When I call Matthew Partridge, he is standing at the side of the road waiting for a Stuttaford Van Lines truck.
Partridge is a contemporary art specialist with auctioneers Strauss & Co, a role that allows him to apply his expertise to an astonishing array of artworks; it also has a less glamorous side, which involves packing and unpacking boxes, managing deliveries and collections, and explaining the finer points of catalogue auctions and online sales to ignoramus arts writers.
Strauss & Co has another stellar crop of items coming to auction in April, and Partridge is tasked with helping me navigate the catalogue that presents this bounty (627 lots in total). He does so by telling me a little bit about the collectors behind the collections from which the works have come. What emerges is the rather pleasing affirmation that there is no such thing as a “typical” art collector.
To borrow from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, some are born collectors, some achieve this status, and some have it thrust upon ’em. You can be a lifelong collector, an aficionado, a connoisseur. You can inherit a collection (lucky you). But you can also become a collector by chance — or at least through a series of chance events.
That seems to be what happened to cosmopolitan power couple Peter and Della Jerling, who returned to SA after living in pre-Ayatollah Iran and made a home in Plettenberg Bay. It just so happened that fragments of the famous blue and white “Kraak” Chinese porcelain, produced during the late Ming Dynasty, were buried in the dunes facing their house. This secret cache had found its way to land after the merchant ship São Gonçalo sank just offshore during a storm in 1630.
This historical quirk represents the fascinating SA intersection of a receding Chinese empire and burgeoning European consumer-imperialism. Kraak is the Dutch name given to these ceramics (which were manufactured by the Chinese specifically for export to Europe), taken from “carrack” or “carraca”, the common term for Portuguese vessels like the São Gonçalo. You can hardly blame the Jerlings for taking an interest in the discovery — which would become the start of their remarkable collection.
Another accident of history spurred a very different collection, when Metropolitan Life purchased a building that just so happened to include the old studio of 19th-century landscape painter Thomas Bowler, who travelled widely in what was then the Cape Colony.
The Metropolitan Life Collection grew out of works from this studio, including two of only 12 oil paintings produced by Bowler. Partridge explains that British topographical painters at the time favoured watercolours and would make lithographic prints (using early photographic techniques) that they could sell to subscribers. Oil paintings were “supporting documents” for the watercolours and lithographs — and, with Bowler in particular, their rarity gives them great value.
The KWV Collection, which joins the Metropolitan Collection in the final session of Strauss’s April sale, presents a contrasting study in corporate art collection. Partridge notes that the winemaker initiated what would become a discernible trend as corporate collections started to reflect the business and physical environments in which they were situated and, implicitly or explicitly, the principles of the company.
In the case of KWV, additions to the collection cohered around the Boland winelands, with both established and emerging artists from the region being given priority. Vineyards and mountains abound in the landscapes; wine by the bottle and the glass is plentiful in the interiors.
One especially striking item is Cecil Skotnes’s carved-and-painted wooden triptych — like an altarpiece paying a vinophile’s tribute — which was commissioned by KWV in 1977. Titled The Origin of Wine/Epic of Gilgamesh, this work connects the earliest recorded production of wine in Mesopotamia to SA’s winemaking tradition.
The politics of this undertaking are not unproblematic; no idealised representation of agriculture in our country’s past (or present) could be. But Skotnes chose to affirm winemaking and wine drinking as archetypal human endeavours. And, after all, as Partridge so aptly puts it, when appreciated aesthetically rather than politically, the artwork is “an absolute banger”.
Strauss & Co’s upcoming auction runs from 11-13 April. Previews from 6 April. straussart.co.za/auctions.
