It’s a year just short of half a century since Irma Stern exhibited as a living artist. An artist who courted controversy in her lifetime and posthumously, Stern is often in the news as a South African painter who commands the highest prices, writes Lucinda Jolly.
Her portraits in particular have reached prices of up to 20 million rand. Recently her painting Arab in Black, discovered in the kitchen of a London flat where it was being used as a notice board bedecked with little beaded South African HIV pins and postcards, was sold for 17.5 million rand.
One of Stern’s floral still lifes hangs in Buckingham Palace bought by the Queen of England after her visit in 1948.
According to co-curator Carol Kaufman, the deciding factor for the exhibition Brushing up on Stern was because there’s “so much interest in Irma Stern”. It was generated particularly by the Arab Priest, a national treasure which was purchased by the Qatar Museums Authority three years ago with the condition that it must be brought back to South Africa every five years for a period of time in compliance with The South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA).
Originally Kaufman, who sits on SAHRA and co-curator Andrea Lewis wanted an exhibition of Stern’s paintings linked to her depiction of the Arab world and the Arab Spring. When this didn’t happen “we didn’t give up”. The result is Brushing up on Stern which showcases 22 oil paintings, numerous gouaches and drawings on paper.
As the title suggests, the exhibition not only provides a chance to reacquaint ourselves with Stern’s paintings, but also an opportunity to re-contextualise her work currently seen through the highly critical and politicised lens of contemporary South Africa. Lewis has picked up a lot of resentment against Stern from students of her generation who have been taught to think about her work in a particular framework.
The exhibition balances this by recognising and celebrating the importance of her place in our past and how it impacts on our present.
As Kaufman points out the themes of the refugee, racism, sexism, Judaism and Islam which pervaded her life and work continue to be pertinent to the 21st century. She mentions an African American professor Dr LaNitra Berger who recently discovered a book written in the 1930’s for African Americans who were looking at art in Africa where one of the artists they were encouraged to look at was Irma Stern.
Congo Group, 1946, oil on canvas.
Stern caught plenty of projections in her time and continues to elicit strong responses. Her work can be read as not just a barometer of her time but also ours. The artist who embraced the spirit of German expressionism with her expressive outlines, powerful colours and highly personal approach to subject matter nevertheless rejected their angst ridden, jagged outlines and acidic colour range in favour of her own fruity, juicy colours informed by the African continent and the Mediterranean. Her exposure to German expressionism was in strong contrast to the prevalent Cape Impressionism, a misnomer for “enchanting Cape scenery, quaint Malay quarters” and “romantic Cape Dutch farmhouses”– in chalky pigments with lots of brown. Aka. early Gregoire Boonzaier and the boys. One of Stern’s exhibitions was berated by a critic under the headline “Agony in Oils” as “a chamber of horrors”, and yet she pulled in the conservative, parochial Cape crowd even if it was just to be titillated by what was then considered shocking.
Like many people Stern was full of contradictions. Both extraordinary– when you consider her extensive travels as a single woman through Africa once Germany was unavailable because of the war – and very ordinary in her idiosyncrasies. She could be generous and was also strongly opinionated and wouldn’t suffer competition especially from other women artists whom she snubbed.
She has been criticised among other things for “exoticising” indigenous people with her colonial gaze. And yes from a politically correct perspective to perceive indigenous people as an outsider is highly problematic. Interestingly as a white Jewish single woman painting in Islamic countries she was exotic. But Stern’s gaze and rendition of African cultures acknowledges the attractive, colourful and striking qualities she honoured and celebrated.
What separates Stern from the “exoticising” of the European expressionists is her lived experience of Africa. She was considered an Africanist by Europe and America. Had she painted only the poor and the destitute would she also have been condemned for capitalising on the sensational and exploiting the marginalised?
Irma Stern, Congo Group, 1946, oil on canvas
Stern is seen by some as “that racist white artist” whose work should not be allowed to be exhibited in the Iziko National Gallery. Artist Athi-Patra Ruga, who (after Neville Dubow) is considered Stern’s harshest critic, is exhibiting a number of tapestries in this exhibition using Sterns paintings as a starting point. They include a camp rendition of Stern’s Young Arab Boy, a Johnny Depp pirate of the Caribbean look-alike, complete with anchor earrings. Ruga may be politically critical of Stern, believing that she “appropriated black bodies”, but I’m curious to know how an artist refrains from appropriating the sitter’s body when painting them. Yet Ruga admitted that Stern influenced the way he painted, drafted and used colour.
