Art Club Johannesburg

Join us for Art Club in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 7 October 2025, where Senior Art Specialist and Head Curator Wilhelm van Rensburg will be in conversation with Kathy Berman and Karel Nel about the Anna Starcke collection of African art.

The Starcke Collection of Classical African Art

Born in Germany in 1936, Anna Starcke was evacuated during the bombings of the town of her birth south of Stuttgart during World War II. She returned to a completely devastated town. With just a high school certificate, she left home to seek her fortune in Europe in the hospitality industry. She married artist Helmut Starcke, and they made their way to Cape Town in the 1960s where the art scene was flourishing. Anna, who was glamorous and stylish, was quickly accepted into the Cape Belle Monde – posing for Irma Stern and Stanley Pinker – and very soon writing for local magazines. Having advanced to political and economic reporting, she moved to Johannesburg to join the Financial Mail. And that is when she began to collect African art.

Walking down Eloff Street in the Johannesburg city centre on her way to work – now a political and economic journalist – and later a consultant – she stopped dead in her tracks in front of a shop window. She would later say that a West African figurine whispered loudly to her: Hey! …Psst! … from behind the large glass pane. She promptly walked into the Totem Meneghelli gallery and put down a deposit on her first African artwork. By the time of her death, her collection included over 150African art works – contemporary and classical – excluding key pieces that were purchased for the Wits Art Museum prior to her death in August 2025. 

The full collection will be on auction at Strauss & Co in Johannesburg during auction week in November. The exhibition will be curated as a re-creation of Anna’s spectacular apartment in Killarney, which served as a private venue for meetings between global political role-players and key business figures, curated by Anna during the dangerous and later heady negotiations of the 1980s and early 1990s.