Notes

Drawing was a formative gesture for Irma Stern. “I’m doing a lot of drawings at present,” she wrote in a diary circa 1910.¹ Stern’s conservative academic training in pre-Weimar Germany reinforced the primacy of this medium. Stern’s expeditionary method of journeying in search of models and scenes – initially in Southern Africa, later across Africa and beyond – came to rely heavily on drawing, notably charcoal sketches. Journalist Hilda Purwitsky, a friend and supporter, described Stern’s method of drafting in a number of press articles, including in 1927, when this lot was produced:

“She is at present at Ezulwini, a trading station in Swaziland, 10 miles from Mbanbane. Ezulwini means ‘the place where heaven and earth meet.’ There she was called upon by Kind Sobhuza, who invited her to be present at a native dance at the royal kraal. Miss Stern is not only making sketches, but she is modelling native heads and figures.”²

Stern’s travel drawings received concentrated attention in a 2006 exhibition in Cape Town. Although concerned with works made between 1929 and 1939, the exhibition highlighted Stern’s “consummate skill as a draughtswoman”, as well as her discipline in noting “perceptible differences in appearance and dress” in her models”.³ Art historians have deliberated on the naming and understanding of Stern’s representations of African subjects. Are they in fact portraits? “Although motivated by encounters with actual people, Stern’s work from the 1920s is idealised,” writes Marion Arnold.⁴

Stern’s portraits, adds Arnold, are “complex statements about identity … They record appearance, suggest a character and investigate the human condition from the artist’s perspective. But a portrait is never merely the objective record of another; it is a response to the human tendency to consider oneself in relation to others … Many of Stern’s portraits are both studies of the model and projections of self. She sees herself in others and explores her own identity – woman, white German South African, Jewish, spinster/wife/divorcee, artist.”⁵

^1.Karel Schoeman (1994) Irma Stern: The Early Years, 1894-1933, Cape Town: South African Library, page 26.
^2.Hilda Purwitsky (1927) ‘Irma Stern in Swaziland’, The Cape Argus, November 1927, cited in Lara Bourdin (2013) The Sculpture of Irma Stern (1922-1955), unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Montreal, page cii.
^3.Andrea Lewis (2006) Journeys to the Interior: Unseen Works by Irma Stern, 1929-1939, Cape Town: South African Jewish Museum, page 32.
^4.Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Stellenbosch: Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation, page 71.
^5.Arnold, pages 97-98.