Notes

Irma Stern was a versatile painter who, in addition to her extraordinary portraits and flower still lifes, consistently produced nudes and landscapes. The depiction of everyday panoramas observed from life formed an essential part of Stern’s conservative German education. In 1914, aged 20, Stern demonstrated great skill in rendering a modest European village, capturing its vernacular design in an impressionist style. That early composition foreshadowed two interests evident in this lot: Stern’s fidelity to place and pronounced use of yellow, a favourite colour.

An inveterate traveller, Stern’s adult biography can be mapped through her many landscapes portraying, among others, Alicante, Cannes, Lake Kivu, Tunis, Umgababa, Venice and Zanzibar. Stern’s unreliably mapped archive also includes abundant Cape scenes. Along with the peninsula docks, Cape Town’s Malay Quarter was a favourite setting. Located on the terraced slopes of Signal Hill and now known as Bo-Kaap, Stern was a frequent visitor to the district. ‘Irma enjoyed drawing and painting the men and women of Cape Town’s Malay Quarter, where she often shopped for spices and cooking ingredients, when not hunting for exotic fruit and vegetables for her still lifes,’ notes Mona Berman.¹

This landscape, which includes Lion’s Head in silhouette, appears at first to be devoid of human presence. Closer inspection reveals a figure in red. This anonymous pedestrian is evoked in what Heather Martienssen appreciatively describes as Stern’s ‘facile scribble’.² This lot from Stern’s golden age of the 1940s is also socially important. In 1944, the Malay Quarter was declared a slum and over 150 houses expropriated by the city government. The action, partly encouraged by developers, prompted a backlash by preservationists interested in conserving the district’s mix of Cape Dutch and Georgian buildings.³ Stern’s activism, such that it may be called that, was less specific and lay in consistently returning to the settlement, to render its Muslim inhabitants and architectural landmarks.

^1. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma: Irma Stern, a Memoir with Letters, Cape Town: Double Storey Books. Page 48
^2. Heather Martienssen (1968) The Art of Irma Stern, Lantern, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, December. Page 25
^3. J J Oberholster (1972) The Historical Monuments of South Africa, Cape Town: Rembrandt Van Rijn Foundation for Culture. Pages 35–36.

Provenance

Naspers Limited.

Exhibited

South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Old Houses of the Cape, 28 April 1971.