Sean O'Toole
Irma Stern: Modernist Pioneer and African Traveller
Sean O'Toole - Irma Stern Modernist Pioneer and African Traveller
- Sean O'Toole is a writer and curator based in Cape Town, as you can hear from his accent. Probably wouldn’t know that he’s based in Cape Town but he’s a South African. His books include the biography, “Irma Stern : African in Europe - European in Africa.” And short story collection, “The Marquis of Mooikloof and Other Stories.” He has edited three volumes of essays, including “African Futures” and “The Journey” in 2022. Which featured in the New York Times list of notable art books of 2021. That’s incredible, congratulations. I actually did know that but you’ve just like re-jogged my memory. I remember chatting to you about that, fantastic. A working journalist.
Visuals are displayed throughout the presentation.
I was chuffed.
Sorry that was what?
I was chuffed.
Yeah, I bet you were I mean, on the global stage. It’s great and I just love it when I see South Africans right up there. A working journalist principally focused on arts, photography and architecture, he’s published well over a thousand news articles, reviews, features and commentary in print and online. He has adjudicated numerous awards, including The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Daimler Award for South African Photography and Free Writers Prize. He is a founder of the independent publisher, Century Press. Sean curated an incredible, incredible exhibition at our foundation. Was that two years ago?
Yes.
Sean?
Yeah it was two years, really it was depicting through narrative really, the history of South Africa. Today Sean is going to be talking to us about Irma Stern, modernist pioneer and African traveller. I am a huge fan of her work, I absolutely love it and so I am thrilled to introduce Sean and I can’t wait to hear this presentation. Many, many thanks Sean, over to you.
Thank you Wendy, thanks for the opportunity. The talk is going to be overridingly visual. I’m not going to drone on, I think Irma was a visual person and I just want to check that everyone is seeing, yes, there we go. And I want to respect that, she thought visually. And that’s how I’m going to navigate this talk. I suppose for those that don’t know me, the introduction thank you Wendy, was great. I am often asked about my very Irish name. I am fifth generation South African and I would regard myself as I suppose, de-tribalized. I grew up in Pretoria, my ancestors came from there. So that, just by way of a sidebar. But it’s also useful to thinking around Irma, who struggled I guess in some senses with ideas and notions of identity. So this talk is going to look at two periods of her life. Her debut exhibition in 1922 and then the work that is highly acclaimed that was made in the late ‘30’s into the '40’s. But that would probably presume that all of you listening know Irma Stern. So just a little qualifier, this is in 2020. I received a request from Prestel, the art book publisher in Munich. Could I write a book on Irma Stern? And it had a very sharp deadline. As you can see, the German edition came out in October 2020 and the English edition, I wrote it in English but it came out a little later. And the book is essential a primer, a kind of biography of Irma. So I’ll draw on some of that, but I’m not going to rehearse too much of the book. So for those of you who are entirely new Irma Stern, and those of you who are German would also probably laugh at my pronunciation, I’ve had presentations by Germans who called her Irma Stern.
So apologies for my very South African manner of pronouncing her name. Irma Stern was born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, which is in the Northwest province in South Africa. At that point it was in the Transvaal Republic. It was a very new settlement and she was the firstborn child of German-Jewish emigres, Samuel and Henny Stern. And they started a small trading business as well as a farm. So this is a contemporary photograph of Schweizer-Reneke. That’s more or less what it would look like around the time they settled there, this is a postcard from 1900, very small settlement. And as was the manner of particularly Jewish traders at that time, they would in some ways, replicate how they lived in the Stern’s instance, in central Germany in small little hamlets. And interestingly enough, Irma’s family befriended Sarah Gertrude Millen, who was a very famous writer in the early 20th Century. Also Jewish emigres to South Africa. These are just some early portraits, just to kind of give you a sense of what Irma looked like. I included the one that you would see on the left, of her with a, her St Helenan, nursemaid.
If you’re wondering what St Helenan means, it’s St Helena, the island. The woman’s clearly of Indian ancestry. She would have ended up there probably as indentured labour. This kind of theme will come up a little later again in the talk, just park the idea of the Indian Ocean and it’s importance to Irma Stern. So these are all pre the outbreak of the South African War, or the Anglo-Boer War in 1899. Schweizer-Reneke was occupied. Irma’s father was arrested for, seen for having Boer sympathies. He was arrested or detained by the English Imperial army and put in a proto-concentration camp in Vryburg. There were a number of these encampments, where particularly wives and children were kept prisoner. Prior to his arrest, Samuel had sent his wife and his two children to Cape Town. So they managed to avoid any of the conflict, they initially went to Kimberly and then down to Cape Town. Interestingly, and this is an important theme that sort of emerges in Irma’s life of displacement, born in 1894, 1899, 1900, they rehoused to Cape Town. And in Cape Town, bumps up against anti-Semitism.
So because of the South African War, the British army brought in provisions and in the horse feed that came from South America came rats that brought bubonic plague. But interestingly, Cape Town’s Jewish population was scapegoated, so I’ve got some quotes here. I mean, you see at the top there, the New York Times actually reports in 1901 about bubonic plague breaking out. And already then in the reporting there’s a distinction between race, the one victim was a white person, the other being a native. Interestingly enough, for those are that interested in this history, there’s a fascinating book by the historian Milton Shane, where he talks about these various phases of very aggressive anti-Semitism in Cape Town. We see the district surgeon making these outrageous comments about particularly Russian, which would encompass Lithuanian Jews that had, would be a kind of second wave that came to South Africa and caused a lot of ructions. This prompted the Stern family to return to Germany. I’ve shown, well I’m showing here a postcard view of Kurfurstendamm in Berlin.