Stern was never a political activist nor pretended to be. Interestingly in the 1960s she donated the Arab in Black for auction to raise money for lawyers representing former president Nelson Mandela and his co-accused during the Rivonia Treason Trial. Later when she withheld further paintings it was interpreted by some as her fear of the attention she might draw to herself in the face of the rise of anti–Semitism. Others suggest that after being “castigated and flagellated” Stern changed when she received affirmation from the South African government. The Nationalists used her work especially her portraits for their own nefarious ends, placing them in every embassy and sending her to Venice and France. Lewis suggests that one of the reasons Stern is associated with the old apartheid era was that she represented South Arica in the 1956 at the Venice Biennale under the National Party. As the late artist Alan Crump wrote, “Stern’s art was political in that she embraced and elevated a culture deemed inferior by the white minority”. She was, according to Kaufman, “highly knowledgeable. Open her book on Zanzibar and on the very first page is Stern’s condemnation of slavery. Stern also realised a link between Arabs, people of Indian extraction and the Muslims of the Cape” Kaufman points out.
Stern gave every sitter who invited her humanity and dignity. Originally her portraits were titled with the name of the sitters. The Golden Shawl was originally titled Sheikh Rashid, indicating a personal rapport with her sitter. But her titles were often changed by the dealers possibly to give a more exotic ring or as Hayden Proud points out in keeping with the Victorian tradition where the sitter represented an abstract quality such as knowledge.
This exhibition is an all- encompassing experience against watermelon pink walls. It’s dominated by Sterns paintings. Her rich dense surfaces glisten with a mascarpone like sheen, fat with pigment and oil draw us in and mock our modern sensibility – on the one hand allergic to intimacy and on the other sexualising everything -with their sheer unabashed sensuality. The late psychoanalyst and author of the wonderfully titled book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse, James Hillman believed that we have angered Aphrodite by not honouring her and she in return has taken her revenge by pornographising everything.
Stern is adept in many mediums whether it is a charcoal portrait of Watussi Queen or another one of her entourage showing evidence of her skilful, sensitive, graceful line or the gouache paintings of The Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
Curators Andrea Lewis and Carol Kaufman have enhanced the impact of Stern’s artworks by creating an environment for the paintings from Sterns collection of those artefacts which are featured in her paintings. Drawn from Africa, Asia and cultures around the Indian Ocean, they show Stern’s acute and discerning aesthetic eye and her appreciation for other cultures beyond curios at a time when only produce from the Atlantic Ocean was considered worthy.
On display is the African sculpture found in the Arum Lilies painting, finely woven Prestige baskets from Rwanda, and a set of Turkish Iznik jugs, one of which held her brushes and a brown Chinese Martavan storage jar. You’ll also see the actual outfit that the beautiful Pamela Frampton wore as the sitter for theWoman Wearing a Mantilla.
The display of Stern’s ledger indicates her astuteness as a business woman .It’s a meticulous system, recording 100 works per exhibition, new works in oil, recycled works, charcoal and works on paper for those who couldn’t afford oils, and tabs those who paid off works over a period of time. Her signature appeared on every invitation in recognition of herself as a brand. And her mammoth sized python skin-covered press cutting book is a sign of her large, but prickly ego. As compelling as Stern’s sumptuous paintings are, whether still life’s or portraits, their context, in the form of the information boards adds another dimension. There are excerpts of her awareness and comment on slavery, the sad story of Queen Rosalie Gicanda, the sitter for Watussi Queen who was shot as part of the Rwandan genocide which makes for fascinating reading.
BRUSHING UP ON STERN: Works by Irma Stern from the Iziko South African National Gallery Permanent Collection and private lenders, curated by Andrea Lewis and Carol Kaufman until November 1.
WHERE: Iziko National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company’s Gardens, Cape Town 8001
This review by Lucinda Jolly first appeared in The Cape Times
