Irma Stern
For all the simplicity she saw in her subjects, Stern’s figures appear brimming with feeling. Those who look back at the viewer, like the watchful Swahili Dhow Woman, betray an emotional weight beyond that which Stern might have consciously allowed. To the artist, her subjects were as children, naïve to the world and preternaturally joyful. Of those figures that look more pensive, she ascribed “the heaviness of an awakening race not yet freed from the soil.” But still, there is a humanity to many of Stern’s subjects, an interior life she never acknowledged. Transcribed in oil, many claim a selfhood their painter disregarded.
b.1894, Schweizer-Reneke; d.1966, Cape Town
Throughout her life, Irma Stern pursued visions of the exotic. She travelled widely in both Europe and Africa and found in the latter reflections of a timeless idyll. Stern was particularly drawn to the otherness of the people she encountered, to – as she wrote – “the hidden depths of the primitive and childlike yet rich soul of the native.” Unconcerned with the particularity of individuals, her paintings of African figures are seldom portraits but rather ethnographic imaginings (to this end, these sitters are seldom ever named). All this considered, there remains a compelling complexity to her paintings. An artist seduced by colour and rhythm, she in turn seduces the viewer. There is a material richness to Stern’s canvas, a sensual pleasure to her impasto paint. While her words more often revealed her colonial sentiments and a profound lack of insight into the lives of others, in paint, she was redeemed. Stern can perhaps be forgiven for being of her time and, like so many modernists, excused her primitivism. Beauty, above all, was what Stern sought to express, and the lasting influence of her paintings is a testament to her aesthetic achievements. She remains a commanding presence in the South African art world, in death as she was in life.