Which is much like the Champs-Elysees in a sense, a very upmarket street. The Sterns prospered in South Africa, so when they returned to Berlin they certainly didn’t return in poverty and they mixed their time between Berlin and some of the family I think, in Hanover and other places. But throughout the 1910’s certainly, they, Irma as a young woman grew up in the Kurfurstendamm, living with a family member there. And this would be Irma, shortly going to Germany, what’s the date there, 1901. So this would be very soon after going there. In that period, when you see her here is pre-adolescence into her adolescence, the family did sort of bounce up and down but eventually it was, principally the father and Irma stayed with her mother in Germany. If you bring to mind that photograph that you saw of Schweizer-Reneke, here is a open air cinema in Berlin. Particularly in Kurfurstendamm. They are hugely different life experience, world experience. Sort of plunged into modernity, if you will. Compared to living in an agricultural outpost in South Africa. Here’s Irma in 1913, a very attractive photo.
I mean, I think if one’s familiar with Irma, in her later years she became fairly obese and it’s often the point of reference. And I think it’s important to kind of flag that we are not always old, this tends to be the journalistic way, that when someone dies, that photo comes to define you. Why I show this photograph is in 1913 Irma begins her art tuition and she goes to the precursor of the Bauhaus. Which is this Grand Ducal Saxon College. Incredibly beautiful college, it was, it had been founded in the 1860’s but was I think incorporated and then also remodelled. And you see this art nouveau building with the incredibly beautiful August Rodin sculpture there of Eve. But you know, that theme of social upheaval follows Irma to Berlin, so you have, straight after World War I, the beginning of the November Revolution or the German Revolution, which overthrows the emperor, Kaizer Wilhelm. And inaugurates a very tumultuous period, the Weimar Republic, and if one reads Irma’s letters around, she was, she came through it relatively unscathed. In the sense that she continued to live a fairly privileged life and she even gave food provisions to her mentor, who I’ll touch on now.
So in late 1918, December 1918, a group of artists led by Max Pechstein, the painter, the expressionist painter and Cesar Klein start the November Group. This is a later photo from 1920, but at the December 1918 meeting, Irma is in attendance, she’s a founding member of the November Group. I mean, if you look at some of the figures that have come, that were participants in the November Group, I mean, they’re world famous. The architects Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, you looked at El Lissitzky, the artist or Moholov-Nagy. There’s the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who’s so influential on another South African, William Kentridge, so very pivotal. But she’s been written out of the history of the group, partly by her own design, she didn’t really participate that actively. Also the dates, December 1918 it gets founded, Irma returns to South Africa in 1920, so not much opportunity to partake. But it want to briefly mention Max Pechstein, hugely influential figure in Irma’s biography, her early biography, particularly friend and mentor.
Someone to imitate, and imitate’s not a bad word as an artist, if one thinks musically, you would perform other people’s music as a way to kind of learn the trade. So not, you know, it’s not a slur. It became a slur in South Africa where years after she sort of moved through the influence of Pechstein she was still seen as a disciple. This is a work by Pechstein from 1920. For those of you who don’t know him, I mean, he’s very much a key figure in the German expressionist movement. I think you know, one can split hairs. But if you look at essentially the European modernism and, from the 1850’s into like, this period 1920’s, 1930’s. It’s not, there are sort of formal distinctions. But I think Pechstein was doing very similar things to Paul Gauguin. He himself, Pechstein travelled to Palau and was very much energised by the encounter of the new world. This is a work by Irma, sorry I’m just, if I jump back and forth, Pechstein 1920. In 1919, Irma starts a personal visual diary, which is only posthumously discovered at her home, and is published I think, if I stand to correction in the '90’s.
And you can see the direct influence of Pechstein in a very early Irma’s output. That’s another page from the Paradise journal. I mean, to go back to that point about the influence of European modernism, it wasn’t just the tropical islands that infatuated Europeans. If you look at Irma’s, the woman with the very acute haircut. One could see aspects of art deco fashion. If you page through the book you can see Japonsime, the infatuation with Japan that sort of gripped many, particularly French artists in the late 19th Century. First off, to kind of give you a sense of, this is very early Irma, this is her first professional output. She has her first solo in Berlin in 1919 and she also produces two print portfolios, the one on, the two images on the left come from her portfolio, “Dumela Morena.” Which is Tswana for good day, sir. And if you compare it to the Pechstein from two years earlier you know, you can see great affinities.
