Obituaries: Louis Schachat: 'inventor' of value for SA art

Louis Schachat, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 86, was the doyen of South African art dealers. More than anyone, he was responsible for the rise in the monetary value, recognition and status of SA art.

He was born in Robertson, in the Western Cape, on July 13 1926, the son of a Lithuanian father, who traded ostrich feathers and speculated in cattle, and an English mother. He went to an Afrikaans school and grew up speaking Afrikaans and Yiddish. He became chairman of the United Party Youth Front when he was 16 and established a lifelong friendship with Japie Basson, the United Party, Progressive Party and National Party politician who died last year.

Money was tight, so he worked as an articled clerk while studying law part time at the University of Cape Town. He started a law firm and, in the 1950s, began collecting art. He and his wife, Charlotte, befriended and collected works by many of SA's greatest artists of the time, including Irma Stern, Gregoire Boonzaier, Cecil Higgs, Maggie Laubser and Jean Welz, who did a painting of Charlotte that she still has.

It occurred to Schachat that their work was outrageously undervalued and underpriced. It was more or less accepted that the only art worth collecting was from overseas.

Schachat was no artist but had an unerring eye for quality. He decided to launch his own gallery to give local artists their due.

He opened Die Kunskamer in Cape Town in 1971, when he was 45, in the belief that Charlotte would run it and he would pop in for an hour a day while continuing to practise law. But he decideddealing in art was more fun than law and devoted himself to it full time.

"The idiom at the time was to talk prices down," he recalled later. He refused to do that and his prices reflected what he believed was the intrinsic value of the art.

He caused a stir when he asked R5000 (the price of a modest house at the time) for an Irma Stern. "Louis has launched another branch of the stock exchange," was a fairly typical comment at the time.

He continually raised the benchmark at auctions, usually holding the record for the highest price paid for a local work. He never chased names, only quality, and he never bargained.

In 2010, he paid R13.36-million for Stern's Gladioli still life, which was then the highest price paid for a South African artist.

Two years later, someone paid almost R23-million for another Stern, a painting Schachat had bought before he became a dealer. He had sold it for a fraction of this price, but instead of kicking himself, he took great pride in the fact that he could talk a client into buying a picture that sold so well.

His client list included captains of industry such as the Rupert family and Christo Wiese, son-in-law of his close friend, Basson.

He advised clients to buy for the sheer love of a painting or sculpture, rather than as an investment. If you want an investment, he said, buy property, equities or bonds.

Although he lived in a beautiful Cape Dutch home in Fresnaye that boasted a collection of about 100 contemporary works, he was not as wealthy as one might have thought.

"Look for the house with a big bond," he told someone who wanted to know how to find him. He avoided the limelight if he could and had a dry sense of humour.

An enthusiastic auctioneer called him up to interpret some Arabic writing embroidered in a beautiful silk rug. Reluctantly, he went up, donned his bifocals, studied the rug intently, took the mike and said with a perfectly straight face: "It says ... 'exclusively manufactured for the OK Bazaars'."

Schachat, whose brothers built the first cluster homes in South Africa and started the Schachat Cullum Group, is survived by his wife and two daughters. His son died in 2010.