Out of South Africa

Courtesy Bonhams, London

Irma Stern's "Still Life with Chrysanthemums and a Pumpkin" (1937)

April 2008 In Brief

Boon for Business

Installation Art

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Irma Stern, who was born in the small South African town of Schweizer-Reneke and, while studying in Germany in the early 20th century, was influenced by Expressionism, stole the show, with seven of her paintings among the top 10 lots. Her Still Life with Chrysanthemums and a Pumpkin, 1937, sold for £378,400 ($751,600), the sale’s top bid and a record for one of her still lifes. Stern’s Portrait of a Pondo Woman, 1929, fetched another high price, £280,000 ($556,200). “Before her, artists were painting South Africans with a much more colonial eye, whereas she gave her subjects a tremendous amount of dignity,” says Giles Peppiatt, the director of Bonhams’s South African sales.

The work of another female artist, Maria Magdalena Laubser, also performed impressively. Laubser’s The Harvesters, undated, quintupled its low estimate of £25,000 ($49,700), bringing in £126,000 ($250,300), a record for a Laubser landscape.

Of the 200 people who packed the salesroom, the majority were from Europe or the U.S. As Peppiatt notes, “You don’t have to be Dutch to buy a van Gogh, and you certainly don’t have to be South African to buy an Irma Stern.” Bonhams’s next sale of South African art is to be held on September 10.

"Out of South Africa" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.