Pechstein out of, actually was 10 years older. So you know, it’s fair to speak on him as a mentor, but even Irma returned to South Africa she kept up correspondence and there was friendship too. I think it’s important to mention just, you, one had that sense when the Sterns left Cape Town for Berlin in 1901, of the sort of lurking shadow of fascism in Europe. And particularly anti-Semitism. So her dealer was, her first dealer was Wolfgang Gurlitt. For those of you who follow some of the repatriation of looted art, the name Gurlitt, family name Gurlitt would not be unfamiliar. Wolfgang’s, I stand on the correction, but I think it was his cousin became Hitler’s art dealer and did a lot of, he was the sort of intermediary for all the looted Jewish cultural property that was traded. And I think it was about a decade ago, his son was discovered with that huge hoard that was then subsequently bequeathed to the Kunsthalle Bern. Irma, I’ll get to that a little later after World War II. Irma returns to South Africa in 1920 with her, both her parents and this is to kind of give you a sense of the outpost, it’s not an outpost. You know, everyone can see sort of, fairly clear signs of sophisticated commerce. Interestingly enough, the British travel writer and novelist Evelyn Waugh came to South Africa in 1930.
He was rather withering in it’s appraisal, he said it was as ugly as Glasgow. And maybe he spent too much time at the docks, I’m not sure. He also spoke about the very fashionable, and he mentions it by name, the Jewish population in Cape Town. Which was a strange observation but I think you know, there is a very large Jewish community within Cape Town that Irma would have formed a part of. But she was an assimilated Jew, not an orthodox Jew. Not very observant in her religious practises. Just to kind of give you a sense of some of the images that I’ll touch on. And also, it’s important to understand at the outset that Irma was a genre painter. And that’s not a slur, I think it’s really just an attempt to paint what she does accurately. Which is, paint in very received traditions. She painted portraits, she’s most, perhaps most acclaimed for her portraits. And the one on the left of the young girl clutching the flowers is her first important picture, it’s from 1916. The children playing, the two children are from 1924. And that’s when she’s beginning to make waves.
But I’ll get to that in a moment. Here’s “The Eternal Child.” I mean, it has a couple of different names and it’s hugely important, Neville Dubow, the art critic and the head of Michaelis Art School, described it as, “Possibly,” with a little exaggeration, “The most important single work in the history of South African art.” It might be a little bit of hyperbole. There’s always new works that make the same claim. But interestingly enough, Irma attached great value to it and didn’t, kept onto it until near her end, when she sold it to the, Anton Rupert, who acquired quite a large archive of her work before her death in 1966. The work’s based on, kind of a remembered scene while in a tram, seeing I think, one version or title of it is called “The War Child.” Before it became “The Eternal Child.” Really sort of captures the desolation I guess, of post-war Berlin, it’s not post-war sorry, it’s 1916. But that war period and interestingly enough, it caused a break with her tutor at the time. He regarded it as fairly cynical portrait.
Like I said, she’s a portraitist. But part of my talk touches on her interest in travel. These two images, which were on view at the Rupert museum in Stellenbosch in 1919, listen to me, 2019 and 2020, record two of her most important travel destinations. The Arab youth on the right would have been painted in Zanzibar, and the woman on, my apologies, the woman on the right is from Belgian Congo. And the young man is from Zanzibar. She also did still life’s and particularly was an avid gardener, so many of her still life’s incorporated flowers. To the extent that there’s a whole subgenre of Irma’s work devoted to flower studies, and very often they would incorporate elements of her collection. Irma was a voracious collector, as her acclaim grew and as she sold more, she would spend more. So after her death, her home in Cape Town was ultimately transformed into a museum and houses some of her extraordinary objects, collected around the world, of cultures from around the world. Irma also painted consistently nude studies, and as she got older, she painted older, middle-aged women. Her earlier work was often kind of, some critics say, surrogate self portraits of young women.
But as she aged she kind of acknowledged the ageing body and recorded it, they’re very, I think her nudes are an extraordinary body of work. These two are from 1965, both would have been painted during her stay in the Mediterranean. Irma died a year later, but you can see the importance she attached to the vitality of the body. It’s not the genre study, it somehow exceeds that. Also probably less acknowledged, but a very important part of Irma’s output, she painted landscapes and did them frequently. I won’t pause too long there, just to kind of give you a sense. Very joyous with her use of green, very capable. It’s not an easy colour to work. Also, and somewhat overlooked, is her portraiture of, particularly Cape Town society.
And often, Jewish society. The woman on the right was actually a visiting journalist with the Hearst Corporation from America. And if there’s Americans listening in, they would, you probably know Rebecca Reyher. In the Suffragette movement in the United States. And published a book on the Zulu queen in the late '40’s, if I’m not mistaken. Irma was also a ceramicist, very capable one. Didn’t produce much but she had three periods where she sort of consistently produced ceramics. And you can see how she sort of travels her motifs from her paintings onto her ceramics. She also sculpted, although this feels posed, but such is the nature of photography. Very small body of works, sculpturally.
I mean, she was principally a painter. I think it’s important to know that Irma was born into a German-Jewish family. Was raised speaking German and spoke German as her principal language until '93, 1933. She also read German. She divorced her husband in 1934 and around that period renounced her relationship with Germany and spoke and read English. I’m going to play a brief clip of an interview that she did on the radio, just to give you a sense of Irma’s voice. It’s important to hear that, I think.
Audio plays.
[Interviewer] Miss Stern, I believe you’re going to hold next year an exhibition in the country where you held your first exhibition, is that so?
[Irma] Yes, that is so. The works in fact on the 15th of December and being shipped, and going to Munich on an exhibition. It’s the Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt, we choose to have the gallery before this last, they’re one of the most prominent and I was very proud to be able to show there, the.
