Notes

Irma Stern worked in settled painterly genres, notably portraiture, the nude and still life. She used these categories as architecture to express her technical prowess and formal daring with colour, pattern and surface. A dedicated gardener as well as voracious collector, Stern frequently produced eruptive flower pieces incorporating objects – books, vases, votive sculptures – from her collection. An important site of technical innovation, particularly from the 1930s onwards, these flower pieces are now rated as some of her ‘most sumptuous and sensual images’.¹ The assuredness with which she realised these works saw Stern, in 1937, confide in a friend that she was equal to another flower painter, notably of irises, Vincent van Gogh.² Stern offered this by way of landing a greater point: she aspired to paint like Paul Cézanne. ‘He has painted pictures so free and so unhampered of the world.’³ Stern’s quest for liberation is a hallmark of both her painting and personal life. One meaning of freedom for Stern was movement and change. Stern’s flower pieces evolved formally and stylistically over the decades, as her attitude to evoking a beloved subject, flowers, changed. Stern’s late style, of which this lot is a representative example, has yet to receive fuller critical appreciation. For example, when exactly does it begin? Heather Martienssen ventures 1954, the year Stern turned 60 and this lot was painted. The unavoidable decline in vigour that comes with age, writes Martienssen, is matched by ‘elegance, sureness of touch, economy of technique’⁴ – all hallmarks of this lot.

Stern’s restrained approach to detailing her compositions and habit of allowing her canvases to show through in her late works allies her with Cézanne, whose late pictures are characterised by their unpainted ‘breathing spaces’.⁵ In old age, both artists challenged traditional notions of finish by displaying areas of unpainted canvas. This looseness and dissolve is, in Stern, counterbalanced by her unwavering commitment to colour, its luxuriousness as well as life-affirming value.

^1. Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press, page 125.
^2. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town, Double Storey, pages 53–54.
^3. Ibid, page 54.
^4. Heather Martienssen (1968) ‘The Art of Irma Stern’, Lantern, December, 18 (2), page 31.
^5. William Rubin (1977) ‘Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism’ in Cézanne: The Late Work, New York: Museum of Modern Art, page 189.

Provenance

Professor Danie Joubert collection, since 1982.