/ 7 December 2007

New value for a past master

The market has seen a 300% rise in the value of the late Gerard Sekoto’s work in recent years, reports Jeremy Kuper in London.

In May last year a self portrait by the artist Gerard Sekoto was sold for £117 600 at Bonhams in London, more than 10 times its estimate and the highest price paid for one of his paintings at auction. Last December a collection of nine Sekoto watercolours depicting the Sharpeville massacre sold for £72 000. That was another record, this time for watercolours, by the artist who used to hide his work under his bed and who, in his own words, ‘was never chasing after gold”.

Several other works by Sekoto exceeded their estimates in recent sales of South African art at Bonhams. One of the highest prices, £84 000, was paid for his painting, Women in the Suburbs. Woman in a Township Street sold for £48 000, more than five times the estimate. The market has seen a 300% rise in the value of his work in recent years.

The South African art sale is an established feature of the London auction circuit. Other artists also featured prominently in Bonhams auctions in the past two years. Some of the most notable of these are Irma Stern and Pierneef, whose works have seen significant price rises. But, in terms of interest, Sekoto holds his own among the most established South African artists of the 20th century.

Sekoto was born in Botshebelo in 1913, the son of a school teacher, but he left for Paris in 1947 and did not return to South Africa. He struggled to make ends meet, let alone achieve recognition for his work, in France. Sixty years later ‘Sekoto has become an artist of international importance”, says Giles Peppiatt, Bonhams’s director of South African art. And ‘it is not only South Africans who are buying his art work, collectors and galleries from America and Europe are interested”.

Peppiatt sees two reasons for this interest in Sekoto’s work. The first is the changing tastes of art collectors, which he says ‘used to be more Eurocentric”. The other is a result of the changes in South Africa, there are now a lot more African collectors ‘looking for African work”.

Bonhams’s website refers to Sekoto as ‘South Africa’s pioneer of urban black art and social realism”. However, Peppiatt is hesitant to label Sekoto’s work. ‘What he provides that a lot of other artists don’t is his untrained technique [which] means he paints straight from the heart.”

His earlier work in South Africa ‘is topographically very interesting”, while examples of his later works in Paris, such as his blue-head period, ‘were inspired by Picasso and Miriam Makeba”. The growing movement of black consciousness in the 1960s also influenced Sekoto’s blue-head period.

Peppiatt gives an insight into Sekoto’s life in Paris, describing how he survived by playing the piano in bars. ‘People would buy him drinks to keep him playing — He was susceptible,” and this contributed to his eventual decline into alcoholism.

Barbara Lindop, an expert on Sekoto and author of a book about his art, says: ‘Sekoto portrayed the dignity of humanity, surviving despite extreme adversity within a strictly controlled political structure.” She writes that his subject matter was ‘instilled with a heroic quality reminiscent of Millet and Courbet, the 19th-century French realist painters, while his painting techniques recall some of the great post-impressionist artists”.

Lindop describes how Sekoto ‘was filled with bitter memories” of South Africa. This was why he refused to return from his self-imposed exile in Paris. The artist recalles that when the Johannesburg Art Gallery bought his painting Yellow Houses in 1940, the only way he was able to see the painting on display was to pretend to be a cleaner.

Shortly before his death Sekoto was recognised by the French government and was awarded the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1990, though Peppiatt notes that in France he ‘was equally well known as a jazz pianist”.

‘He is terribly important,” Peppiatt says. But it is sad to reflect that Sekoto, who dreamed of ‘spiritual gold, at all costs”, died alone in 1993 and that he never returned to South Africa.

Bonhams’s next London Sale of South African Art will be held on January 30 next year. There are about 20 of Sekoto’s works on the sale.