Provenance

Crake Gallery, Johannesburg, c. late 1970s - early 1980s.

Private Collection.

Notes

This vivid gouache belongs to Irma Stern’s celebrated body of work from the mid-1940s, a period of intense productivity in which she returned with renewed vigour to South African subjects following her East African journeys. The scene is most likely set in Cape Town, where Stern found ample inspiration in the rhythms of everyday urban life. Here, a busy thoroughfare is animated by a flow of passers-by: men in brimmed hats, women in headdresses, some carrying infants, cluster and move across the foreground. Behind them rises a pink-walled house with green shutters, adjacent to an open verdant area punctuated by a palm tree and other foliage, all bathed in the distinctive coastal light of the Cape.

Stern renders her figures with characteristic vitality: simplified forms, angular silhouettes, and bold contrasts of colour convey both movement and presence. The crowding of bodies against the shallow picture plane heightens the sense of immediacy, placing the viewer within the social fabric of the scene. The palette, rose-pink architecture set against lush greens, enlivened by whites, ochres, and earthy tones, most likely captures Cape Town’s particular atmosphere while resonating with the broader modernist language that defined Stern’s style at the time.

Although she is best known for her travels to Zanzibar in 1939 and again in 1945, Stern remained deeply engaged with the South African environment. The scene painted with its hybrid cultural life and layered histories, offered her a similarly compelling context in which to explore the vitality of human encounter and the poetics of colour. As Marion Arnold has observed, Stern consistently elevated the ordinary to the monumental, treating everyday figures not ethnographically or sentimentally, but as participants in the broader drama of modern life.¹

The gouache medium itself underscores this vitality. Quick-drying and fluid, it allowed Stern to work with a sense of urgency and directness: brushstrokes remain broad and assured, colours fresh, the surface alive with movement. In this modest format, she distilled themes central to her practice: human presence, architectural rhythm, and the interplay of natural and built environment – into an image that is both immediate and enduring.

^1. Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press.