Mark Kretschmer
Chairman and major shareholder in Stephan Welz & Co
in association with Sotheby’s (Swelco).

Michael Coulson

What makes somebody who admits he has no knowledge of either art or the auction business buy into arguably SA’s most respected art auction house? It’s simple, says Mark Kretschmer, chairman and major shareholder in Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby’s (hereinafter referred to as Swelco). “My wife. Eight months after I retired from my previous business [for 36 years he’d dealt in medical supplies] she told me that while she’d married me for better or worse, she hadn’t married me for lunch.
“So I had to find something to get me out of the house. It happened that my auditor was also Stephan Welz’s, and he knew Stephan wanted out. So I took a look at it, and we just went on from there.”
Kretschmer says that while it’s been a steep learning curve, there’ve been no major shocks or surprises. “You have to come into a new business with an open mind. But we [he and his business partner, deputy chairman Jack Rosewitz] have seen areas where the business could be improved and modernised, and we’ve been trying to do that.”
Despite rumours in the art world that that the sweeping of the new brooms upset many of the auction house’s long-established staff, Kretschmer claims that an area on which the new bosses have focussed is staff relations. “We’ve tried to be innovative and dynamic, looking for new products and other areas where we could expand. Heads of departments have been incentivised and given more autonomy.
“When we bought the business, we had two objectives: to ensure continuity, and ultimately to hand it over to the staff. After all, I’m 62, and Jack is 71, so we won’t be around for 20 years!”
Kretschmer readily concedes that not all the new initiatives have been successful.
“We tried to develop a contemporaray art sale, but it didn’t materialise. Unlike New York or London, SA isn’t ready for a contemporary art sale. We couldn’t put a decent selection together and in any case we think the latest contemporary art sales abroad show that the bubble has burst for contemporary art.
“And contemporary art needs branding, as artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons or collectors like Charles Saatchi have shown. With traditional art, the branding is already there, and it’s much more a question of supply and demand.
“Another new product we tried was vintage and veteran motor cars. We had a very [as he spoke, the last word was heavily underlined] success but we didn’t see a future in it and decided not to proceed. Still, we did sell a Merc for R8m.”
Swelco’s relationship with its old principal, the eponymous Stephan Welz, and his new firm Strauss & Co is obviously a sore point.
“W bought the business with two provisos: that Sotheby’s was happy, and that the main directors would stay for five years. But if someone doesn’t want to stay, there’s no point in forcing them.”
And he’s dismissive of the suggestion that that the loss of three staff in the Cape Town branch, presented by Strauss as a coup, was a major blow. “Only one of them was in fact on the staff, the other two were consultants, and only one of them was a specialist, the other two were in PR and admin. In fact, we’ve benefited from their departure, because with the money we saved, we’ve been able to employ more specialists in Cape Town.”
And though this is the sort of statement people automatically make for public consumption, there’s no reason to doubt his assertion that the arrival of Strauss is positive. “It can only broaden the market, and I’m always in favour of competition.”
While there may have been early setbacks, Swelco’s latest Cape Town sale, if falling short of Strauss’s recent bonanza, was one of the more successful recent sales of SA art.
The firm has just released details of its next Jo’burg sale, on April 20 and 21, brought forward a day to avoid clashing with the general election. It includes 250 works of SA art, the highlight being an Irma Stern portrait of a girl with her only known painting of her father on the verso, valued at R800 000-R1.2m.
There are also major works by familiar names like William Kentridge, Adriaan Boshoff, Francois Krige, Walter Battiss, Gerald Bhengu, George Pemba, Maud Sumner, Pierneef, Pieter Wenning and Gregoire Boonzaaier.
The sale also includes furniture, silver, ceramics and jewellery. The estimate for the SA art section is R8.6m-R12.7m, and the take will need to be well above the low figure if Swelco is not to lose ground to Strauss & Co in public perception.