Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 6 November 2000, lot 474.

Notes

This striking portrait of an elite Watussi woman, a chieftain’s wife, derives from Irma Stern’s incident-prone second visit to Central Africa in 1946. It forms part of a revered corebody of works depicting elite society in the region before African independence and decolonisation. Stern visited the Belgian Congo three times, first in 1942, again in 1946, and finally in 1955. Collectors greatly prize Stern’s portraits of Mangbetu and Tutsi (formerly Watussi) subjects from her first and second trips, in particular her lavish and detailed pictures of women. Stern determinedly sought out her socially diverse subjects in the northeast of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo and in southern Rwanda.

During both visits in the 1940s Stern criss-crossed Belgium’s colonial territories in her own car, which she had trained up from Cape Town to Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi) and hired a chauffeur to drive. Similar to her earlier travels across Southern Africa, where Stern refined her method of direct encounter in the field, she was prolific in rendering daily scenes. Stern made numerous charcoal drawings and notational sketches in gouache. But it is her commanding oils from 1942 and 1946 that concretise her interest in social status, cultural pageantry and the labours of women in Belgian Congo.

Stern’s subjects ranged from workingwomen involved in Belgian Congo’s hugely productive banana industry to the socially privileged, among them a Mangbetu chief’s daughter and Watussi princess, both recorded in 1942, and here, from 1946, an unnamed Watussi chief’s wife. An aristocrat herself, at least culturally, Stern also rendered the Watussi queen Rosalie Gicanda in oil during her 1942 visit. When this royal portrait was shown at Cape Town’s Argus Gallery in 1943, a local newspaper characterised it as a ‘magnificent study in colour’.¹ The same holds true of the present lot.

This vibrant composition, skilfully executed in mostly banana yellow, is a tour de force of observation and painterly decision. As in her portraits Watussi Princess (1942), included in the main exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and Watussi Chief’s Wife (1946), a related work discussed below, Stern presents her sitter in threequarter pose against a neutral backdrop. Backgrounds are diverting and, as the history of painting shows, deeply connoting. In the main, Stern preferred to forgo context, using neutral backgrounds to float her studies of commoners and nobles. See for instance Banana Carrier (1946) and Congolese Woman (1946), the latter in the Rupert Art Foundation Collection.

Stern hired a villa on Lake Kivu, on the border between DRC and Rwanda, for purposes of painting during her second visit to the Belgian Congo. One account has it that Stern collided with a truck while driving up a mountain pass.² Another states that her car broke down in the wilderness and she slept rough in the tropics for three nights.³ Whatever the facts, Stern contracted malaria. She cut short her visit. The truncated work trip yielded only 14 big canvasses, several charcoal works and a large selection of outlined work, according to Mona Berman.⁴

Notable works from this trip include an accomplished charcoal drawing of Queen Rosalie Gicanda, as well as two oils depicting the unnamed wife of a Watussi chief. Both oils were exhibited at Johannesburg’s Gainsborough Galleries in 1947, together with an earlier work, Watussi Woman in Red, made in Cape Town in 1944. The present lot is most likely the work listed as number eight in the exhibition catalogue, Watussi Chief’s Wife in Yellow. Listed number 19 in the catalogue, Watussi Chief’s Wife, is a related work later exhibited in Stern’s 1947 exhibition with Paris dealer Georges Wildenstein, where it was also sold. The sitter in Watussi Chief’s Wife appears to be the same woman with heavy-lidded eyes, but is depicted wearing a spotted pink headscarf and white shawl pulled over a red undergarment.

The historical draw of Watussi sitters and scenes merits a brief observation. Frequently characterised as the ‘aristocrats of Africa’ in the Anglophone press, male Watussi dancers were especially revered. Belgian Congo’s tenfranc banknote prominently depicted intore dancers. Stern also made a large oil of these martial dancers in 1946. The valorisation of Rwandan athleticism and artistry in the west was the subject of caricature, notably in Hollywood films like the cringe adventure Watusi (1959), which inspired a brief dance style of the same name in 1960s America. But the poise and dignity of the Watussi signified something completely different to indigenous Africans. In a letter from Robben Island prison, Robert Sobukwe thanked his friend Benjamin Pogrund for the gift of a mattress for his 12-year-old daughter, Miliswa: ‘She is growing into a glorious Watusi [sic] woman.’⁵ It is this legacy of refinement and grace, all but extinguished by the 1994 Rwandan genocide, that Stern’s wondrous portrait memorialises.

¹ – (1943) ‘Irma Stern’, The Cape Argus, 25 February.
² Thelma Gutsche (1947) ‘Irma Stern – Ambassador for Africa’, The Outspan, 31 October 1947. Page 40 .
³ – (1947) ‘Irma Stern Back: Painting Trip in the Congo’, The Cape Argus, 24 July 1947.
⁴ Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Story Books. Page 106.
⁵ Robert Sobukwe (2019) Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Page 342.