Notes

In 1955, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town hosted the exhibition African and Christian Sculpture from the Irma Stern Collection. Accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by museum director John Paris, the exhibition highlighted two pivotal characteristics of Stern’s evolving life and work: art collecting and religious iconography. Stern’s collecting practices, argues Canadian scholar Lara Bourdin, were “inseparable from her quest for spiritual energy and creative stimuli.”¹ Stern surrounded herself with religious iconography throughout her adult life. Already in the early 1920s she slept beneath two wooden Christian figures in prayer and kept a menorah on her shelf and small, crying jade Buddha figure on her night table.

Stern, an assimilated Jew who considered converting to Catholicism in her later years, frequently depicted the impact of Christianity and Islam on women, notably in her portraits from Cape Town, Madeira and Zanzibar. Following the resumption of her European travels in 1947, her work more explicitly featured motifs drawn from European Christian art. The 1950s especially saw her produce a number of paintings and works on paper revealing her close observation of especially premodern Christian painting. These works, writes Marion Arnold, divulged her need for spiritual fulfilment in art rather than religious practice itself.²

^1. Lara Bourdin (2013) The Sculpture of Irma Stern (1922–1955). Unpublished Master’s thesis, Université de Montréal, page 200.
^2. Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Stellenbosch & Cape Town: Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation & Fernwood Press, page 21.

Provenance

The Irma Stern Trust Collection, accession number 1075.