(Schweizer-Reneke, South-Africa 1894–1966 Cape Town)
Floral Still Life, 1929, signed, dated Irma Stern 1929, oil on canvas, 58 x 44 cm, framed

“During the years I spent in Europe studying there was always one idea in my mind – back to Africa, the country of my birth, the land of sunshine, of radiant colours, where the fruit grows so plentifully and the flowers seem to reach the summit of all joy …”

Cape Argus, 3 April 1926. Irma Stern, »My Exotic Models«, in:
The Cape Argus, 3. April 1926

In her life, Irma Stern had to move between Europe and South Africa a few times due to the Boer War and the First and Second World War. When she finally could reside in her marital home in Rosebank, The Firs, a large Victorian home in Cape Town which is now home to the Irma Stern Museum, in 1927, she started to paint a whole series of still lifes.
Although her earliest watercolors and drawings already depicted flowers, it was in this time, when she had finally moved back to South Africa, where she developed her own distinctive style. Through her flower paintings, she found her own artistic identity which was influenced by her friend Max Pechstein and the work of Paul Cézanne. Stern’s popular still lifes all show the experimentation and her great joy with color. The usage of color and its balance on canvas is seen throughout her work. Flower paintings are a recurring subject in Stern’s oeuvre forming a bridge between her other two key subjects – portraits of those in her social milieu and paintings of ‘exotic’ others; Africans, Arabs, and Malays that she encountered both on her travels and at home. The innovation of her painterly practice with color and texture via her still lifes is a breaking point in her oeuvre.
Flowers are a major theme of Irma Stern’s life and work. The floral studies show her personal pleasure of those and her passionate interest in color. She mostly painted flowers out of her own extensive garden grouped with objects she Collected or her own handmade glazed earthenware jugs together with fruits and vegetables. While all her still lifes are unique, they share common characteristics in which they are set in a fairly shallow pictorial space with a forced perspective that tilts the horizontal plane towards the viewer. The addition of fruit, vegetables or her Collectables serve formally to balance the compositions, while at the same time setting up a sumptuous play of color. The celebration of floral and vegetal forms in her work gave free rein to Stern’s abundant creative passion for exoticism, sensuality and color.
As symbolic portraits of her personal world with the visceral pleasures of food and the exquisite beauty of nature, Irma Stern’s still lifes represent some of the artist’s greatest joys in life. Mona Berman, a daughter of some of the artist’s friends, remembers that after painting her still lifes at a considerable speed, Stern would devour the depicted fruits and vegetables as one of her favorite pastimes.
The work being auctioned off shows off Irma Stern’s expressive impasto technique and her joyous play with colors. The canvas is barely able to contain the artist’s exultation of the flowers depicted in it. The viewer is immediately drawn into the work wanting to take a smell at the flowers and fruits.

Provenance:
The estate of Katharina Heise, artist friend of Irma Stern
Private Collection, Saxony-Anhalt

Exhibited/Literature:
Irma Stern und der Expressionismus. Afrika und Europa. Bilder und Zeichnungen bis 1945, Bielefeld, Kunsthalle, 1996/1997, cat. no. 14, ill. on p. 68