[Sean] I think you get a sense of Irma’s very capable BBC1 voice. Just to say that Irma, despite returning to South Africa in 1920, was a very worldly person. And continued to exhibit throughout her career, particularly in Europe. She didn’t really make in roads into the United States. This is probably her most important exhibition throughout her career. She never had a proper museum show, as is the manner in contemporary times. So she exhibited with the very acclaimed French or Parisian dealer Georges Wildenstein in 1947, and all her key works are on this, particularly her Zanzibar work. So if you could see my arrow there, that work was also on the exhibition, “Arab Priest.” It’s probably one of her most important works, I’ll get to why in a moment. It illustrates her second artist’s book, “Zanzibar.” It’s the first image that appears in it. Return to a moment in that. So Stern died in 1966, this is from an obituary in the Rand Daily Mail, which is the newspaper in Johannesburg.
Cape Town press were quicker to cover it but they, have shown this clip just for the opening sentence. “Much will and should be written about Irma Stern, who died,” apologies for my spelling error, “a few days ago in Cape Town.” I continue, Irma, strangely for someone who in South African art circles is really well-known, only had two books published in her lifetime. First one is the book on the left, by a very prominent Berlin art critic, Max Osborn. And it was part of a series called, “Junge Kunst,” or “Young Artists.” And this edition, so it was number 51, was immediately preceded by two books on Picasso. And if you look at the list of artists that appeared in the “Junge Kunst” series, really kind of gives you a sense of Irma’s place in 1927 already, within European modernism. Irma though, lived in Cape Town from 1920 until her death in '66. In that time she only had one book published and that’s the book on the right by Joseph Sachs, who was a very prominent intellectual in Cape Town and an educationalist, he got his PhD from the University of Zurich. And Irma as thanks painted a portrait of him. Since then there’s a been a flood of books about Irma. I’ve just shown you a couple here.
Neville Dubow authored the earliest books, interestingly enough, there’s been a slow international recovery of Irma. So the two books at the top, “The Stonecutter,” the man in the sort of Cezanne-ian composition and then “Hidden Treasures,” which is, are both by Irene Below, who in the '90’s helped sort of, return Irma to Germany in a sense. The book on the bottom right is by an African-American scholar, Lanitra Berger, and looks at some of the paradoxes of Irma’s portrayal of particularly black subjects. And a very interesting read, I think a necessary kind of revision. Books often mean also that people are paying attention. You don’t publish books for artists no one is interested in. Irma, people are interested in. I’ve shown some pictures of auctioneers here for a simple reason. “The Arab Priest” sold in London in, I’m just putting this out the way, in 2011 for just over three million pounds. And it didn’t sell to a South African collector, it sold to the Qatari museum’s authorities. And will be exhibited in their Oriental Museum. It caused a bit of a kerfuffle, as we say in South Africa.
And the South African heritage organisation allowed it to be sold, with the caveat that it has to return to South Africa every five years for public exhibition, and that has been honoured. It wasn’t a flash in the pan, the sale. And this is a ranking of the top 30 selling African artists in a five year period, 2016 to '21, by value, and it’s dollar-based value. You can see Irma Stern, $26 million. She’s only outsold by Julie Mehretu, who’s an Ethiopian artist living in the United States. And Msrlene Dumas, who’s also a Cape Town artist but lives in Amsterdam. Most of the artists in that list are contemporary, living artists. It would be only Irma, Ben Enwonwu the Nigerian artist, and Pierneef, a South African artist. It just gives you a sense of South African modernism’s durability, I think is the, as a collectable. Anyway, I have spoken a little bit too long about who Irma is, so modernist pioneer. This is Irma, early twenties in her studio. It’s important to recognise what her work would be bumping up against.
And I use that purposefully. Gwelo Goodman would have been at that time, probably the most celebrated landscape painter. Landscape painting generally was highly revered, and particularly in a kind of impressionist, light mode. And then Anton van Wouw, Anton van Wouw, working in a kind of 19th Century formalist tradition, these are from 1907. So this is where Irma is, shall we say crash landing? Parachuting into? Young woman, very dynamic, she wins a prize for best costume at a dance in the mid twenties. So she’s socially prominent, but this exhibition, the one in 1922, her debut solo in Cape Town at Ashbey’s, really kind of makes her reputation. It’s very hard to track down what was on the show. There is a list from the leaflet, but many of the works are hard to find because most of Irma’s works have entered private collections. This work was on exhibition, as was this work, “Man in a Fez.” Bear in mind, as I said earlier, Irma comes from a German-Jewish family, but becomes very interested in other religions and other cultures, and does not hold back on documenting them, it’s an important theme.
I just want to read this. So her show draws popular, or it draws an audience. I mean, that sounds a little bit benign as a statement. I’ve included this little clip on the left. This is the Cape Times, which would be like the New York Times, very important. This is the full extent of their review, and it says, “A first visit causes undoubted amusement, but on subsequent inspections this feeling vanishes, to be replaced by frank disgust at the general nastiness of the work.” One thing prompted by this was queues. Irma’s exhibition was noted for queues. People came to see what this work was about. One version has it that two policemen came to have a look at what was being portrayed because there was allegations of nudity. Few of the works sold, there were 96 works in total that were sold. These two women, Roza Van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitsky, sort of very important cultural figures in that inter-war period, between the First and Second World War.
