Thursday, March 24

I lived in New York for five years in my twenties. I was working as an advertising copywriter for the agency Benton & Bowles, and my office was on the 12th floor of the steel studded Tishman Building, 666 Fifith Avenue. The side entrance of the building was on West 53rd Street, diagonally opposite the entrance to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and sometimes at lunch times I would slip across the street to sit in the room lined with Monet’s mesmerizing paintings of the waterlilies at Giverny.

I was at the very beginning of my career as an artist then, taking my first life-drawing classes ever one night a week with John Groth at the Art Students League of New York, and never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that one day my own work would be exhibited in the self same museum.
The opening night crowd at MoMA

That moment arrived, last night, with the opening of Impressions: Prints from South Africa 1965 to Now, curated by MoMA’s Judy Hecker. My 1990 piece, For Thirty Years Next to his Heart has never been hung better (a perfect grid) and ephemera included postcards, a magazine project and the Freedom Charter T-shirt.

The snowy view from my bedroom this morning

Unseasonal snow and hail prevented many people from making it to the opening, but faces familiar to South Africans included Petra Mason, Jann Cheifitz and Tony Karon, Julie McGee, Jack Shainman, Gabi Ngcobo and John Peffer.

A wonderful evening.

Sunday March 13

Sunday. Dipping intio the auction world for the first time in many years, on Monday of this week I found myself in the ballroom of the Vineyard Hotel, consulting my Strauss & Co. catalogue.

I wanted to observe firsthand the collecting mania that has driven the steady flow of Irma Sterns to achieve ever higher prices at auction, breaking record after record.

But this was not going to be a night of electricity, gasps and vigorously clapped applause. The richly pigmented still lifes of vases of flowers reached the lower ends of the estimates, about R10 million on average, but the bidding around the catalogue cover image The Lemon Pickers (R10 – R14 million) seemed strangely desultory, and the hammer went down at R9.5m – a sale which might still be under negotiation. On www.straussart.co.za, there’s a blank opposite the lot number (236),



The Lemon Pickers is a gorgeous painting of sinuous half clad women (well, it must have been very hot!) balletically gathering lemons (more breast forms) in a Gauguin style setting. (Gauguin made a somewhat stiff painting with the same name) So why would this sensual painting be left on the sale room floor when the pretty but conventional flower paintings all found new homes?
Are South African collectors too conservative for a little flesh?

Price wise and subject wise, It will be interesting to see what happens when another wave of Irma Sterns, including some of her best works, come under the hammer on March 23. This time, at Bonhams in London