Deep Roots

Deep Roots: Selected Works from Stephan and Carmen Welz, a single-owner auction of modern and contemporary art, Cape furniture, ceramics and a library of books assembled by the legendary South African auctioneer Stephan Welz and his wife Carmen Welz. The sale includes a collective consignment of 58 paintings, drawings and prints by Welz’s father, Jean Welz, the Austrian-born architect who became an acclaimed modernist artist.

Born in 1943 in the Breede River Valley town of Worcester, Welz was the third of five sons born to émigrés Jean Welz and Inger Christensen. Welz’s aesthetic education, the foundation of his professional achievements, was decisively influenced by his proximity to artists. Irma Stern and Walter Battiss were frequent houseguests in the Welz family home. Speaking in 2007, Welz warmly recalled the gift of a budgie by painter Cecil Higgs when he was a child. She also painted him as a young boy. He also remembered an overnight stay at painter Gregoire Boonzaier’s home, an early champion of his father’s austere but lyrical paintings. Welz’s formal education in the art business began in earnest after he took up an administrative position in UNISA’s fledgling art department in Pretoria. He worked alongside Walter Battiss and Welz was a first-hand witness to his mentor’s transformation from respected modernist painter into Fookian trickster when, in 1967, he attended Yes-No, Battiss’s landmark happening in Pretoria.

In 1970, shortly after obtaining a commerce degree from UNISA, Welz joined Sotheby Parke Bernet, a new auction house established by Reinhold Cassirer and Jane Harraway in Johannesburg. In 1980, when Cassirer retired to pursue other interests, his key protégé, Welz, inherited the mantle. He held the reins of his eponymous company until 2006, when he sold Stephan Welz & Co. During this 26-year period Welz presided over the incredible growth in interest and value of South African art at auction. Welz retired to his farm Blomvlei at Tonteldoos, near Dullstroom, where managed a herd of drought-resistant Tuli cattle. 

In 2008, Stephan Welz came out of retirement to establish Strauss & Co with respected business leaders Elisabeth Bradley and Dr. Conrad Strauss. Drawing on deep reservoirs of experience, he helped transform the start-up business into the largest auction house in Africa and a global leader in the secondary market for South African art. Shortly before his death in 2015, Welz knocked down Alexis Preller’s oil and gesso work The Creation of Adam I (1968) for R8.5 million. It set a new auction record for the artist, one of many in a career studded with achievements and accolades.