But the auction in London on March 23 did see growing selectivity in the market, as the selling rate came in at 57 per cent (96 of the 168 lots sold) and the auctioneers' evening offering of 18 select lots entitled Masterpieces saw only nine works get away.
Overall, the hammer total for the sale was £7.75m.
Irma Stern's (1894-1966) Arab Priest was the sale's star, setting a new record for the artist at £2.7m against a £1.5m-2m estimate, selling to a private buyer on the phone. The auctioneers would not reveal the nationality of the buyer but confirmed they were an existing client.
The price beat the previous high for Stern, seen when Bahora Girl sold for £2.1m at Bonhams in London in October. Both works were part of her arresting series of portraits made during her trip to Zanibar in 1945, very few of which remain in private hands. Commercially these now are considered her 'blue-chip' works.
The sum seen for Arab Priest was just shy of the record for any South African artist. That accolade belongs to Marlene Dumas (b.1953), whose 1995 painting The Visitor made £2.8m at Sotheby's in July 2008.
Another Stern broke the million-pound barrier at Bonhams' sale - a rare painting of a nude by the artist which took £1.5m - but five of the ten works by her featured in the Masterpieces sale failed to get away.
Elsewhere, an auction record was set for the leading black artist in the South African market, Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993), whose Yellow Houses, District Six drew strong competition against a £200,000-300,000 estimate and sold at £520,000 to a South African-based buyer on the telephone.
The picture itself was a scene of the poor neighbourhood in Cape Town to which Sekoto moved in 1942 and was an evocative example of the rarely seen works he produced before he left his homeland for Paris in 1947.
A picture of the same subject, although somewhat different in terms of composition, can now be found in the Johannesburg Art Gallery and was the gallery's first acquisition of a work by a black artist. Famously the artist had to pretend to be a cleaner to see it on display because of the racial restrictions at the time.
The sale also saw a record for Alexis Preller (1911-1975) when The Garden of Eden made £650,000 against an estimate of £500,000-700,000, also knocked down to a telephone buyer.
The buyer's premium was 20/12 per cent.
By Alex Capon
