Bonhams auctioneer Giles Peppiatt selling J.H. Pierneef's "The Baobab Tree" for £826,400 ($1.2 million) in London, September 2008

While Africans constitute a negligible percentage of the world’s super-rich (or “high-net-worth individuals,” as they are referred to in financial circles), it is notable that in 2005 South Africa achieved among the highest growth in super-wealthy populations (at 15.9 percent), alongside South Korea (21.3 percent), India (19.3 percent), and Russia (17.4 percent). One effect of this rising tide of wealth has been an increased demand for works by homegrown, early-20th-century modernist painters.

“There is a new group of players who have made vast amounts of money in property, banking, and so on,” Michael Stevenson, a Cape Town art dealer, said in an interview last year. “It continuously surprises me how deep the market actually is for the best works by the big names.”

Unsurprisingly, international auction houses want in on this action. In May 2007, Bonhams launched a twice-yearly South African Sale in London, the first international auction of South African art hosted outside of the country. And despite its narrow focus, the specialist sale, spearheaded by Giles Peppiatt, a watercolor specialist at the house, has steadily generated widespread interest.

“Essentially, our buyers come from three main constituencies,” Peppiatt told ARTINFO. Resident and expatriate South African buyers form the first two, with the latter group mostly concentrated in London and New York. The third is a more amorphous category of buyer — the non–South African, a class predominantly comprised of English and U.S. buyers, though a small group of Russian buyers looking to hedge their portfolios have also demonstrated interest.

The South African Sale came into being after a self-portrait by pioneering black modernist Gerard Sekoto, who died in exile in France in 1993, sold for nearly ten times its low estimate (£12–18,000) at a Bonhams sale in May 2007, fetching £117,600 ($180,500). The sale started relatively inauspiciously last year — though at least one South African auction regular was surprised by the number of new faces — but it has gained in momentum, with the most recent installment generating unexpected attention.

“South African avant-garde painting of the 20th century has not loomed large in the public mind in the past, but this may be about to change,” offered journalist (and Art+Auction columnist) Souren Melikian in a lengthy article published in the International Herald Tribune just days before the most recent sale, held September 9 and 10.

Change things did. On the second day of the two-part sale, a large oil on canvas titled The Baobab Tree by J.H. Pierneef sold for £826,400 to an anonymous buyer (price includes the buyer’s premium). Offered by an expatriate South African couple living in the United States, the pre-sale estimate for the expansive landscape scene was set at £200–300,000.

The only South African artist ever to earn a higher sum at auction is the now Amsterdam-based painter Marlene Dumas, whose 1987 The Teacher (sub a), which shows a group of schoolchildren posing with their teacher for a photo portrait, went to Acquavella Galleries for $3.34 million at Christie’s in London in February 2005 (and whose work can been seen in a traveling retrospective, “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on December 14).

But not everyone in South Africa has been thrilled by the new interest in South African art abroad, particularly Johannesburg dealer Graham Britz of Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. Shortly after the Pierneef sale at Bonhams, he sent out an electronic newsletter to his clients, cautioning: “Although the sale indicates a revised relative market value for these significant artists’ works, the supplementary expenses that are incurred by the buyer and seller are an important aspect to factor into each individual sale.”

Britz’s e-mail went on to offer a detailed breakdown of the “additional costs” — buyer’s premiums, seller’s commissions, warranties, exchange rates, import duties — of buying and selling work at auction, particularly abroad. In contrast, Britz guarantees a net price “from the beginning of the sales agreement, which can openly be discussed between the seller and dealer.”

Ironically, Britz, a relative newcomer to South Africa’s tight-knit community of secondary-market dealers, has established a reputation for aggressively pricing and cleverly pitching his holdings of blue-chip works by national painters like Pierneef, Sekoto, and the German-trained expressionist Irma Stern to a new class of wealthy buyer. If there are some commonalities between Bonhams and Britz — posh catalogues, ads in the Financial Times, offices that offer a sense of modern classicism — their operations are distinguished by their reach. For Africa, Bonhams has a global footprint; Britz, meanwhile, trades from a single location on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg.

“I started this sale to broaden the buying base,” said Peppiatt. While he concedes that the global financial turmoil, prominently signaled by Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy on September 15, just days after Bonhams’ headline-grabbing South African Sale, “must have some impact,” particularly on his Russian buyers, Peppiatt nonetheless remains confident.

“We certainly have some powerful non–South African buyers who have access to huge sums of money,” said Peppiatt. He is also optimistic that his sale will continue to attract wealthy South African buyers, pointing out that local banks were “largely immune from the direct impact of the sub-prime losses in the United States.”

While also threatened by the global financial squall, the South African market for local modernist painters remains noticeably buoyant. This resilience was reflected in a recent two-day sale hosted by Johannesburg-based auction house Stephan Welz & Co. Presented by the company’s Cape Town satellite branch on October 21 and 22, the so-called Darling sale realized in excess of R43 million ($4.4 million), achieving the second highest total ever for a regional sale. A 1956 oil by Pierneef, Approaching Storm on the Savannah, conservatively valued at R1.5–2 million, sold for R3,136,000 including buyer’s premium. And there was no mention of mysterious Slavic or even fastidious English accent among the bidders.