Huge promoters of Irma, often wrote under pseudonyms throughput the 1920’s and '30’s, promoting her work. The reason I mentioned them is two things. They were a lesbian couple, openly, in a very conservative society. And Childe writes that in that 1922 exhibition, the small pencil drawing sold to the woman in the middle, Ruth Alexander. For those of you interested in the history, particularly the political history of Cape Town at that time, Ruth or Hedwig Alexander came from a very prominent Jewish family in London. Her father was a Hebrew scholar. She got involved in, at the Suffragette movement in South Africa. But interestingly broke with it when white women were given the vote in 1931, but no one else. And it prompted her to divorce her husband and move to the UK. Her sister Amy, the younger sister, moved to the US and became a car-carrying member of the communist party. Very interesting family. Ruth, who bought the drawing of Irma, divorced her husband in '33.
Irma divorced her husband, Johan Prince, a year later. Interesting models of very liberated women, who’s biographies are not often spoken about. One consequence of that very vitriolic reception of Irma’s first exhibition was her retreat, in a sense. But not a retreat as in a refusal, more she went, practically, with her family on holiday to Umgababa, which is on the Indian Ocean coast. And had encounters there that informed sort of, new paintings and new drawings. So in that period from 1920 to, well into the '30’s, Irma travelled extensively, alone across Southern Africa by car. Making sketches that she would realise in her studio later. Interestingly enough Hilda, who writes about her method, so she would head for a little trading station. So this article from '29, she’s actually describing Irma in Swaziland, where she makes for a little trading station and records encounters with people that she sees there. Irma, which isn’t mentioned, was a big smoker. So she would use cigarettes at times as a bartering tool, for positive or negative. I’ll leave that to you to judge. In that early phase, I mentioned earlier she’s a genre painter and she’s interested in subjects like the nude, and she’s also interested in this idea of a kind of mythic fertility, you can see the influence of Pechstein with this kind of mythic primitivism that she’s interested in portraying.
This is from '24, the reason I show it is just her, the subject matter. It’s a Malay woman, which is in South Africa, a euphemism for a South African Muslim community. Which is a very hybrid community coming from many places, amongst them the Indian subcontinent and Malaysian. Again, throughout the '20’s, working in. Here you can see the influence of Pechstein very clearly in the works, I feel that they could sit very easily next to Pechstein, she hasn’t really kind of worked out her own authentic style. Here you can see the relationship between the composition and the field on the left, a drawing. And the work that would come out of the studio. Irma was a studio painter, she’s not a planarist, even thought she would use gauche to make quick sketches in the field or record details that she would later adapt. So, and use this as a bridge, the '22 exhibition’s important because there’s this push back, rather than wilt, Irma sets off on these extraordinary expeditions that grow and grow in ambition.
She travels across South Africa into what would be Zimbabwe, into lower Mozambique. With the outbreak of World War II and that sort of slow burn, Irma stopped exhibiting in Germany in '33. Her last trip to Europe was in '38, and with the outbreak of the war in '39, being such an inveterate traveller, she was, travelled to Europe almost annually by boat, she started looking to new destinations. So I just made a quick note here for those interested. Her two sort of key destinations are Belgian Congo and Zanzibar. So she goes to Zanzibar twice in '39 and '45, and Belgian Congo she goes three times. So she goes in '42, '46 and '55. The reason why I highlight those is because Irma may have only had one book written about her during her lifetime in South Africa, but she published two books in her lifetime in South Africa. The first was “Congo,” published in '43, which would record her first trip there. Just to kind of give you a context, Irma put her car in the train and had it trained up to Elizabethville, which is, Lubambashi is it’s name. And from here hired a chauffeur, Pierre. And they drove across the full extent of Congo, right up to the falls that the Victorian adventurer and explorer Stanley saw.
She travelled into contemporary Rwanda, which was part of Belgian Congo at that time. And made numerous works, she also even exhibited in Elizabethville. So these are from her first trip in '42. I thought to show this book just for those interested, that this a photo book produced by the queen of Belgium in 1928 of her visit to Belgian Congo. So the idea of Irma as brave, extraordinary should be tampered, it’s not, it was not that unusual for women of a certain social status to travel widely across the African continent, and also to kind of produce some form of printed artefact. I show this spread, this is from the book from '28, and this a gauche by Irma from '42. And you can see the direct relay, you know. She’s factually recording what she sees there. The photograph and Irma’s. But I want to lead out by looking at Irma’s Zanzibar work. So this is her book from '48. And there’s “The Arab Priest,” which I showed a little earlier.
I want to make an argument, and even though Irma’s been written about extensively, people haven’t really looked at Irma’s relationship to the sea. Irma travelled up and down to Europe by boat, typically would take the route via West Africa but she also travelled the Indian Ocean route via the Suez Canal. And this early work which is very atypical, it almost has like Monk kind of skyline from 1919 when she’s still in Berlin. You can, the subjects here are sailors and coastal port. Madeira is such an important stopover on the Castle-Line. And Irma had her breakthrough in the early 1930’s as a painter by doing a stopover in Madeira. I make the argument that her work does express an oceanic consciousness. Perhaps that for an intellectual debate rather than necessarily something here. But you see the repetition of the sea in her work and the Indian ocean forms such an important part of her output.
