Notes

The decade of the 1940s is often defined as a period of wanderlust in the career of Irma Stern, with her trips to the Belgian Congo in 1942 and 1946 and Zanzibar in 1939 and 1945 resulting in some of the most desirable works in her artistic oeuvre.

On 14 June 1939, Irma Stern set sail aboard the Duvenage Castle for the island of Zanzibar on the Swahili Coast of East Africa, returning to Cape Town in mid-October. She would visit the island again in 1945, documenting her experiences by way of her published travel diary titled Zanzibar.¹

In an interview with HT Lawless she describes her decision to travel, saying; ”This is how I went to Zanzibar …, tired of this infernal wind, I was walking down Adderley Street one morning in 1938, remembering the stories told by our old Arab cook … when I was a child (he) used to spend the time of day reminiscing about his island home”. Then, appearing to make fun at her own naiveté that disguised a more impulsive nature, she continues “… so I walked into a travel bureau and asked ‘Can I motor to Zanzibar?’”²

Stern’s interest in African travel had undoubtedly been sparked by her visits to the Senegalese capital of Dakar on the west coast, while en route to Europe in 1937 and 1938.For her extended four month stay on the east coast island of Zanzibar, a British protectorate since 1890, Stern would stay as a guest of the provincial commissioner, Captain John O’Brian before taking residence in a large house across from the bazaar.³

From there she would become intoxicated by the island, proceeding to paint its inhabitants with a keen observation and attention to detail that has come to define the Zanzibar portraits as the beginning of Stern’s high period.

Enthusiastically received by critics and the general public alike, the work that Stern produced during these visits has come to define her as a portraitist. A commentator in the Cape Times would call her first exhibition of paintings from Zanzibar in February of 1940 a “veritable triumph for the artist”. Whilst the review in Cape Argus the next day would go further saying “The vitality and the sense of colour which you will find has always been implicit in Irma Stern’s painting, but in the best work here there is an even greater sense of achievement”.⁴

^1. Irma Stern (1948) Zanzibar, Pretoria: Van Schaik publishers.
^2. HT Lawless (15 March 1946) In the Limelight: Irma Stern, Spotlight.
^3. Ibid.
^4. (Monday, 12 February 1940) Irma Stern’s Latest Exhibition; The Results of her Visit to Zanzibar, The Cape Argus, page 13.

Provenance

The Irma Stern Trust Collection, accession number 818.