According to Michel Strauss, his stepfather Isaiah Berlin once said that “money is the most interesting subject in the world.” Strauss added: “I believe art is the second.” In a 40-year career at Sotheby’s, he found his vocation: “It was this synergy between art history and collecting and organising sales that became the perfect life for me.”
Michel Strauss, who has died of Covid, aged 85, was the only child of Aline (née de Gunzburg) and her first husband, André Strauss. Aline was descended from a wealthy Russian-Jewish family. The Gunzburgs were one of the great European Jewish dynasties, along with the Warburgs, Ephrussis and the Rathenaus, and arrived in Paris from Russia in 1857, living in a palatial residence, full of great art, the finest collection of Meissen porcelain and a library (with its own librarian) filled with rare Judaica.
Michel’s father André was the grandson of the German art collector, Jules Strauss, the son of a banker, who also moved to Paris and lived on the Avenue Foch, buying Old Masters as well as works by Monet, Degas and Cézanne. At one point, Jules owned more than 200 Impressionist paintings. André died of cancer in 1939 when Michel was just three.
After the fall of France in June 1940, Michel and his mother moved south to the Riviera and in January 1941 they escaped from occupied France to New York, via Spain and Portugal. In 1943, Aline married Hans Halban, an Austrian-born nuclear physicist who was working for the Manhattan Project in Montreal during the war. Aline and Hans had two sons: Peter, who became a publisher, and Philippe Halban, later a cell biologist and Professor of Medicine in Geneva.
In September, 1946, Michel, his mother and stepfather and his half-brother Peter moved to Oxford, where Hans was a Professor of Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory, and they set up home in Headington. In 1956 Aline married her third husband, the philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin.
Michel was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford and Bryanston. He had a troubled adolescence and was prone to severe asthma attacks. He studied PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) at Christchurch but left Oxford after one year to study history of art and Russian literature at Harvard. In 1958, he met Margery Tangway, an Australian student, and they married the following year.
He returned to Britain to study at the Courtauld Institute as a postgraduate. He had found his vocation. Strauss claimed that he fell in love with art at the age of six and was hugely influenced by his grandfather Jules. “It was not only my grandfather’s passion for works of art that I inherited,” he later wrote, “but also his quest to hunt them down.” What they shared “is a highly tuned, intuitive ‘eye’, an instinctive notion of excellence in art, fostered by learning and experience.”
In 1961, at the age of 25, he joined Sotheby’s as a cataloguer, where he worked for almost 40 years, until 2000, rising to become of head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department in London. It was an exciting time to be at one of the great auction houses in Europe. In a tribute in ArtNet magazine, Walter Robinson wrote it was the moment when “the centuries-old, but local firm evolved into the global art-market behemoth that it is today. He [Strauss] was there when Sotheby’s held its first specialist sale – typically, everything was sold all at once – and in 1967, responding to the demand of a publicity-shy US collector, he came up with the now commonplace idea of telephone bidding. He helped take Sotheby’s into the Japanese market, the Russian market and the French market, each with its own peculiar difficulties.”
In the early 1960s, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department consisted of Strauss, David Nash and Bruce Chatwin, later a celebrated travel writer and novelist. Two of their most celebrated early auctions were the collections of Somerset Maugham and the film producer Sir Alexander Korda, which included Vincent van Gogh’s Nature Morte aux Citrons et Gants Bleus (1889): “This was the first picture I had catalogued,” Strauss said, “that I really fell in love with.”
Another early success was his editorship of an annual company book, The Ivory Hammer: The Year at Sotheby’s. For his first issue, surveying the sales of 1962-63, Strauss commissioned Ian Fleming to write a James Bond story set in the auction house. The tale, The Property of a Lady, saw 007 winkle out a Soviet agent during the sale of a Fabergé egg. In 1965 Strauss was made a director of Sotheby’s. Following the departures of Nash, to New York, and Chatwin, to pursue his career as a writer, he took control of “The Imps”.
During the 1970s, Strauss assisted the British Rail Pension Fund in building their remarkable collection of Impressionist paintings. The original outlay was £3.4 million and when the collection was sold in 1989, it went for £35 million – a tenfold increase in less than 20 years.
In 2011, he published his memoir, Pictures, Passions and Eye: A Life at Sotheby’s. The book is full of fascinating stories about the dramatic expansion of Sotheby’s, the world of art collectors, dealers, the super-rich who transformed the art market in the late 20th century, and clients such as the writer, Somerset Maugham, who had second thoughts about going through with selling his collection. Strauss’s young colleague, Bruce Chatwin, known for his charm with “collectors of a certain persuasion”, visited Maugham and calmed the great writer by allowing him to run his fingers through his hair.
In 1959 Strauss married Margery Tongway. The marriage was dissolved in 2003. He is survived by their two children, Andrew and Julia, by Margery, and by his second wife, Sally Lloyd Pearson, a former colleague at Sotheby’s, whom he married in 1952.
DAVID HERMAN
Michel Jules Strauss: born September 23, 1936. Died October 18, 2021
