Notes

Stern’s artistic output includes a substantial archive of female nudes spanning the entirety of her prolific five-decade career. An enduring subject, and frequently a site of bold formal experimentation, Stern’s depictions of naked (or nearly naked) female subjects range from her ambitious nudes in oil and gouache to her notational descriptions in ink, pencil, charcoal and wash of studio models and women encountered in the world. The importance of this archive, which includes works in bronze, fired clay, terracotta and cement, was asserted in a 2021 exhibition organised by art historian Michael Godby at the Irma Stern Museum.

“Although somewhat overlooked in the critical literature, and in the market,” Godby writes in an accompanying book, “Stern’s nudes may be counted amongst her most significant work.”¹ Stern’s output of nudes was substantially informed by the tradition of the nude in European art. Stern was introduced to the nude – as both compositional problem and genre subject linked to a grand tradition – during her academic training in Berlin, which included life drawing. The Expressionist movement’s contradictory uses of the nude to valorise themes of ugliness and primitivism also informed her early practice.

Notwithstanding Stern’s many stylistic shifts, the nude remained throughout her life, writes Godby, “both a trigger for her practice and her most common subject.”² With the exception of drawings made during her travels across Southern and Central Africa, and her beach scenes, all Stern’s nudes were painted, drawn or sculpted in her studio.³ The sitters in these studio nudes were chiefly paid models, although friends like Roza van Gelderen (see lot 12) also posed nude. Stern was particularly active in her studio during the 1940s. In 1943, for instance, she worked on material towards an unrealised book of nudes, as well as held a dedicated exhibition of nudes in Cape Town. This lot dates from 1948, another period of intense productivity in the studio matched by later, selective public display.

Stern’s studies of middle-aged white sitters from the 1940s are notable. Godby sees in these “magnificent” and “extraordinarily mature” works the same vigour and iconographic appeal as Stern’s esteemed flower studies of the 1940s.⁴ They are certainly characterised by remarkable intimacy and, as is clear in this lot, candour. They show a woman seeing another woman without libidinal intent. While dissimilar in some respects to her voluptuous nudes in classical poses, the styling of the woman in this lot, with her blouse unbuttoned, reiterates a recurring strategy in Stern’s nudes of this period. “Almost all of Stern’s nudes of this time include some form of drapery – a cloth around the midriff, underwear, or a drape that the model is either putting on or taking off – all of which draw attention to the nakedness of the exposed figure and so prevent her from being simply an abstract, idealised nude,” informs Godby. “This simple device has the effect of returning the conventional nude to the condition of nakedness and, in a sense, reclaiming the female body from male appropriation.”⁵

^1. Michael Godby (2021) Irma Stern Nudes, 1916–1965, Cape Town: Primavera Publishing, page 11.
^2. Ibid, page 143.
^3. Ibid, page 63.
^4. Ibid, page 149.
^5. Ibid, page 37.

Provenance

The Irma Stern Trust Collection, accession number 648.

Exhibited

Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, Irma Stern Nudes, 1916-1965, 26 May to 2 July 2021.

Literature

Michael Godby (2021) Irma Stern Nudes, 1916-1965, Cape Town: Primavera Publishing, illustrated in colour on page 37, figure 2:26.