Giles Peppiatt, director of South African art at the London auction house Bonhams, is describing one of the important works in his forthcoming sale, an oil painting by the late Maggie Laubser, an Indian girl with poinsettias. “That has to be one of the highlights,” he says. “It’s a wonderfully decorative image — she did these Indian studies when she was in Natal in the Thirties and they’re pretty rare.” No wonder Bonhams has chosen this image with its dream-like quality to put on the front of its South African sale catalogue.
Maggie Laubser’s stock is certainly on the rise posthumously and that her art is selling for more than £100 000 now is extraordinary for an artist whose work was often seen as naive, even childlike. During her lifetime she didn’t sell a painting for more than a few hundred rands. “The early works fetch the highest prices,” Peppiatt says, reinforcing the point that Bonhams is not a museum but an auction house in a world where art is money.
Then there is the question of whether the Bonhams sale represents the flight of art, mirroring the white flight, as people abandon ship with their suitcases stuffed with Krugerrands and Irma Sterns. This is a sensitive issue indeed. When British art treasures of the nation are being sold abroad there will be televised appeals for these works to be saved for the nation and in more than a few cases the money would be raised to keep them in the United Kingdom.
“The art comes from the UK, the United States, from continental Europe and from South Africa, as one might expect,” Peppiatt says. The catalogue reinforces the point that the art is from a dozen different countries. But, Peppiatt says, South Africans “beat a path to our door in South Africa, asking us to take their pictures to sell in London where, plainly, they will get a higher price”.
“Sometimes it’s not possible,” he says, “because the South African Heritage Resources Association is there to protect the South African interests and will prevent certain works from being exported.”
According to Peppiatt the demand for South African art in part stems from its previous unavailability. South Africa’s remote location and unique history led first to geographical isolation and later to political isolation, allowing art movements to develop quite differently from elsewhere in the world. “So it was in a way a rather interesting case of a country being able to develop its own artistic bent, its own artistic movement in isolation, which really does produce a strong art form. South African art is like no other artistic movement.”
The credit crunch does not seem to worry Peppiatt. He is optimistic, believing the South African economy is not in the same mess as those overseas. Nevertheless the catalogue, which broadly predicts auction prices, offers a hint that works by Pierneef, Sekoto and Stern may go cheap.
“We have some good Sterns,” Peppiatt says, “but we don’t have exceptional ones like those in our September [2008] sale. It’s not anything to do with the market. It’s just like catching a bus — it’s whatever comes along.”
Peppiatt hints that, unlike property, he does not believe South African art prices in the UK have dropped. But when the sale happens on February 18 he may be forced to change his view.
He thinks that much of the South African work is predictably cheap at present, but there is no doubt that it has been going up. “It’s a realignment,” Peppiatt says. “People in Africa and in South Africa especially cannot expect to buy and sell this art at prices that don’t reflect international values.” He confidently predicts the art “will maintain an upward trajectory”.
Answering his critics, he says: “Some would say we’ve contrived the market and there’s no doubt that by holding the South African sales in London we have done something new. We have presented South African art in an entirely different way, in a prestigious setting in Bond Street.”
South African art sales held at Bonhams in the past two years have introduced historical works to a new and moneyed audience.