South Africa's Strauss & Co. breaks 100m Rand barrier; Gaitonde tests Indian market at Saffronart; YBA's mostly up at George Michael sale; Enwezor remembered; Ashley Longshore wants a LVMH collab.

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Irma Stern Helps South Africa’s Strauss Sell $7.3m

Strauss & Co broke a record for a South African auction with a 106m ZAR ($7.3m) total this week. As often is the case with South African art, five works by Irma Stern were among the top 10 lots and accounted for 39m ZAR ($2.7m) of the sale’s value. Alexis Preller’s Collected Images (Orchestration of Themes) also sold for just over 10m ZAR ($700k), a new record for the artist.

• The top-selling lot at Strauss & Co’s sale was a previously unrecorded Stern portrait of an Omani nobleman from the court of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Painted during Stern’s second visit to Zanzibar in 1945 and acquired directly from the artist by the late collector Sol Munitz, Stern’s painting Arab sold to a telephone bidder for R20 484 000 ($1.4m).The Munitz Collection consigned 15 lots to the sale, including Stern’s The Mauve Sari from 1946, which sold for R14 794 000 ($1.02m), and Gerard Sekoto’s Saturday Afternoon, a bucolic street scene from his esteemed Eastwood period, which sold for R3 072 600 ($210k)
• Paintings consigned from the Shill Collection included the world-record Preller work, as well as Stern’s 1939 portrait of a young woman wearing a yellow headscarf, Meditation, Zanzibar, which sold for R17 070 000 ($1.175m) attracting the attention of a first-time Stern buyer.