Paris Calling: Strauss & Co’s Five-sale Cape Town Auction Week Celebrates French Influence on South African Art

27 Mar 2025

• Five curated sales for Cape Town Auction Week
• Sekoto, quintessential South African in Paris, has three works in Evening Sale
• Notable works by Paris-influenced artists like Kentridge, Laubscher, Preller, Siopis and Sumner
• Three glass pieces from 1930s by French designer René Lalique
• Watch sale includes Cartier ladies wristwatch

CAPE TOWN – For generations of South African artists and collectors, Paris has exerted a magnetic influence, defining artistic aspiration and shaping connoisseurship. Strauss & Co’s Cape Town Auction Week (31 March – 2 April 2025) showcases the extent of this influence in the catalogues for its five specialist sales of collectable modern and contemporary art, furniture, silverware, jewellery and watches. Highlights include fine examples of French silver and glassware, as well as works of art by generations of artists who sojourned in the City of Light.

Leading this curated programme of sales is Strauss & Co’s flagship live-virtual Evening Sale (1 April 2025, 7pm). The sale includes important works by Paris-influenced and/or trained artists, among them William Kentridge, Erik Laubscher, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto, Penny Siopis and Maud Sumner. Painted in 1948, Alexis Preller’s Homage to Hieronymus Bosch (estimate R3 – 5 million) references images from a book about the Dutch master of fantasy, purchased in Paris. It is one of two high-value Preller works in the sale. Gerard Sekoto, an artist whose star remains ascendant, has three works in the sale. They include his enigmatic Portrait (estimate R600 000 – 800 000), an exile-period work from 1960 rendered in hues of brown and orange.

Paris’s influence on South African art is well documented. In 1988, the South African National Gallery explored this theme in a major exhibition featuring Sekoto, the quintessential South African artist in Paris. After leaving his homeland in 1947, Sekoto gained renown there in the 1950s. He is now a central figure in Paris Noir:

Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000 (Centre Pompidou, 19 March – 30 June 2025), which showcases 150 black artists from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Sekoto’s 1947 self-portrait is a focal point of the exhibition’s publicity.

Other notable works in the Evening Sale include Penny Siopis’s pastel Quail (estimate R200 000 – 300 000), produced in 1986 during a residency at Cité des Arts, a complex of artists’ studios in central Paris. Erik Laubscher’s Drought Namibia (estimate R800 000 – 1 million), a mythical landscape, illustrates how this much-loved Cape artist absorbed his Parisian training – particularly under Fernand Léger – to develop a distinctive personal style. The Evening Sale also includes six works by William Kentridge, among them Shadow Figure II (estimate R1.5 – 2 million). Kentridge spent a year in Paris in 1981, studying mime at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.

Cape Town Auction Week features three timed-online sales of furniture, silverware, jewellery and watches: The Classics Edition (closes 31 March 2025 at 2pm) and March Interiors (closes 2 April 2025 at 2pm), as well as Watches Through The Decades (closes 2 April 2025 at 5pm). French ideals of luxury and connoisseurship are evident throughout the catalogues. Among the highlights are three glass pieces by renowned French designer René Lalique, including a 1933 Perruches glass bowl (estimate R25 000 – 35 000). Strauss & Co’s inaugural watch sale features ten lots, including a Cartier Ballon Bleu ladies’ wristwatch (estimate R40 000 – 50 000).

To browse, register, bid and buy: www.straussart.co.za