Heroic art works by Preller and Stern expected to perform well at Strauss &Co.’s next virtual live auction

By CityLife Arts Writer

Great pictures are the champagne of the auction market. Two post-war paintings with remarkable fizz, a blazing mural-scale work by Alexis Preller and light-infused harbour scene by Irma Stern, lend Strauss & Co’s forthcoming live virtual auction on 11-12 October extra anticipation. These premier lots are expected to achieve popping results. Since 2009, works by Stern and Preller sold by Strauss & Co have collectively earned three-quarters of a billion rand (R725 million).

Conceived on a grand scale, Preller’s 135,5 by 125,5cm Boy with a Crocodile (estimate R8 – 12 million) is a dazzling mix of symbol, blazing colour and surprising pattern. Executed in the mid-1960s during a period of mature experimentation, the painting hints at the wide range of Preller’s visual sources, his unique interpretations of African mythologies, and his irrepressible, richly coloured imagination.

Writing about Boy with a Crocodile in 1968, Preller remarked, “the various motifs and decorative elements derive from much of my earlier work, the origin of which is always Africa.”

Stern’s Fishing Harbour, Algeciras (estimate R5 – 7 million) predates Preller’s work by seven years. It depicts a Spanish fishing town that Stern visited during a six-week sojourn in Europe during the run of the 1958 Venice Biennale, where she was the featured artist in the South African Pavilion.  Spain appealed to Stern. It was, she wrote, “very African in character. Palms grow – dates even get ripe – the sea is blue and the sun shines hard”.

In style and temperament, Stern and Preller are worlds apart, yet in these two first-class works attitudes to line and form converge. Both artists utilise purely abstract lines. Preller’s work is dominated by a heraldic figure, a stylised and virile princeling pictured standing on a carved crocodile. The boy is surrounded by a hard-edged expanse of electric orange, and framed by flat discs that enclose sections of lavender and mauve overpainted with flashes of blue and purple.

Unlike Preller, who also produced purely abstract compositions, Stern was publicly dismissive of abstract tendencies prevalent in post-war painting. However, in her gripping 87,5 by 101cm harbour scene, Stern makes liberal use of abstract mark making. Her scene includes angular lines in the flickering ocean and sweeping curves to describe the lines of the moored boats that bob silently in the harbour.

Both the Preller and Stern works have impeccable provenance and outstanding exhibition histories. Stern’s Fishing Harbour, Algeciras was first shown in Cape Town in 1959, followed by presentations in Munich (1960) and Paris (1965). Her work also appeared in the South African National Gallery’s tribute exhibition to Stern in 1968. Preller’s Boy with a Crocodile was first exhibited in Johannesburg in 1965. It also appeared in two posthumous surveys of his work staged held in 1972 and 2009.