THE LASTING LEGACY OF IRMA STERN

Irma Stern is an important figure in the history of South African art. An undeniable innovator, her portrait and still life paintings have been especially admired by generations of collectors. Nearly a half-century after her passing, Stern’s legacy endures and she continues to outperform all other South African artists – she is art auctioneer Strauss & Co’s topselling artist. And who better to take us through the enduring legacy of Irma Stern and her work than Bina Genovese, Joint Managing Director of Strauss & Co.

Born in South Africa in 1894 to German-Jewish immigrants, Irma Stern is distinguished for her unique visual language inspired by the German Expressionists, but with a very strong African flavour. Her vision of the world through her many travels is generously and exuberantly portrayed in terms of vivid colour and energetic paint application. The works she produced document her travels and encounters with people in the places she visited. Stern’s vibrant, lustrous floral studies and deeply compelling portraits reveal a larger-than-life, independent and courageous woman, who always knew the value of her work and never undersold herself. She was a highly prolific and successful artist – the startling price tags achieved for her paintings at auction since 2000 bear testimony to the broad base of collectors globally who find great pleasure in owning works by this extraordinary artist.

A new biography of the artist, African in Europe: European in Africa, by respected art critic and author Sean O’Toole, is being published soon and I am very much looking forward to reading it in full. It encapsulates Irma Stern as a fascinating product of dual heritage, positioned in the traditions of the European Jewish community and developments of modern Western art, while at the same time being deeply inspired by her experiences and travels through Africa. Her works are a synthesis of cultures: African and European, formed by a singularly individual vision. She is not only one of the grand masters of 20th South African painting, she also takes her place in the canon of modernist art history alongside international contemporaries like Max Pechstein, whose influence was of vital importance to her development as an artist.

Fiercely independent, she travelled continuously throughout her life. Beginning in the 1930s, she undertook many expeditions into the heart of Africa – to Swaziland, the Belgian Congo and Zanzibar – when transcontinental travel was extremely difficult, especially for a woman alone. This inspired her evocative and powerful studies of the local people she encountered and their ways of life. [S]heexhibited in Germany and France, winning the Prix d’Honneur at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts. According to art historian Marion Arnold, this exhibition was a roaring success, bringing her “widespread interest and eulogistic comment in French art publications”. The European public was enthralled and intrigued by her strong African identity and her lively documentation of the places she visited.

Stern produced numerous still lifes throughout her career. They were integral to her identity as a painter and enabled her to refine her expressionistic use of colour and dynamic detailing of objects. Stern returned again and again to the blooms that were readily available either in her own garden or from the flower market in AdderleyStreet in central Cape Town.Stern’s highly energised floral studies from the 1940s represent the apex of her achievement in this genre. They exude vitality and joy that bursts beyond the confines of the picture plane, as if the totality of objects on the canvas are “resisting their confinement in the space provided”, according to the doyenne of South African art history, Esmé Berman. Stern’s 1940s flower studies are praised for their ‘molten magma of colour’ and heralded to be among her finest. Strauss & Co’s NORTH/SOUTH Live Virtual Auction, which took place in November 2020, included 15 Stern works, varying from works on paper and studies of olive pickers and harvesters tosome of her most important still lifes with flowers from The TassoFoundation Collection, assembled by the Late Giulio Bertrand of Morgenster. There was also a beautiful View of the Grand Canal, Venice, full of light and colour, and the unforgettable portrait of a Swazi Woman that graced the cover of the auction catalogue. •www.straussart.co.za