Following the record-breaking sale last year of Irma Sterns Two Arabs for R21 166 000, the highest price ever achieved for a painting in South Africa, Strauss & Cos 11 June auction in Johannesburg will feature another extraordinary painting from this celebrated artist.

Irma Sterns studies of Arabs have caused so much of an uproar in the South African art market that they can be likened to an Arab Spring with Strauss & Co playing no small role in this. Irma Sterns Arab (R7 000 000 9 000 000), painted on the artists first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, is attracting considerable interest given Strauss & Cos record-breaking sale last year of Irma Sterns Two Arabs for R21 166 000, the highest price ever achieved for any painting at auction in South Africa.

Strauss & Cos Paintings Department, headed by leading art expert and auctioneer Stephan Welz, features handpicked professionals, whose tenure and experience is difficult to match.

Irma Stern has captured the attention of art lovers and serious buyers alike with her paintings achieving phenomenal prices, including the highest price ever paid for any work of art at auction in South Africa when the painting, Two Arabs, was sold by Strauss & Co for R21 166 000 in September 2011. Arab, also painted in 1939, comes up at Strauss & Cos 11 June 2012 auction in Johannesburg.

Johannesburg: At Strauss & Co’s Important South African Paintings auction held this evening at the Country Club in Woodmead, a major portrait by celebrated artist Irma Stern sold for a startling R17 267 000, the second highest price ever achieved for a painting sold at auction in South Africa (the highest price was achieved last year when Strauss & Co sold Two Arabs also by Stern for R21 166 000).

Irma Stern produced a number of paintings of harvest scenes in the 1960s which Neville Dubow has described as lyrical figures-in-landscape compositions, loosely knit yet held together by sweeping rhythms that bind earth, workers and sky.(1) We know that she visited Europe in 1961 and painted in Spain. Its quite possible that Tomato Pickers was painted there as the harvesters wear the same loose-robed dresses and yellow sun hats as seen in Siesta, also painted in 1961. (2)

An important part of the art of Walter Battiss is a confluence of specific African and Western pictorial traditions. The Western bequest was passed on to him by local art institutions modelled on European establishments. His African heritage is the bounty of his own research.1

"Dreams and Nightmares of M. de la Q., #2", is one of a series of four paintings which Helmut Starcke dedicated to the woman behind the Governor of the Cape, Maria van Riebeeck, ne De la Quellerie. It forms part of a larger body of work in which the artists stated intention was to reclaim something of the drama of the confluence of art and history in the seventeenth century by contrasting the opulence of the Golden Age of Dutch art with the paucity of the colonial visual record of life at the Cape. It will be offered for sale on Monday 22 October 2012,at Keerweder, in Franschhoek.

William Kentridge is one of South Africas most globally renowned artists but unique works such as this seldom come up at auction. Its bold colour, its powerful form and its substantial size give this early mixed media work its great impact. Within the drawn contours of a supine head, a map of Africa in a coral colour appears to be riven with golden seams where the paper has been carefully torn.

This large reclining male figure has its origin in Ubu Tells the Truth, a portfolio of 8 etchings produced in 1996-7 and the theatre production Ubu & the Truth Commission, which premiered in Weimar, Germany, launching an international tour that culminated in 1998 at Spier in Stellenbosch.