Notes

Irma Stern had achieved concordance between her personal and professional life when she produced this self-assured portrait of a Malay woman peeling a vegetable. Architect Dudley Welch was now living at her Cape Town home, The Firs, and there had been a “dissipation of the unhappiness” that had dominated her life before her mother’s death.¹ The negative publicity that dogged her early career locally had also diminished. Stern was now routinely exhibiting in Johannesburg, long a hostile market. This particular work was originally offered for sale by Constantia Galleries, a Johannesburg partnership between well-regarded dealer Gerrit Bakker and art connoisseur and businessman Jack Lewsen. A prolific artist, Stern in 1948 also published her illustrated travelogue Zanzibar; visited Venice; presented a solo exhibition at London dealership Roland, Browse and Delbanco; and participated in the 1948 South African Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London.

Her output from this period also includes a number of confident portraits of working-class female subjects. They include a 1948 study of a young Malay woman featuring similar mint green and corroded copper tones. Stern’s sensuous brushwork in this work is gestural rather than notational, particularly in recording the vivid floral headscarf. Colour is a key marker of Stern’s bold confidence as a painter. Colour, writes art historian Esmé Berman, was “the primary vehicle of her expressive inclinations and the richness and variety of her palette became the most distinctive feature of her style”.² Stern has long been criticised for her romantic portrayal of otherness, for ignoring the social reality of her subjects. Arguing in defence of Stern’s independent vision as a painter, art historian Marion Arnold writes, “her close perception of people produced paintings in which she is sensitive to the realities of form while at the same time retaining an alertness to the decorative demands of colour and shape.”³ Social reality, adds Arnold, is of little concern to her.

^1. Berman, Mona. (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Storey Books. Page 132
^2. Berman, Esmé. (1983) Art & Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema. Page 440
^3. Arnold, Marion, (1996) Women and Art in South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip. Page 88

Provenance

Constantia Galleries, Cape Town