasion and top government officials and diplomats were among the 400 carefully selected guests. Governor-general EG Jansen expressed the hope that the collection would be left at the gallery permanently.
In 1988 Labia gave the Venetianstyle mansion his father had built in Muizenberg in 1929 as the ambassador’s residence to the National Gallery along with 10 paintings from the collection and all its antique furniture, to be run as a gallery and museum.
In 2004 the Iziko National Gallery quietly sold some of the property without his consent for a suspiciously small sum and closed the museum. The building deteriorated and a valuable painting from the collection, by James Stark, disappeared.
Labia obtained an out of court settlement to have the mansion returned to the family on the grounds that Iziko had breached the deed of donation. Known as Casa Labia, it is now run by the family as a cultural centre and restaurant.
Labia was born in Cape Town on September 30 1924. He went to Bishops Diocesan College, continued his schooling at Westminster in London and returned to Cape Town when World War 2 started.
After graduating from the University of Cape Town where he won the class medal for French and physics he read law and economics at Christ College Cambridge.
He joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria intending to be a diplomat like his father, but left after the National Party came to power and began implementing apartheid.
He returned to England where he did post-graduate work in economics at the London School of Economics. He published an article in the prestigious Royal Economic Journal which helped him to get a job as a lecturer in the economics department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
He became deputy head of the department before joining its counterpart at the University of Cape Town where he stayed until his retirement at 60.
An astute investor, Labia spent much of his time in retirement following the markets and managing his portfolio of investments. He continued to write articles on economics for academic journals until well into his 80s. Another of his great enthusiasms was cars. He inherited two De Dietrichs, a 1903 and 1905 model, from the Robinson collection, and a Fiat 525 N which Mussolini had given to his father in 1929. He had given one to Pope Pius XI at the same time, supposedly in return for the pope not sermonising against him.
Count Labia kept these and other vintage cars at Hawthornden, the family mansion in Wynberg where Robinson lived and died.
In the 1970s all but about 2ha of the 13ha Hawthornden estate was effectively expropriated by the government and given to Wynberg Boys High School.
Labia is survived by his wife Sylvia and two children. — Chris Barron