Dahlias

Notes

Flower paintings occupy a central place in Irma Stern’s prodigious output. While flowers appeared in her earliest drawings and watercolours, and often formed part of her controversial figure paintings of the 1920s, it was only after she settled at The Firs, her home in Rosebank, Cape Town, in 1927 that they truly emerged as independent subjects capable of sustaining her ambitions as a painter. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stern coupled this enthusiasm for floral subjects with increasingly bold experimentation in colour.

Dahlias (1935) represents the culmination of this sustained process of innovation. Stern repeatedly returned to the same luxuriant blooms – particularly lilies, magnolias, hydrangeas and dahlias – their visual profusion, rather than any symbolic significance, marking them out for repeated depiction. Here, arranged in a copper pot and flanked by bowls of fruit, the abundant dahlia blooms are set against the distinctive yellow wall of her studio, their mauve, pink, orange and red petals animated by generous impasto and assertive brushwork.

The composition reveals an artist increasingly interested in the expressive possibilities of colour rather than merely its descriptive function. It marks an important transition in Stern’s mature style. During the 1930s, she gradually abandoned the hard-edged Expressionist manner associated with her early work in favour of a more personal idiom in which colour, applied with brush and palette knife, became the organising principle of the composition.

In Dahlias, line yields to chromatic relationships. The lustrous copper pot, the turquoise tablecloth and the richly varied blooms are unified by what her biographer Bernard Sachs memorably described as Stern’s “sonorous colour harmonies and daring contrasts”,¹ and evidence what the critic, Melvin Simmers characterised as her “daring use of richly dangerous colour harmonies”.² The result is a still life of remarkable vitality that remains faithful to observed nature while asserting the modernist autonomy of paint itself.

The significance of this development was recognised by critics and patrons. Dahlias was exhibited at the Criterion Restaurant Ballroom in Johannesburg in May 1935, where it was among the most highly priced works in the exhibition and sold on the opening day. It travelled the following month to Glen’s Gallery in Pretoria, where a reviewer singled out Stern’s flower paintings as “beautiful pieces of work, full of depth, of light and shade and of gracious loveliness”, adding that “the gladioli, the magnolias and the dahlias are exquisite”.³

The acclaim heaped on Stern’s flower paintings was not confined to South Africa. While exhibiting in London in 1937, Stern met the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who remarked: “Do you know that nobody living can paint flowers better than you do – that the Renoir roses I just saw look like paper against your flowers.”⁴ That reputation has endured. Stern’s monumental dahlia paintings of the 1940s remain among the most sought-after works in her oeuvre, achieving some of the highest prices realised for any of her still lifes at auction. The present work stands at the beginning of this remarkable sequence of dahlia paintings that extends to works produced into the 1960s.

^1. Joseph Sachs (1942) Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa, Pretoria: J L van Schaik, page 36.

^2. Melvin Simmers (1938) 'South Africa’s most vital painter, the art of Irma Stern', The Cape Times, 28 March.

^3. – (1935) 'Art Exhibition in Pretoria: Arresting Studies by Irma Stern', The Star, 12 June, page 8.

^4. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Storey Books, page 52.

Provenance

Acquired from the artist, 20 May 1935.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

The Criterion, Johannesburg, 20 May to 1 June 1935, cat. no. 46.

Glen's Gallery, Pretoria, June 1935, cat. no. 46.

Literature

– (1935) The Star, 20 May, illustrated in black and white on page 7.

– (1936) The South African Lady's Pictoral, March, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated.

The present lot is illustrated as hanging in the artist's sitting-room in The South African Lady's Pictoral, March 1936. 

Magnolias and Fruit (1947) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 21 October 2013, lot 701, Sold R 9 662 800.00 (USD 597139.65). 

Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias (1946) Strauss & Co, Johanneburg, 20 May 2019, lot 233, Sold R16 159 600 (USD 999679.09).