Notes

Thanks to Phillippa Duncan for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

Harbour scenes were a favourite subject of Irma Stern and appear throughout her oeuvre in varying media. Understood as a consequence of her insatiable need to travel, these vistas can be seen as the sum of a cumulative experience that define the sense of wanderlust that has come to characterize Stern’s career. Early examples from the 1930s feature the island harbour of Madeira, whilst notable examples from the late 1940s include sweeping views of the Venetian lagoon. In the 1950s Stern’s interest shifted from Italy to the shores of the western Mediterranean and, in particular, the Spanish coast where she would execute the current lot in 1958.

An important year in Stern’s life, she would be represented as the featured artist in the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, marking a significant career highlight. Stern would paint inconsistently for the majority of that year, which saw her hampered by illness and general ennui brought on by the domesticity of life at home at The Firs. “I am working spasmodically – as the light and my mood permits. It is a very lonely life for me at present when I do not work”. ¹

With news of positive reviews coming from Venice, Stern would leave for Europe in mid-September with her companion, Dudley Welch, for a six-week sojourn that included a trip along the Iberian peninsula and the bay of Gibraltar where she would visit the fishing harbour of Algeciras. The current lot was presumably executed either en plein air from the deck of a ship or finished in her studio from the many preparatory drawings that filled her sketchbooks.

Ushering in her late style that would mark the 1960s, Stern would sacrifice her trademark impasto for a more diluted and fluid brushstroke that was at once more spontaneous and geometrically descriptive. Notoriously antagonistic towards the new developments of post-war abstraction, Stern’s work from this period takes its antecedent from her earlier forays into expressionism that favoured representative immediacy.

In Algeciras Stern found a familiar light given the port’s geographic proximity to North Africa. “Spain”, she writes, “was very African in character. Palms grow – dates even get ripe – the sea is blue and the sun shines hard”. ² The present lot captures this direct light as the buildings reflect the sun and the ocean glistens in a tonal range that is unique to the Mediterranean. Whilst often dismissive of abstract tendencies prevalent in her contemporaries, in this example Stern makes liberal use of angular lines in the flickering ocean and sweeping curves to describe the lines of the moored boats that bob silently in the harbour.

1. Sandra Klopper (2017) Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? Cape Town: Orisha, page 189.
2. Sandra Klopper (2017) Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? Cape Town: Orisha, page 202.

Provenance

Purchased from the artist by Professor and Mrs WEG Louw.

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 17 May 1999, lot 337.

Private Collection, Cape Town. 

Exhibited

Regency Gallery, Cape Town, Irma Stern, 24 February to 11 March 1959, catalogue number 1.

Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt, Munich, Irma Stern, 11 February to 7 March 1960, catalogue number 4.

Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg, Irma Stern, 13 to 26 February 1962, catalogue number 15.

Galerie Andre Weil, Paris, Irma Stern, 12 January to 25 January 1965, catalogue number 33.

South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Cape Arts Festival, Homage to Irma Stern, 1968, catalogue number 71.

Literature

Magda Sauer (1959) 'Irma Stern', in Our Art I, Pretoria: Foundation for Education, Science and Technology, pages 103 to 104 and illustrated in colour on page 107, figure VII.

F E L Alexander (1962) Art in South Africa: Painting Sculpture and Graphic Work since 1900, Cape Town: AA Balkema, illustrated on page 93, figure 64.

Sean O'Toole (ed) (2006) Between Foothold and Flight, catalogue number 3, Johannesburg: Graham's Fine Art Gallery, page 84 and illustrated in colour on pages 38-41.