Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby's, Highly Important South African Paintings and Sculptures from the Collections of the Late Pola Pasvolsky, Sydney Press and Barney Lobel and British, Continental Paintings and Watercolours, Johannesburg, 17 May 1999, lot 273.

Notes

Irma Stern’s floral still lifes of the 1930s and 40s represent some of her most technically accomplished and formally daring works. Stern’s handling of colour was vital to this achievement. Initially, she used colour to denote tone and mood in her early, graphically inclined high-expressionist works. However, by the late 1920s, notably in marvellous prototype pieces like Floral Still Life (1929), Stern began to favour vivid colour to define the form and structure of her flower compositions. By the mid-1930s, she had perfected this exuberant style, which was particularly noted for her thick impasto surfaces.

Dated 1946 and produced at the height of her golden period, following career-defining visits to Belgian Congo and Zanzibar, this still life prominently portrays four anthuriums. Exhibited the same year at the Argus Gallery, alongside important Zanzibar paintings like Praying Arab (1945) sold by Strauss & Co for R18 300 000 in 2023, critics attending the exhibition highlighted her “vivid and interesting … colourful still-life studies” (Cape Argus) and praised her “vigorous brush work and lavish pigment” (Cape Times).¹

Along with chrysanthemums, dahlias, lilies and zinnias, anthuriums were a recurring subject in Stern’s still life paintings. A popular cut flower indigenous to the Americas, recognisable by its waxy, heart-shaped flower bracts and long, still-looking spadix, anthuriums appeared frequently in Stern’s paintings well into the 1960s. Sometimes referred to as “flamingo flower” and “painter’s palette,” the flower emerged as an icon of modernist painting in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Art Deco masterpiece Anthurium (1923). Chuck Close and Jim Dine have also depicted them.

In this composition, the flowers are presented in a southern Chinese jar with a blue glaze from the artist’s extensive collection. The jar appears in two other paintings, notably Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias (1946), sold by Strauss & Co for R16 159 600 in 2019, which features a similar round-edged raffia mat as in this lot. The painting itemises many of Stern’s favourite domestic objects. The raffia mat was likely acquired during her second visit to Belgian Congo in 1946. The composition also incorporates what appears to be another painting behind the flowers, possibly an icon painting from her collection. The bowl of fruit and book adds visual richness to the composition but, like the partially obscured painting within a painting, also introduces a layer of artifice.

While undoubtedly painted from the objects suggest a carefully constructed scene that engages with the still-life tradition beyond mere observation. The inclusion of the book alludes to the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, where books symbolised the transience of knowledge and worldly pursuits. The stacked and overlapping elements – fruit, textile, book, painting – echo Paul Cézanne’s exquisite, quietly revolutionary still lifes, which Stern admired. Writing to a friend, she praised Cézanne’s ability to paint “pictures so free and so unhampered of the world.”² Here, through her own deliberate staging, Stern explores that freedom while embracing the inherent theatricality of the still-life genre.

¹ – (1946) 'Irma Stern’s Pictures', The Cape Argus, 1 March and P H W (1946) 'Irma Stern’s Notable Exhibition', Cape Times, 2 March.
² Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Storey, page 54.

Exhibited

Argus Gallery, Cape Town, Irma Stern: Exhibition of Paintings from Zanzibar, 1946.