Notes

Flowers are central to an appreciation of Irma Stern’s biography and work. Her earliest watercolours and drawings depicted flowers. The Eternal Child (1916), her first conclusive statement as an artist, features a young girl clutching a spray of wild flowers. Youth and fertility are recurring subjects in Stern’s art. Her controversial figure paintings of the 1920s often featured young women either holding or situated adjacent flowers. Stern’s earliest independent flower studies date from this febrile period, but it was only after she had settled into her marital home in Rosebank, The Firs, acquired in 1927, that flowers began to habitually figure as independent subjects capable of expressing her ambitions as a painter.

The 1930s marked a period of decorative experimentation and formal innovation with the genre. Across the passage of this decade Stern abandoned her earlier hard-etched style, so obviously influenced by her friend and mentor Max Pechstein, in favour of a personal style in which colour, thickly applied with a brush and knife, became the armature of her vertiginous flower studies. Stern’s flower compositions from the 1940s represent the apex of her achievement in this genre. Works from this period are characterised by their precarious plenitude, a long-established hallmark of the genre dating back to works like Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Vase of Flowers with Jewellery, Coins and Shells (1606), and crowded framing, as if the totality of objects presented on canvas are ‘resisting their confinement in the space provided’.¹ The present lot and lot 369 are exemplary.

Stern often depicted the same fulsome blooming flowers, in particular lilies, magnolias, dahlias (the present lot) and hydrangeas (lot 369). Dahlias were a much-loved flower for Stern and works portraying this perennial are amongst her most prized. Queen Elizabeth, wife of English King George VI, acquired Stern’s Dahlias in a Copper Pot during a royal visit to South Africa in 1947. Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias (1946) and Dahlias (1947), the latter included on Stern’s career-defining 1947 exhibition in Paris, respectively sold for R16 159 600 and R9 104 000 at previous Strauss & Co auctions. The non-naturalistic depiction of the tilted basket next to the vase of lavender-pink dahlias is typical of works from this period. A master of the colour green, Stern’s variegated apples bear notice. 

Stern greatly esteemed Cézanne. In a 1937 letter to Freda Feldman, the artist states: ‘At present I feel I can do the same as the best here and that is to say the best living and strangely enough Gauguin and mostly van Gogh seem to me very much like a level I have also reached – not so Cézanne.’ Stern was awed by his ability to paint work ‘so free and so unhampered of the world’.² Her 1940s flower studies are a supreme expression of her translation of this awe into practice and were praised for their ‘molten magma of colour’.³ The scuffed pinks, empurpled reds and shy daubs of yellow in lot 369 (Hydrangeas in a Jar with Mangoes) show her remarkable facility as a colourist. The work dates from an important transitionary moment. 

In 1948 Stern visited Italy and Tunisia, marking the start of her pivot north. Over the next decade she would represent South Africa at four editions of the Venice Biennale and spend increasing time travelling and painting in Europe. The surfaces of her impasto flower studies flattened. Her colours too became more fluid and intermixed, an abrupt transition signalled in the liquid form of a 1950 flower study depicting hydrangeas and St Joseph lilies in the artist’s handmade ceramic jug held in the Irma Stern Collection. The two lots offered here capture the artist at the height of her powers, utilising a bold palette and confident mark to transform a domesticated genre.

1.  Esmé Berman (1993) Painting in South Africa, Halfway House, Southern Book Publishers, page 77.

2.  Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town, Double Storey, page 53.

3.  Alan Nash (1946) ‘The world goes by …’, Cape Times, 6 March.

Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby's, Cape Town, 11 October 1999, lot 270.

The Tasso Foundation Collection of Important South African Art assembled by the Late Giulio Bertrand of Morgenster Estate.