Provenance

Gallery 101, Johannesburg.

Private Collection.

Notes

The 1950s marked a period of consolidation rather than innovation for Irma Stern. While the "spontaneity and impetuosity"¹ of her brushwork continued to divide critics, she was nonetheless celebrated as "a pioneer of the contemporary movement"² and praised as "an indefatigable ambassador of South African art."³ Stern represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale throughout the decade, including the 1954 edition - the year this work was painted. At 60, Stern showed few signs of slowing down. She travelled extensively between 1953 and 1955, notably to the Congo, France, Germany, Israel and Turkey.

This composition presents what appears to be a three-legged copper fruit bowl bearing what appear to be lemons but are in fact grapefruit. The bowl is placed atop a loosely rendered newspaper with another grapefruit. Nearby, a clay ewer bearing a swirling geometric motif completes the scene. Both vessels were likely drawn from Stern's extensive personal collection. A 1954 edition of the Cape Times reported that Stern had recently acquired an example of 11th-century Persian pottery in Paris.⁴ Regardless of their exact origins, the vessels underscore Stern's long-standing engagement with still life as a genre to explore colour, texture and compositional daring.

Citrus fruits, with their warm hues and symbolic charge, appear throughout Stern's oeuvre, from her early portraits to her prolific output of still lifes. Whether grouped in bowls or scattered across sumptuous textiles from her collection, they provided Stern with an opportunity to indulge in orange and yellow, the latter a colour she came to use more frequently from the 1930s onwards. Grapefruit, though, are a rarity as subject. The only mention of this fruit by name appears in her 1948 book Zanzibar, in a section detailing a visit to the bazaar: "The stalls had a daily surprise of strange kinds of fruit and vegetables. A pale yellow large grapefruit called ballunga (balungi, Swahili) intrigued me. When I opened it, the flesh was a lovely pink embedded in a heavy woollen white."⁵ The citrus here may be a pomelos, a Southeast-Asian citrus with a yellow-white skin that is an ancestor of grapefruit. Pomelos were introduced to the Cape by Jan van Riebeeck, circa 1661.⁶

Although stylistically diverse, Stern's darker palette and graphic handling of her subject matter in this lot aligns with other still lifes from the 1950s (for example, Still Life with Masks, 1954 and African Idol, 1957). Unusually, it also suggests kinship with Georges Rouault rather than Cézanne, whom Stern greatly admired and shared certain late-career stylistic quirks. Stern's later works have received limited critical attention. Writing in a commemorative essay, Heather Martienssen identified 1954 - the year this painting was made - as a turning point. The vigour of Stern's earlier work gave way to a looser, more restrained style characterised by "elegance, sureness of touch, economy of technique, and integration of the visual theme."⁷ This painting, like much of her still life work, meditates on the quiet concord between the made and the grown, the human and the natural.

^1. F L Alexander (1962) Art in South Africa, Cape Town: A A Balkema, page 36.

Maurice van Essche (1952) "Irma Stern at City's New Gallery", Cape Times, 19 August.
^3. - (1953) "Art Ambassador", Cape Times, 13 March.
^4. - (1954) "Irma Stern Exhibition, Cape Times, 26 February.
^5. Irma Stern (1948) Zanzibar, Pretoria: J L van Schaik
^6. Jean Branford (1988) "Adam's Dilemma: A Note on the Early Naming of Kinds at the Cape", in Words (ed) EG Stanley and TF Hoad, Cambridge: DS Brewer, page 77.
^7. Heather Martienssen (1968) 'The Art of Irma Stern', Lantern, December, 18 (2): 31.