Christo Coetzee (24 March 1929 – 12 November 2000) was a South African assemblage and Neo-Baroque artist closely associated with the avant-garde art movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.

Christo's father developed a lung condition colloquially referred to as miners' phthisis and moved to the building industry, where a talent for drawing became evident.

This exhibition was opened by South African National Gallery director John Paris,[1][4] and featured portraits in Victorian daguerrotype style.

The following year, Coetzee and Marjorie Long married in Hammersmith, London and set off to Spain for a honeymoon of several months in the coastal town of Benidorm in Alicante.

[2] He was soon occupied with mundane office work, first for the South African Railways, then at Wits, briefly enlivened by an exhibition of small oil paintings at the Lawrence Adler Gallery in Johannesburg.

The interest of Cape Town art dealer Louis Schachat was peaked and it became his occupation to acquire Christo's work from this period and the 1951 exhibition.

[1] Denney invited Coetzee to dinner at his home at St Peter's Square 30, Hammersmith, where he found his painting hung above a work by Antoni Clavé.

The gallery had a reputation for presenting challenging modern artists and alumni included Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, William Scott and Henry Moore.

[1] In 1956 Coetzee and Australian Sidney Nolan[4] received a bursary from the Italian government, through mediation of the British Council, for a four-month sojourn in Italy.

Later, in pilgrimage, he visited Peggy Guggenheim at her home in Venice and remembered vividly the glass and metal gate of American artist Claire Falkenstein.

[9] Here Coetzee met Dutch painter Karel Appel, Annabel Buffett, wife and muse of Bernard Buffet and gallerist Charles Vessey.

Coetzee found an important friend in the person of Aileen Hennessy, the cognac heiress, who had an apartment at 1 rue Gît-le-Cœur in the 6th arrondissement, only 7 minutes walk from his studio.

Typical attendees would have been Aileen's sister Scheilagh and Alice DeLamar, heiress to the fortune of Joseph Raphael De Lamar, who had an apartment in the same building.

On this occasion Solange de Noailles, Duchesse d'Ayen, fashion editor of French Vogue, hosted a lunch with several future collectors of his work.

The group included architect and interior decorator Victor Grandpierre, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Tom Kernan, editor of Maison & Jardin.

[2] One of Coetzee's paintings from this period Butterfly lighting in a diamond (1960) was purchased from the Stadler Gallery by Philip Johnson for $1000, and sent straight to the MOMA for the 1961 The art of assemblage show[1] comprising 140 artists, including Braque, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Man Ray, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg.

Version I, of which Coetzee was a part, also featured Antoni Tàpies, Jean Arp, Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Dan Flavin, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg.

Around this time Anthony Denney and partner Alex Collins won a commission from shipping magnate Basil Mavroleon to design the interior of his yacht Radiant II.

[14] In the same year, while on his way to a reception by Rosamond Bernier, art historian an co-founding editor of the magazine L'Oeil, he became stuck in an elevator with designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

[15] Also in 1962, Coetzee received a studio visit by Danie van Niekerk of the Rembrandt Group to commission a work for Turmac Tobacco Company in Zevenaar, Netherlands.

The introduction to the exhibition was again provided by Michel Tapié de Céleyran and photographs show Anthony Denney, Duchesse d'Ayen and Aileen Hennessy in attendance.

While living in Spain he became friends with Imme Reich and Frederico Van Ankum and exhibited at their Galeria Arrabal in Callosa d'En Sarrià.

[2] During a short visit to South African, it was decided to show a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Pretoria Art Museum from December 1965 to January 1966, curated by Albert Werth.