The experience of the Indian Ocean you know, if we look at images that I’ve showed you previously, “The Man in the Fez,” she’s a Jewish woman, looking at the influence of Islamic culture, particularly along the East, eastern seaboard of Africa. And in Cape Town, Cape Muslim community is deeply entrenched, brought here as slave labour. Have a very distinct culture within Cape Town which she records, this is the “Malay Priest,” in Cape Town. The bridge to her Zanzibar work is a boat trip back or boat journey, from Europe in 1938, where she decides to stop in the port city of Dakar in Senegal. And she produces work there. I say it’s a bridge, look at the two men in this work, set against landscape. And you’ll see it repeated a little later.
My favourite works of Irma, personally favourite, are her bridal series of particularly young Cape Muslims in bridal clothing and very particular garments that are associated with marriage. I mean, Irma was interested in themes of youth, fertility, ritual, but she didn’t ignore the everyday. Here’s a young woman in what would be contemporary dress from Cape Town, the titles are typically Irma’s but some are impositions by auction houses. I’m just mindful of the time, we’re almost there. So I show this as a bridge just to, showing how Irma distinguished herself from other painters interested in particularly, lets say, aspects of orientalist Africa. This is Frans Oerder, very well-known painter from South Africa who in his later years concentrated on flower studies, but he went to Zanzibar in 1903 and you can see this picture, it feels very 19th Century in it’s kind of realism that it’s invoking.
Here’s Irma from her first trip in '39, meeting, and I think it’s a persuasive argument, a very aristocratic woman goes to Zanzibar and paints the elite. She looks at everyone but her key works are the Omani Diaspora that settled in Zanzibar and had been trading there for about a millennia, if I am not mistaken, in various forms. And the culture that took hold. Extraordinary pictures, you also see how her work transformed from those early nubile young women in the fairly sort of graphically etched way, to something that’s more complex in terms of colour. Also focal point, if you think of that Dakar portrait of the two youths again, Irma was a pragmatist. She sold her own work, she kept her own ledger of accounts. If a work sold, she wasn’t averse to repeating it. Here’s this work, composition’s called, “Two Arabs,” from '39 from Zanzibar. Another work from Zanzibar, “Two Arabs.”
The man on the left who’s eye appears to be winking, Zanzibar had a chronic problem with a particular, I think a type of cataract disease. So she’s actually recording an aspect of fact there, it’s not some jokey gesture. I want to show this man, Abdulrazak Gumah, the 2021 Nobel Literature Laureate. He was born in Zanzibar around the time of Irma’s second visit and he left in '62. There was a revolution in Zanzibar, part of the whole de-colonial or anti-colonial movement in Africa. There was atrocious violence and the, particularly the Arab elite was dethroned. And Abdulrazak Gumah lives in England and writes these extraordinary books that recall that time with great melancholy. I mean, Irma was recording the twilight of a very particular culture that manifested in East Africa. And it’s important to recognise that. The book I would recommend if anyone is interested is, “By the Sea,” it’s a remarkable book.
Has great sadness beneath it, but if you want to get the kind of aroma of Irma’s work, as well as questions that maybe art historians don’t ask, I would recommend this book. I’m just going to quickly flash through some of the works that come out of that Zanzibar period, extraordinary works. Someone has compared, an art historian, this work to a van Eyck work, “Dutch,” of a youth. This is, this particular work’s held in the National Gallery in Cape Town, “The Golden Shawl.” In 2020 the Norval foundation in Cape Town put on an exhibition, “The Zanzibari Years,” where they showed this incredible trove of work that had not been seen or shown together in almost half a century. This very extraordinary exhibition, curated by Karel Nel. And he did some fantastic things, like looking at these frames, which were commissioned by Irma in Zanzibar from artisans, taking doorframes and creating these particular, striking frames for the paintings. Again, I’m not going to read because I’ve overshot my time, but if you read Abdulrazak Gumah, he talks about the customers that were buying objects, 'cause in this novel it’s a trader who’s selling things, and one gets the sense that this trader would definitely have met Irma. It complicates these pictures, it doesn’t negate them.
[Wendy] Sean, you can read it, sorry I’m jumping in. I know it’s near the end, but you can read it.
Oh, okay.
[Wendy] That’s fine. I think it’s important.
Oh no, okay.
[Wendy] Thank you.
So in the novel there’s a man who’s been exiled in England and he remembers his time as a trader in Zanzibar. And he traded in antiquities and this is him. “My customers? For the antiques and the exquisites, they were European tourists and the resident British colonials. We were a day-stop for the Castle-Line cruise ships from South Africa to Europe and back. There were other lines as well, but the Castle was a regular twice-a-week call, one going up, the other going down. The tourists disembarked, were taken in hand by accredited guides who, for a commission, brought many of them to my shop by and by. They were my best and most welcome customers.” I can imagine Irma doing that but not, and it’s important to register this. Irma spent four months in Zanzibar, she installed herself in a large house that she used as a studio. She paid models that she met at the market and would use them to create her work. In some instances, the portraits are actually, were called, named individuals. The others like “The Golden Shawl,” there’s one called, “Praying Arab,” etc are a kind of archetype if you will, of that individual. Irma could not speak Swahili, she was inventive like I said earlier, she knew how to engage people, so I used the example of the cigarettes.
