Arab spring

One morning in 1938, on Cape Town’s Adderley Street, the artist Irma Stern walked into a travel bureau and asked: “Can I motor to Zanzibar?” She’d been thinking about her parents’ old Arab cook and the stories he’d told her of his island home. Bored by her life in Rosebank, one of the city’s Southern Suburbs, she hoped a change of scene might do her good.
The agent advised against it. Even on today’s roads, it is a journey of more than 5,000km across four countries. She was persuaded to fly.
That first trip to Zanzibar the following summer, when Stern was 44, and another in 1945, proved two of the most productive periods of her life. They inspired some of her best, most sought-after works, among them Arab with Dagger, which Bonhams is offering in London’s Modern and Contemporary African Art Sale in March.
“I am painting dramatic pictures, compositions and faces, not just types and races,” Stern wrote to Richard and Freda Feldman, during her second visit, when the painting was made. “Conquering new ground for my work and development.” And she was enjoying herself too. “Had the most phantastic [sic] time,” she wrote in an earlier letter. (Her English spelling and punctuation were sometimes eccentric.) “A heap of new friends – partly white – partly brown. A life so full of interest and fun.”
Now part of Tanzania, Zanzibar was then an outpost of the Sultanate of Oman and a British protectorate. The Representative at the time found Stern lodgings in an old, most picturesque Arab house, opposite the Sultan’s Mosque and close to the port in the island’s capital, Stone Town, which she described as “lovely in its austerity… pale blue and cool looking”

Stone Town, Zanzibar where Irma Stern lived in 1945
Stone Town, Zanzibar where Irma Stern lived in 1945

Irma Stern: “She hoped a change of scenery would do her good”
Irma Stern: “She hoped a change of scenery would do her good”
It was also convenient for the souk, where Stern would shop voraciously, not least for the traditional carved wood she used to frame the paintings she was proudest of – and scout for models. With a population of Omani Arabic, Indian, Swahili among other ethnicities, Zanzibar struck her as being “the gateway to central Africa”. And even if her social life was that of a colonial expat – a round of “elaborate dinner parties, all in a long evening dress” – she was tireless in her curiosity and desire to meet people from other cultures and learn about life on the island. In an article for South Africa’s National Council of Women in 1954, recalling her time “amongst the Arabs”, Stern writes of her “desire to work among people who have a definite philosophy of life. In this I found a new truth – a truth from early times, handed down from age to age, a worship of spiritual forces.”
Stern was fascinated, too, by the Indian population. “How differently [they] live,” she wrote in the book, Zanzibar, she later published about her travels. “Although in purdah their surroundings are gay and colourful. On a swing, all shiny with metal, which was hanging from the middle of the bedroom, I found my young friend, Fatu, the Bahora girl…” whom she painted in 1945 (a work Bonhams sold for £2.37m in 2010).
Stern secured invitations to weddings, even to tea with the sultana at the palace of His Highness Sayyid Sir Khalifa bin Harub Al-Said, ninth sultan of Zanzibar. She would paint at least four of members of the Sultan’s court, not least Hass Aurah Sheikh Ebrahim, whose portrait, Arab in Black (1939), Stern donated to the Treason Trial Defence Fund established to cover the legal costs of Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants when they were arrested in 1956.

