Notes

Irma Stern’s conservative art training in Wilhelmine, Germany provided her with a solid technical command of painting as both a material negotiation of experience and iconographic retelling of facts in a received way. This tension between matter and image is central to Stern’s practice. Notwithstanding her progressive formal experiments, Stern worked with settled genres drawn from the western canon of painting. Much like the nude, the still life was central to her output throughout her many stylistic evolutions. This gouache is typical of her middle period, heralded by Stern’s increasingly fervent colour experiments of the early 1930s and divorce in 1934. Stern was highly competent with gouache, an opaque watercolour that is easy to learn but notoriously difficult to master. It was her medium of choice for the private visual journal she kept from 1919 to 1924. Stern also frequently used gouache during her travels to record direct encounters with people and objects.

At her home in Cape Town, The Firs, she used gouache to describe choreographed scenes featuring objects from her personal collection (books, textiles, ceramics, and wood sculpture) that she juxtaposed with alive but perishable things (mainly flowers and fruit). Sometimes these compositions inspired larger works in oil, but just as often these fluid renderings were resolved statements, counterpoints to what was possible in oil. The table grapes in this work locate the painting in the Cape and its agricultural industry, which would later explicitly feature in Stern’s many harvest scenes. The warm colour tones, notably yellow, mustard and orange, were frequently on Stern’s palette board in the 1930s. These colours also enlivened her workspace at her studio, which featured “three walls of a pale yellow colour and the fourth a bright and happy orange”.¹

^1. Karel Schoeman (1994) Irma Stern: The Early Years, 1894-1933. Cape Town, South African Library, page 88.

Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby's, Cape Town, 30 May 2007, lot 373.