In Zanzibar, if she couldn’t communicate with the model, she would get on the telephone and call the exchange and have the person at the exchange translate her desires to the person seated in front of her. I think what’s also interesting here, why included this passage just to end, is that there’s also a sadness that he talks about. “It’s not that my countrymen were incapable of seeing the beauty of these things.” And I’m particularly thinking of the doors. Irma bought a door from Zanzibar and shipped it to Cape Town and installed it in her house, which is at the museum, it’s still the entrance to her house. “I arranged the most beautiful of them as exhibits in the store and people came to look and to admire. But they would not, could not, pay the prices I was asking for them, they did not have the same obsessive need for them that my European customers had.” And by that I would include Irma. “To acquire the world’s beautiful things so that they could take them home and possess them as tokens of their cultivation and open-mindedness, as trophies of their worldliness and their conquest of the multitudinous parched savannahs.”
There’s a twist that happens in Gumah’s novels when you read them. This is my last slide, so why do I end on the ocean? And why do I use that, not necessarily the market value, as the determiner why Zanzibar is important? For the American audience, also South Africans, maybe you would have heard of the poet, Gabeba Baderoon. She teaches in the US at the moment and she’s written some extraordinary books about the history of slavery in Cape Town and Cape Muslim culture. Her one book is illustrated with Irma Stern on the cover, one of her Malay brides. So she doesn’t exclude Irma from the history of Arabic culture in South Africa. And also, but this is where I want to get to, where she speaks of the ocean as an important way of understanding history.
And here’s a little passage that she writes. “What do the two oceans tell us?” Two oceans because South AFrica’s at that meeting point, Cape Town particularly, of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. What do they tell us? “They show us that the oceans tell us about history, about the ways in which the individual relation to the sea is weighted with history, about the ways in which the register of the private can open a path to history.” I hope this has opened up a little bit about Irma. Google her, there’s an impossible amount of information about her online, I hope this has sort of steered you in perhaps interesting directions. Wendy, thank you.
Sean, thank you very much, I read a lot about her. I know that she was an extremely flamboyant personality. She didn’t sleep, very exotic, highly energetic, is that right?
Yes.
A huge character, a huge character. Wherever she went there was this massive flurry, she’d arrive at her friends and they would empty out their lounge and their dining room and they’d turn it into a studio. The children were dismissed, the children had to go and stay with friends. I read this incredible book how she was very close with this one family and they, she used to move into.
The Feldman’s, yeah.
Yeah and how she used to, the kids moved out and they had to go elsewhere and she you know, she was just the centre of everybody’s world.
I want to share an anecdote where she was on the bus. She took the bus down.
Yeah.
And she spoke very loud so that everyone could hear what she was saying and how important she was. I think she certainly, I mean she was a complicated individual in that she had a very, very fragile personality. I’ve often likened her to Wednesday Addams in “The Addams Family,” the young girl.
Right.
But flamboyant and a go-getter, definitely.
Yeah, do you? So maybe she was a lesbian too and she was conflicted about her own sexuality and she, living through, I don’t know. Just listening, reading and reading through. Not that it’s relevant but you know, one wonders if she was.
I don’t know, I mean she, after she got divorced she had a man that lived with her, Dudley Welch. And at one point,
Right.
she was actually going to convert to Catholicism so she could marry him, but one gets the sense that Dudley was more of a man Friday than anything else.
Yeah.
I don’t want to speculate on her sexuality, I mean she had interesting friends.
Yeah.
Let’s say that.
She was such an amazing, wonderful character. So you know, I’ve always had this thought that maybe one day she would have an exhibition at a major museum, Chantal Joffe, Alison Yale and Irma Stern. Because I just think, you know regardless of market, market goes up, market goes down, markets you know they, artists are fashionable, they’re not so fashionable. You know, I just feel like. But she’s certainly a very important, beautiful, beautiful painter and an important painter, South African artist. And so I want to thank you very, very much for that very informative and interesting presentation. I also just want to say to our audience that there’s a whole history of black artists, African artists like Makoba and Sithole.
And we are going to do them. I just wanted to start off with Irma because people are very, very familiar with her, and I thought, good starting point. And also Sean and I are friends and I just felt like it was just, you know, a good way to start South African history. But we are going to be starting at the very beginning because I do our want to share our amazing artists and our history with our participants. So thanks so much Sean, I don’t know, are there any questions there? Are you willing to?
Q&A and Comments:
- There are, I can go through them, so Gene Herwitz asked,
Q: “Why did the Stern family return to South Africa?”
A: The simple is, it was, they had a farm in the North and it was a source of wealth, I think towards the end of Stern’s life I read on a newspaper article where she said she inherited, gosh it was nearly a dozen farms up in the maize complex region where Schweizer-Reneke is. So her father initially went to the united States as a young man to kind of make his way, and failed. And then returned to Germany, and then with his brother came to South Africa and initially went to Graaf-Reinet which is in the Cape province, and set up a business there that was successful. He returned to Germany and married Henny and came back with her and they then set up in Schweizer-Reneke I think despite all the ructions of the war, I think they identified a very prosperous community or country to do business in.
Q: There’s a question of, about cubism.
A: I think, Irma’s main influence was Pechstein. But in later years, to pick up on something Wendy said, she was certainly flamboyant in her opinions and in a letter to a friend wrote that she achieved, in her opinion, what Van Gogh and Gauguin had achieved. But she aspired to paint like Cezanne and she held him up as the master. So she looked widely and there are elements in her early work of a number of different, let’s say schools or styles that were prominent.
