Artist 101

1.

Early Life

Stern was born in 1894 to German-Jewish parents in a North-Western province of South Africa. The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) had a huge impact on the family, as Stern’s father was interned by the British on suspicion of being a Boer sympathiser, prompting her mother to take her and brother to Cape Town. The family relocated to Germany upon her father’s release, beginning a period of trips back and forth between the European country and South Africa that broadened and enriched Stern’s creative outlook.

Stern enrolled the Weimar art academy in 1913, joining Berlin’s Levin-Funcke Studio the following year. But it was in 1917, when she began training with the painter Max Pechstein, founder of the seminal German Expressionist November Group, that she found the mentor and the style she needed to take her art to another level. Stern became fascinated with the emerging avant-garde movement, which sought to emphasise the artist’s inner world and feelings over the objective representation of reality. Even after her work became firmly focused on African subject matter, the influence of Expressionism on her artwork, particularly the use of bright colours and the quick, thick brushstrokes, endured for the rest of her career.

2.

First Steps as an Artist on the International Stage

Stern held her first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1919, but decided to move back to South Africa shortly after, setting up her home in the Rosebank area of Cape Town that became the Irma Stern Museum upon her death. In 1920, she held her first solo exhibition in South Africa at the Ashbey’s Gallery in Cape Town, but the city’s staid colonial establishment was not receptive to Stern’s Expressionist style. Critics and public were in fact dismissive and outraged by Stern’s modernist sensibilities.

Yet, the recognition and acclaim Stern was garnering in Europe—which included winning prizes such as the Prix d’Honneur at the Bordeaux Exhibition in 1927—eventually led to a more positive reconsideration of her work in South Africa. By 1929, she had been selected to represent the country at the Empire Art Exhibition in London.

3.

Travel in Africa

Travel had been a constant feature in Stern’s life since childhood, and would continue to be an essential ingredient in the development of her artistic outlook. In the early 1920s she travelled around Southern Africa, visiting the Eastern Cape, Swaziland and Natal, and creating a series of paintings and studies that were exhibited in 1922 in Cape Town—generating a similar outraged response as that to her 1920 show.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as the Second World War raged in Europe, Stern travelled extensively throughout central Africa. Of notable importance are her trips to Senegal in 1938, Zanzibar in 1939 and 1945, and Congo in 1942 and 1946, which fuelled her imagination and sparked a fertile creative period widely considered as the peak of her career. From this period are some of her most celebrated works, featuring vivid, acutely observed portraits of local indigenous people, such as Arab Priest, Arab with Dagger and Bahora Girl, all of them painted in 1945.

4.

Recognition

Europe was quick to embrace Stern’s art. Her paintings, full of gestural dynamism, resonated with the avant-garde inclinations of continental art collectors, galleries and museums. In South Africa, however, it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that Stern was truly welcomed into the establishment. Once that happened, she became a staple of the national art scene, representing South Africa at the Venice Biennale in the 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1958 editions, as well as becoming part of major South African public art collections.

Her work is also part of important international collections such as the Queen Elizabeth II Collection in the UK and the Centre Pompidou in France, and she won important accolades such as the Guggenheim Foundation National Award for South Africa in 1960.

Stern also was an avid collector of art and artefacts from all over the world, amassing a veritable treasure trove that she kept in her Cape Town home. Upon her death in 1966, her home and its contents became a national legacy. In 1972, her house was open to the public as the Irma Stern Museum, administered by the University of Cape Town.

5.

Collecting

The market for Stern’s works has skyrocketed in the last decade, and Bonhams has become the go-to auction house to find her most coveted works.

In 2010, for example, her 1945 oil on canvas Bahora Girl fetched £2,372,000 at Bonhams London’s South African sale. The following year, also at a Bonhams London sale, the Qatar Museums Authority paid over £3 million for her 1945 painting Arab Priest, setting a record not just for any Stern’s work, but for South African painting as a whole. The piece is now in the permanent collection of the Orientalist Museum in Doha. More recently, Lelemana Dance fetched £1,222,750 at the Bonhams Modern & Contemporary African Art auction in 2021.

In 2019, at Bonhams New York, Malay Girl (1946) fetched $312,575. In 2020, her Watussi Chief's Wife, (1946) sold for £447,062 at its Modern & Contemporary African Art London sale, while at the 2021 edition of the sale her 1945 oil on canvas Arab with Dagger fetched an impressive £922,750.

As can be seen, the works produced during the mid 1940s, which is considered the pinnacle of her career, are in very high demand and can easily fetch six figures, sometimes even seven. But for prospective buyers with smaller budgets hoping to collect Stern’s work, her still lifes and works on paper offer more accessible prices and great value.

For those wanting to explore Stern in more depth, the art historian Dr LaNitra M Berger has published Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art (Bloomsbury, 2020), a rigorous study of the significance of her work.

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