Arab with Dagger oil on canvas 71.5 x 71.5cm (28 x 28) Within original Zanzibar frame Estimate: £700,000 - 1,000,000 ($950,000-1,350,000)
Arab with Dagger oil on canvas 71.5 x 71.5cm (28 x 28) Within original Zanzibar frame Estimate: £700,000 - 1,000,000 ($950,000-1,350,000)
It is these works that have become most valuable, most strikingly Arab Priest (1945), which set the record not just for one of her works but for South African painting as a whole when the Qatar Museums Authority paid more than £3m for it in 2011, making it part of the collection for the Orientalist Museum in Doha, Qatar
Born in 1894, in Schweizer-Reneke – a small town in what was then the Transvaal – to German-Jewish parents, Stern was never “particularly interested in her own Jewish heritage”, writes Sandra Klopper in her 2017 book Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? But, as Stern said in an interview in 1961, she did believe that “Jewish artists were prepared to look the world in the face and transcend the narrow and the regional”, and she was, therefore, determined to give her paintings “a cosmopolitan sweep”. Certainly, she loved to travel in Africa, spending time in Natal, Swaziland, Mozambique and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But if Stern tends to be referred to as a South African artist, her artistic sensibility and style owe much to her German background and training
Her father had been a successful cattle farmer and trader in South Africa. But, as Irma turned five, the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out. Her father was imprisoned by the British for his pro-Boer sympathies and, on his release, the family returned to Berlin. At 18, she enrolled at the Grossherzoglich-Sächsiche art school in Weimar. Her professor there was the Norwegian painter Carl Frithjof Smith, whose earlier students had included Max Beckmann. On graduating, she moved back to Berlin, continuing her studies first with the Impressionist Martin Brandenburg, and then with the great German Expressionist Max Pechstein, a former member of Die Brücke, who became her mentor.

Irma Stern (1894-1966) Arab in Black, 1939 oil on canvas, in the artist’s original Zanzibar frame Sold at Bonhams in September 2015 for £842,500
Irma Stern (1894-1966) Arab in Black, 1939 oil on canvas, in the artist’s original Zanzibar frame Sold at Bonhams in September 2015 for £842,500

Two Arab men in Commercial Street, Zanzibar, 1945
Two Arab men in Commercial Street, Zanzibar, 1945
Pechstein had admired her painting Das Ewige Kind (The Eternal Child, now in the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch), made in 1916, of a little girl, with, as Stern put it, “large mistrusting eyes [and] an embittered tight mouth, sitting on a chair, her plaits hanging straight off her naked forehead, her undefined hands clinging to a few field flowers… so as to assure that some beauty was always left”, against a vivid ground of loosely painted arsenic green. “I knew what I had to express – the suffering and agony that war means to all life,” she wrote.
Stern had already grasped the tenets of Expressionism: that feeling was more important than realism, that colour could be representative quite as much as iconography, and that evidence of gesture, of the physicality of painting was an effective conduit of emotion. But Pechstein, who had in 1910 painted an African woman in Germany (Nelly, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and had travelled to Palau in the South Pacific to find inspiration among its islanders, encouraged her to look to the continent of her birth for subjects.
By 1922, by which time she had returned to South Africa, the German art magazine Das Kunstblatt was calling her, perhaps unfairly, the Pechstein of Africa. “Although African by birth and still at home in the bush, she paints exotic humanity and landscapes in the European manner, seen through Pechstein’s eyes,” read a review of an exhibition of her work at the Fritz Gurlitt gallery in Berlin.
“And Pechstein’s powerful influence on Stern endured,” concurs the South African art historian Andrea Lewis, now curator of prints and drawings at the Iziko Museums of South Africa. (As did their friendship: during World War II, she used to send him food parcels.) “She continued to propagate the style of German Expressionism in South Africa, even though the Nazis were systematically destroying any last vestiges of [it] in Germany.” There Pechstein had been classified a degenerate and banned from painting and exhibiting in 1933, and his work had hung in the Nazis’ notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937.
By the time Stern visited Zanzibar, she had found a distinctive style of her own, but the legacy of German Expressionism remains evident in her bold black outlines and what she called the “geometrical and abstract” way she conjures the saris and kangas worn by the Indian and Swahili women who sat for her. (The Arab women she encountered, who “run about like ghosts, black, with their Jashmak [sic] covering their faces and bodies”, held less aesthetic appeal.)
Look at the way she uses greens to suggest the silver of the J-shaped khanjar her Arab with Dagger wears tucked into the sash of his dishdasha; at the flame-like colours and folds of his turban; at the way she shapes the hand and beard to reflect each other. It’s an uneasy portrait, a suspicious rather than a sympathetic one, but that air of unease gives it the emotional truth that defines Stern as South Africa’s first true Expressionist.
Claire Wrathall writes for the FT and other publications.

Irma Stern painting in her house-cum-studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar. She described it as “lovely in its austerity
Irma Stern painting in her house-cum-studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar. She described it as “lovely in its austerity
