Forget the latest season of The Pitt, or that novel everyone insists you must read. If there’s one way the Currency team likes to spend (or possibly waste) downtime, it’s scrolling through auctions worth watching.
From local sales where you can snap up curious bits and bobs from a deceased estate for as little as R100, to the global, record-busting art and luxury auctions in New York and London, we find a surprising amount of calm – and delight – in trawling through lots and lots of lots.
Skip the grim liquidation sales (unless you’re genuinely in the market for a Vaal property, a chest freezer and 14 bedraggled trailers) and head straight for the auctions that specialise in the cooler, stranger and altogether more covetable things. You’ll be amazed at the sheer breadth of fascinating items you’ll find up for grabs.
Case in point: California’s famed Julien’s Auctions. It has hocked everything from Marilyn Monroe’s famed 1956 Ford Thunderbird to one of the couches from the set of the Frasier TV series. In May it will be killing punters softly with goods from the estate of music icon Roberta Flack.
Fancy a 20th-century art jewel or two? Head to famed French auction house Penelope’s, which has a cracking auction of the stuff that ends on February 9.
After much “research” on the options, we’ve rounded up a treasure trove of items that stand out for us on auctions taking place in the next two weeks. Two are local and packed full of delightful potential art, décor, book and luxury purchases, the other two are international and so perhaps less practical if you’re in a bidding mood. That said, many of the lots on sale are still actually decent in rand terms, so you might want to try your hand there too. Just check the shipping and tax terms and conditions!
Strauss & Co
Our go-to South African auction site? It’s always Strauss. We even have alerts for when its new sale catalogues go live. Its February sales run from wine to a collection of art themed around the subject of hair, but we’ve picked out two small gems that we think are magic.
The first is a quintessential little watercolour by the late, great German/Namibian artist Adolph Jentsch. His works are evocative depictions of Namibian landscapes and, given that so many of them were destroyed when the barn in which he stored his archive burnt to the ground, the surviving paintings are all the more prized.
Willem Boshoff put an entirely different spin on the idea of “landscape art” with his Earth Signal pieces. The four prints from the series going under the hammer depict a land artwork he did in 2014. The idea sprung from the artist imagining what the earth would say if it could. Given man’s treatment of our natural surrounds, it’s not hard to see why he settled on “Piss-off”.
Stephan Welz & Co
The auction house’s Premium February Sale takes place from February 17-19 and features 1,293 lots. It includes everything from a cornucopia of copper pieces (including a glorious jelly mould) and many fountainpens to two Irma Sterns and a baby grand piano.
Our top lots are a fabulous little glass bottle with stopper by the late pioneering South African glass artist Shirley Cloete, and an undeniably fabulous lady’s gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust wristwatch, which already has a bid for R100,000 on it.
Christie’s
One of our favourite subcategories of auctions is “the selling of stuff belonging to a famous or glamorous person”. These days the big brands like Sotheby’s and Christie’s do them so well, weaving alluring narratives and even exhibitions around them.
A good example of this is the upcoming Christie’s auction of Irene Roosevelt Aitken’s tchotchkes. The Manhattan socialite and philanthropist whose three husbands included former US president FD Roosevelt’s youngest son John, died last year at 94. Town and Country ran a fantastic piece on her life, if you’d like to learn more about it, but the pieces under the hammer until February 19 say much of it too.
We found it hard to play favourites here, but settled on a Cartier enamelled gold cigarette case and matching lighter that made us long for days of chain-smoking in a glamorous Fifth Avenue townhouse. Failing that, we rather fancy a silver-gilt mounted Meissen porcelain mouse-form snuff box and cover for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Heritage Auctions
You might have loved Superman and Archie comics as a kid and will have clocked that they’re much collected, but have you ever thought about romance comics? These overwrought, sexy specimens from the 50s and 60s are now a hot commodity and have reached record prices in the $24,000 range. On February 12, Dallas-headquartered Heritage Auctions will wrap up a bumper sale of these very amorous editions.
These print bonanzas of swooning, buxom women include crackers like the first in the 1953 Daring Love series, which features the debut published work from legendary Steve Ditko, who was the co-creator of Spiderman and Doctor Strange. It’s already nabbed bids of over $1,300. By comparison the top-quality copy of the very scarce My Confession #7 has hit the $4,100 mark in early bidding.
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