Notes

Irma Stern was a prolific and skillful portrait painter. Her work in this genre falls essentially into two categories: the portraits – whether commissioned or otherwise – of people in her cultural and social milieu, and the 'exotic' portraits of people she encountered on her travels to Central and East Africa. The former are compellingly observed expressions of individual character, at once demonstrating what Irma Stern Museum curator Christopher Peter calls 'a nice bit of social and personal history', as well as Stern's ability to convey a powerful sense of the sitter's personality.¹ The latter tend, as Marilyn Wyman puts it, to focus 'not on the personalities of her sitters but on the expressive quality of the swirling paint on the surface'.² In effect, these Arabs, Indians, and Africans are passive participants in the lush staging of Stern's romantic and expressive interest in exoticism and otherness, rather than fully realized individuals. Both the subjects and the paintings in which they are depicted are thus dazzlingly decorative objects, bespeaking a nostalgia for an imagined past of Baudelairean luxury, calm and voluptuousness.

This painting, of a young coloured woman, is interesting in the extent to which it straddles both these worlds. On the one hand, it is emphatically modern; the young woman's short, stylishly waved hair, fashionable dress, elegantly plucked eyebrows and make-up locating her unequivocally in Stern's temporal present. On the other, her demure attitude, dusky complexion, and almond-shaped eyes position her well within Stern's repertoire of timeless, exotic Others. The overall effect is intensely compelling, the anonymous sitter rising above stereotype to emerge powerfully as an individual. As such, it is a captivating and unusual example of Stern's artistic and personal interests, produced at a time when she was at the height of her painterly powers. Certainly, all her skill as a painter is brought to bear in the lustrous application of paint, the young woman's glowing complexion, rose-pink lips, gold earrings and vibrantly patterned dress dramatically offset by the jazzy blue-black highlights of her hair.

While the identity of the sitter has not been recorded, it appears that the painting was made in Stern's studio. The lemon-yellow background is the same colour as the walls of her studio, and the painting-within-the-painting of a nude figure in the left-hand corner is reminiscent of various figures that Stern painted on the doors and furniture in her home. In the absence of any record, one can only speculate that Stern saw this young woman somewhere in Cape Town, and, captivated by her striking appearance, asked her to sit for a portrait. Mona Berman – whose parents, Freda and Richard Feldman were close friends of Stern's, and with whom she had an ongoing correspondence (see Berman 2003) – notes that Stern wrote only one letter to the Feldmans in 1954. In the letter, she states, 'I am coming for a show at the Gainsborough … it is since 51 my last show in Johburg [sic]'.³ Given that this painting has been in the same Johannesburg family since 1954, it is likely that it was purchased at this exhibition, and indeed may have been painted specifically for the Johannesburg show.

The dynamic interplay between modernity and exoticism in this work positions it at once as a fine period piece, and quintessentially representative of Stern's remarkable oeuvre.

¹ Freschi, F. (2011). A great seduction: The UCT Irma Stern Museum, Rosebank, Cape Town. De Arte, 84, p 96.

² Wyman, M. (2000). Irma Stern: Envisioning the ‘Exotic’. Woman's Art Journal, 20 (2), p 22.

³ Berman, M. (2017). Letter from Irma Stern to Freda and Richard Feldman, 7 September 1954. Personal correspondence with Federico Freschi, 27 March 2017

Federico Freschi