Honouring the legacy of Dr Conrad Strauss

25 Oct 2024

Conrad Strauss, the gifted son of a Northern Cape sheep farmer who brilliantly excelled as a disciplined banker and empathetic business leader, but is also remembered for his singular commitment to corporate philanthropy, particularly in the arts, as well as his key role in founding Strauss & Co, the art auction house that prominently bears his Germanic surname, has died. He passed away on 5th October in Pretoria following a short illness.

Strauss, a brilliant student who capped a lengthy period of study at Rhodes University and Cornell University with a doctorate in economics, is best remembered for his stellar career with Standard Bank. He joined the banking group in 1963, this after a brief period as a lecturer in Grahamstown, and eventually rose to the rank of chairman of its parent company, Standard Bank Investment Corporation, in 1992.

Already in 1969, when he began his managerial career, Strauss distinguished himself with his lucid thinking and straightforward manner, a point of recall among many who knew him. Commenting on the boom in land purchases and share prices in a 1969 bank report, Strauss wrote of the need to address the “inflationary psychosis” and “equity cult” among investors if normalising the capital market was to be achieved.

The ensuing decades presented challenges far bigger than fiscal discipline for South African bankers. Strauss’s leadership of Standard Bank – starting in 1978 as managing director, followed in 1985 as group managing director – coincided with momentous changes in the country’s political favour and economic order. Affectionately known among younger colleagues as “Dr Strauss,” he judiciously applied his academic training and experience as a banker to the task of leadership during the straitened times of the 1970s and 80s.

If leadership meant standing apart from apartheid orthodoxies, so be it. In the late 1980s, Strauss directly assisted entrepreneur Ndaba Ntsele with a business-saving loan that enabled him to bid on an Urban Foundation tender to build a school outside Soweto. Recalling this encounter in a 2008 public talk, Ntsele told how Strauss had agreed to meet him despite the negligible sum involved and a full diary. Strauss also personally called the Urban Foundation to explain the delay.

By the same token, if leadership meant telling hard truths, Strauss was capable of that too. In the mid-1980s, amidst escalating political violence and disinvestment, Strauss cautioned white South African businessmen: “glib talk of the merits of a siege economy may go down well on the hustings but the long-term effects of rigidly applied sanctions will be a severe degeneration of the economy.”

“His views were always expressed in a dignified, calm and well-reasoned manner,” says businessman Christo Wiese, who is related to Strauss through his wife, Caro. “He was a refined gentleman who exuded gravitas and style. As a son of the soil he could hold his own on any world stage and in the most sophisticated company. He was an inspirational mentor and friend.”

The 1990s thrust South Africa onto the global stage, and with it Strauss, who graduated from empowerment-interested banker to respected captain of industry. In 1993, at the request of Nelson Mandela, businessman Harry Oppenheimer convened the Brenthurst Group, an informal initiative that brought together political and business leaders to discuss the transformation of South Africa’s post-apartheid economy. Strauss was one of the 15 senior business executives invited to form part of this elite business cohort.

These informal get-togethers continued beyond Mandela’s presidency. In the late 1990s, Strauss famously hosted South Africa’s second president, Thabo Mbeki, for a meal at Standard Bank HQ. The meeting, which included brandy and cigars, is described in Marc Gevisser’s 2007 biography of Mbeki. Strauss is characterised as “a courtly banker of the old school”.

It is a common refrain among those who knew Strauss, a patrician Afrikaner of the soil who eschewed Stellenbosch for a thoroughly English education in Grahamstown. Strauss was not singularly a gifted banker; he was a committed supporter of the arts. While at Standard Bank, Strauss was instrumental in directing the bank’s sponsorship budget towards the arts. Standard Bank became the title sponsor of the National Arts Festival in 1984; this arrangement ran until the year Strauss stepped down as chairman in 2000.

“He was a driving force in the bank’s involvement and support of the arts,” says Mandie van der Spuy, formerly head of arts sponsorship at Standard Bank (1992-2014). “If it wasn’t for him, the bank wouldn’t have been as closely and determinedly involved.” Van der Spuy says Strauss viewed these contributions not as investments or marketing opportunities, but as patronage.

