Sean O'Toole
Irma Stern: Modernist Pioneer and African Traveller
Summary
Born into a Jewish family on a farm in South Africa’s interior, but raised in Germany, Irma Stern (1894-1966) briefly participated in Berlin’s painterly avant-garde before permanently settling in Cape Town in 1920. Her expressionist mode of rendering indigenous subjects was, initially, a cause célèbre. Starting in 1922, Stern established a regime of expeditionary travel that she maintained until her death. This talk will focus on the heated and occasionally antisemitic reception of Stern’s youthful work from the 1920s, as well as consider the intricacies of her acclaimed Zanzibar-period paintings from 1939-45. Stern’s portraits of Zanzibar’s Arab elite remain highly sought after at auction and she is currently the second most valuable African artist at auction (by turnover) after Marlene Dumas.
Sean O'Toole
Sean O’Toole is writer, editor, and curator based in Cape Town. His books include the biography Irma Stern: African in Europe - European in Africa (2021) and short story collection The Marquis of Mooikloof and Other Stories (2006). He has edited three volumes of essays, including African Futures (2016) and The Journey (2020). A working journalist principally focused on art, photography, and architecture, he has published well over a thousand news articles, reviews, features, and commentary in print and online. He has adjudicated numerous awards, including the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Daimler Award for South African Photography, and Frieze Writer’s Prize. He is the founder of independent publisher Extemporary Press.
Sadly, mainly at auction. Irma did exhibit a show at Georges Wildenstein in Paris, where she exhibited in ‘47, she went on and exhibited in London to great fanfare in 1948. The Queen Mother, this is Queen Elizabeth’s mother, so it would be King Charles’s grandmother, was a great collector of art and actually acquired work by Irma. And it forms part of the royal collection. But it’s not easily accessible.
They had a farm in the North and it was a source of wealth, I think towards the end of Stern’s life I read on a newspaper article where she said she inherited nearly a dozen farms up in the maize complex region where Schweizer-Reneke is. So her father initially went to the united States as a young man to kind of make his way, and failed. And then returned to Germany, and then with his brother came to South Africa and initially went to Graaf-Reinet which is in the Cape province, and set up a business there that was successful. He returned to Germany and married Henny and came back with her and they then set up in Schweizer-Reneke I think despite all the ructions of the war, I think they identified a very prosperous community or country to do business in.
I suppose you know, particularly at a culturally sensitive and inflamed moment, some of Irma’s work does not sit comfortably in terms of the relationship between the subject and the artist. And they’re not neutral, she was projecting certain desires and ideas onto her subjects. I think as she found a facility as, particularly as a painter, she settled on a more kind of descriptive style of painting, it was less about her personal fantasy and finding these surrogate women to portray that were young and nubile and fertile, where she had great issues with her body particularly, both her physical body as in weight, she was always over weight and perhaps an ambivalent sexuality.