Michel Strauss (OW 1954)

(23 September 1936 – 18 October 2021)

This is an edited version of the obituary published in The Daily Telegraph on 22 November 2021

Michel Strauss, who has died aged 85, piloted the Impressionist and Modern Art department of Sotheby’s auction house in London over four decades.

Born in France, fluent in French, the grandson of a foremost French collector of Impressionist paintings, and a man with family connections in Europe and America, Strauss was passionate and knowledgeable about his subject and peculiarly well-qualified for the job.

When Michel was two his father died but fearful for his family’s well-being in Paris as war loomed, he had bought the Château de Brécourt in Normandy. In May 1940 Michel’s mother whisked him away from the German advance to safety in America. It was when he was a boy in New York that the seeds of his future career were sown. Taken by his mother to the Metropolitan Museum when he was six, he saw pictures by Manet, Monet and Degas for the first time and was amazed. At seven he saw The Art and Life of Van Gogh at the Wildenstein Galleries, drew his own versions of Van Gogh trees and decided he would like to be a museum curator.

In 1946 the family returned to Europe living near Oxford where his stepfather physicist Hans von Halban had been appointed to a professorship. Whilst in Oxfordshire Michel attended MCS, leaving in 1951 to become a boarder at Bryanston. Strauss spent a year reading PPE at Christ Church, Oxford where he was a keen skier, belonging to the university team, but then returned to America at the suggestion of his new stepfather Isaiah Berlin. Here he read History of Art and Russian Literature at Harvard, this programme suited him to a tee.

During a spell of art-historical study at the Courtauld Institute in London, Strauss came to the attention of Peter Wilson the chairman of Sotheby’s and in 1961 he joined the firm’s new Impressionist and Modern Art department working as a cataloguer alongside Bruce Chatwin. In 2011 he published a fascinating memoir Pictures, Passion and Eye: A Life at Sotheby’s. He was married twice, first to Margery Tongway in 1959, they had a daughter and son. His second wife was Sally Lloyd Pearson.