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Strauss & Co’s June Spotlight Sale wrapped up with R12.7 million raised from 52 lots sold, with one very compelling portrait of a Cape Muslim woman bringing in the lion’s share.
The portrait in question was Irma Stern’s ‘Malay Woman’, painted in 1936 and estimated at between 3 and R5 million. It sold to a telephone bidder for R5,032,500, hitting the top of its estimate and walking away as the undisputed star of the sale.
Many art aficionados describe the painting as a work that combines the quiet intensity of a Picasso Blue Period composition with Irma’s distinctly South African eye.
While Irma Stern topped the bill, the June Spotlight Sale had plenty more going on. Gerard Sekoto’s Pensive Young Woman, a tender early oil likely painted between 1939 and 1941, sold for R577,625.
Maggie Laubser’s Portrait of a Woman with Head Scarf also found a buyer at R369,680.
“The cumulative efforts to enhance our digital systems and refine our client engagement continue to yield positive results, with new buyers accounting for a fifth of successful bidders,” said Frank Kilbourn, Chairperson of Strauss & Co.
The legacy behind the lot
Irma Stern needs no introduction in South African art circles, but the scale of her market is worth pausing on.
Born in 1894 to German-Jewish parents, she trained under Expressionist influences in Germany before returning to Cape Town. Critics initially savaged her work, and the public was largely baffled.
She persisted. Decades later, Irma had exhibited at the Venice Biennale four times, won the Peggy Guggenheim International Art Prize, and sold work to Queen Elizabeth for her personal collection.
By the time she died in 1966, the artist had cemented herself as one of Africa’s defining modernists. The auction market has been making that point ever since.
Her Arab Priest sold at Bonhams London in 2011 for around R34 million at the time, setting the global record for a South African painting.
On home soil, her 1939 Zanzibar masterwork, Children Reading the Koran, achieved R22.3 million at Strauss & Co in 2023.
Against that backdrop, R5 million for the Malay Woman looks like a bargain. It’s also a reflection of how deep and sustained the appetite for her Cape portraits remains.
Strauss & Co sold her Malay Girl (1938) for R11.7 million back in 2013. The market hasn’t cooled since.
A new home for Irma Stern’s collection
In October last year, the local art community was up in arms following the abrupt closure of the Irma Stern Museum.
Since then, the Norval Foundation unveiled ‘Irma Stern: A Life of Displacement’, a new exhibition of her works, which will run until 17 August 2026.
The exhibition is the first in a four-part series that will run over the next two years, while the Irma Stern Trust arranges a new permanent home for the works.
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