Q: There’s a question here about, “What do you make of her observation of her subjects in their natural environment?”
A: I suppose you know, particularly at a culturally sensitive and inflamed moment, some of Irma’s work does not sit comfortably in terms of, particularly the relationship between the subject and the artist. And they’re not neutral, she was projecting certain desires and ideas onto her subjects. The subjects weren’t photographs though, you know. They sort of interpretations. Okay yes, the drawings are very much based on an encounter with an individual, and it is an area where I think, in terms of current cultural debate there’s, there will be contrasting opinions. I think as she found a facility as, particularly as a painter, she settled on a more kind of descriptive style of painting, it was less about her personal fantasy and finding these surrogate women to portray that were young and nubile and fertile, where she had great issues with her body particularly, both her physical body as in weight, she was always over weight and perhaps an ambivalent sexuality. I don’t know if that’s entirely answered your question, I hope so.
Q: “Can her work be seen anywhere in the United Kingdom?”
A: Sadly, mainly at auction. Irma did exhibit a show at Georges Wildenstein in Paris, where she exhibited in '47, she went on and exhibited in London to great fanfare in 1948. The Queen Mother, this is Queen Elizabeth’s mother, so it would be King Charles’s grandmother, was a great collector of art and actually acquired work by Irma. And it forms part of the royal collection. But it’s not easily accessible.
Q: “Did Irma know Hilda Bernstein, another Jewish-South African artist?”
A: I’m not sure, I can’t answer that one.
Q: “Are there any of her children alive?”
A: Irma never had any children and there are some, her brother Rudy had children, so there is a living relatives of Irma.
Q: I’m going to read another one by Ruth. “I have what everyone thinks is Irma, but Bonhams could not find a signature. Who can authenticate it?”
A: Hmm, that’s a tricky one, if you’re in the UK you would, there are some art historians that could perhaps assist. In South Africa there’s a number of auction houses and specialists so, Strauss and Company, Aspire, Sotheby’s, or is it Sotheby’s? Sorry, Steg and Valsen Company.
Bonhams should be able to do it, though. Who did she speak to at Bonhams?
They, Ruth didn’t give a name.
Bonhams in London, Giles. Giles Peppiatt.
Yes.
He’s a specialist in London. Maybe be in contact with us with the lockdown and let me see if I can help you. Whoever the person is.
Then there’s one last question.
Q: Is, “We have an Irma Stern painted in '53. Could it have a value in North America?”
A: Interestingly enough, I mentioned that Irma didn’t make in roads into North America but there was a competition held in the Guggenheim in the late '50’s and it was a global competition with adjudicators and nominators that put forward regional artists, and Irma was the representative from South Africa, and the Guggenheim, I stand under correction, acquired two works, but I think they’ve been deaccessioned. Irma never.
I can.
So but could it have value? Irma is still largely an unknown property in the US Wendy, would you agree?
I’m sorry, you know what, I lost the signal for a minute.
Okay.
What did you ask and what is the question? I heard about the Guggenheim and that the Guggen had, I can check with the Guggenheim, I can also if that person can’t, what did you ask, what was the question?
Just the larger point, that Irma’s largely unknown in the United States.
You know it’s interesting that, yes, she’s not that well known but also you know, people tend to collect, oh no, I’m going to get into such hot water for saying this. But the Americans, certainly on the boards that I’ve sat, and do sit on, they collect, they collect artists from around their own region because they’re familiar, they know, they understand. Irma I would say is mainly a South.
We seem to have lost Wendy. What I would add to, while we’re waiting for Wendy to connect, Irma is principally a South African, or best known in South Africa, let me phrase it that way, but during her lifetime she was.
That went very, but there’s huge discrepancies between price points. Giles Peppiatt is very, very good. Bonham seems to be dealing with, and Strauss in South Africa, and of course I am very familiar with the work and price structure and I can help anybody if they, if somebody wants to sell an Irma Stern I can put you in the right direction, get the right valuation and help you with that, with pleasure.
Just to make a larger point, I mean, the Pompidou has a work from the Zanzibar period. They bought actually a harbour scene, a very large painting. It’s still in the collection. The, I think in some of the other museums it’s harder to track, I mean there’s the, Berlin Historical Museum has two early works from her November Group period. But because her acclaim is regional, meaning largely South African and South African expats, she hasn’t enjoyed as much prominence. But I think the sale of “Arab Priest” in 2011 to the Orientalist Museum in Doha does shift the dial. I think the work can and does speak to larger art histories that aren’t only Western. I think there’s in recent years among art historians been a lot of interest in the Indian ocean as a site of exchange, much like if one thinks of the Atlantic as where so much traffic in art happened, between Africa, between Europe, between North America. There’s all this Indian ocean traffic going on and Irma’s work really.
[Wendy] I think Sean also, I think, first of all it’s easy to find out. Whatever we want to find, all you do is go to Google.
Yeah.
[Wendy] You can find out, you know, who, that’s a very, that’s very easy to find out about that. But there also been this huge uptick in the museums in the Middle East in the last couple of years. You know, I’m sure a lot of the, her work would have been acquired by, as you say Qatar, UAE. I’m encouraging Guggenheim as well to look at her work.
Thank you, I answered everyone I think. Thank you, good night.