Notes

Irma Stern’s diverse output includes many studies of coastal hamlets and fisher folk from France, Madeira, Spain, South Africa and Zanzibar. Ranging in ambition from large oils and lyrical gouaches to descriptive works on paper, these harbour scenes are an important part of her mature output and slot into a body of work recording the traditions and labours of diverse seafaring cultures. This particular lot derives from Stern’s confident middle period when the graphic styling of her romantically conceived high-expressionistic work of the 1920s had been superseded by a more descriptive form of expressionism in which colour came to play a dominant role.

In the late 1920s Stern became absorbed with colour theory and worked towards building up a new and distinctive palette.¹ A three-month trip to the volcanic island of Madeira in 1931 enabled her to test out these experiments in the field. Despite being produced seven years later, this lot bears striking resemblances to Stern’s portrayals of hatted Madeira workingmen, notably in celebrated works likes Fisherman, Madeira and The Hunchback (both 1931). Similar to these works, the subject in this lot, a young man with vacant eyes wearing a sou’wester rain hat, is encompassed by a landscape inferring basic industry and fecund nature. This lot is nonetheless distinguishable from the Madeira paintings by Stern’s brushmarks, which are vigorous and instinctual. In this sense, the work is temperamentally more closely aligned with the artist’s grand and colour-drunk flower studies of the late 1930s and 40s.

The subject’s face in this lot is an accumulation of mostly lateral marks, the colours of which echo the surrounding landscape. Stern’s palette of lemon yellow, muddy orange, vegetable green and ocean blue, while faithful to life, also exceeds it. Her approach to colour here is almost fauvist. Stern emphasised the importance of colour on many occasions in the years leading up to this work. In 1935, for instance, she gave a lecture in Pretoria entitled ‘The Relativity of Colour and Form in Art’.² The presentation played a crucial role in overcoming resistance to her work in a city that served was a bulwark of official South African culture. The Pretoria council subsequently acquired two oils, including Fishing Boats, Kalk Bay (1931), now in the collection of the Pretoria Art Museum.

1. Irma Stern (1933) ‘Irma Stern and her Work,’ South African Life and the Woman’s Forum, 7 December, http://www.irmasterntrust.org.za/view.asp?pg=biography
2. Jeanne van Eeden (1988) ‘Irma Stern’s First Exhibition in Pretoria, 1933’, South African Journal of Art History, No. 13, page 101.

Provenance

Sotheby’s/Stephan Welz & Co, Johannesburg, 31 May 1988, lot 221.

Literature

Stephan Welz (1989) Art at Auction in South Africa: Twenty Years of Sotheby's/Stephan Welz & Co 1969–1989, Johannesburg: AD Donker, illustrated in colour on page 122.