An art collector with a fondness for the ascetic landscape paintings of German-Namibian artist Adolph Jentsch, Strauss was also a key figure behind the Standard Art Gallery in central Johannesburg. The gallery is built on the site of the former Commercial Exchange Building, which in the 1870s housed the bank’s early precursor, Standard Bank of British South Africa. A municipal bylaw required that the property must fulfil a public demand.

“The bank could have turned it into a parking garage,” says Van der Spuy. “Through Conrad’s drive and insistence, it became a gallery.”

In October 2000, shortly before his retirement from Standard Bank, the gallery hosted an exhibition devoted to Marc Chagall. The last such big show of a European master in Johannesburg had been devoted to Pierre Bonnard, in 1971, at the start of the cultural boycott. The Chagall exhibition signalled a bold new optimism and featured works borrowed from public and private collections across Europe. Strauss was instrumental in the negotiations to facilitate loans.

“It is wrong to assert that a society like ours cannot afford the so-called luxury of engaging with the highest levels of artistic achievement,” said Strauss of the initiative. “We cannot afford not to.”

Those who knew Strauss outside the boardroom say it was his deceased first wife, Josette Strauss (née Sacco), who nurtured his enduring interest in art. She also helped him with the important job of steering Standard Bank’s large corporate art collection, which since 1979 has also included a unique and sizeable collection of classical African art.

A meticulous man who preferred political biographies to art monographs, Strauss consulted widely with experts. They included formidable personalities, notably artist and teacher Alan Crump and auctioneer Stephan Welz. In 2008, together with businesswoman and former Standard Bank board member Elizabeth Bradley, with whom he also shared a deep passion for Afrikaans literature, Strauss persuaded Welz to come out of retirement and head up a new auction house. Strauss & Co launched in 2009 and within less than a year achieved sales of R100 million, surpassing the turnover of both its local and internationals rivals.

Energetic and selfless, even in his retirement, Strauss exercised a strategically important role within the new auction house. To be sure, he was not a rainmaker, expected to introduce new clients and close big sales. Rather, he generously shared of his organisational knowhow and managerial experience, which was substantial.

“He brought with him all this accumulated wisdom and experience, which he wore lightly and quietly shared, behind the scenes, albeit in a voice that emanated gravitas,” says Bina Genovese, a founding member of Strauss & Co who later was promoted to joint managing director. “His experience in business across many decades made him a brilliant mentor.”

Aside from his role at Standard Bank, Strauss sat on the boards of various public and state companies, including Liberty Life, Gold Fields and Transnet. His personal association with political organiser turned businessman Sakumzi Macozoma, a board member of Standard Bank, sharpened his understanding of the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion requirements in successful companies. It was not for nothing that Strauss was once tipped to be the next governor of the Reserve Bank.

Strauss remained energetic and selfless, even in his retirement. A keen tennis player, in 2015, now remarried to Esmé du Plessis, he stepped into the breach when Welz died unexpectedly on Christmas Day. He briefly chaired the company before the appointment of businessman and collector Frank Kilbourn as new chairperson.

“He was an extraordinary man, learned, passionate, always professional, an effective leader who would cut to the heart of the matter, but always with a sense of decorum, with impeccable manners,” says Susie Goodman, an executive director at Strauss & Co. “He joked that he knew very little about art, that his real interest was in economics and politics, in what made effective leaders, but his love for art was sincere and unstinting. It is an important part of legacy.”

Across a storied career that encompassed banking, business leadership at an elite level, cultural philanthropy and, in his retirement, lending his name to a successful auction house, Strauss made his mark.

Conrad Barend Strauss, banker, business leader; born 17 January 1936 in Kenhardt, Northern Cape; died 5 October 2024 in Pretoria; survived by his wife, Esmé du Plessis, and three daughters, Colette, Veronica, Claudia, from a previous marriage to Josette Marie Strauss (née Sacco).