The Yellow Shawl is one of the most complex and alluring new works to emerge from Irma Stern’s oeuvre in many years. The painting is darkly colourful and filled with paradoxes. Its title implies that the subject is the article of clothing, the shawl, not the woman wearing it. Although it is a mesmerising piece of fabric with bright yellow undertones that drapes elegantly against her body, the woman whom it adorns is also fascinating. The sitter’s identity is unknown, but through Stern’s rendering, we know that she is a Coloured South African woman. As she looks past the shawl, we can see her concerned facial expression, giving us a window into her thoughts. The combination of the shawl’s yellow color with the woman’s sheer midnight blue wrap and turquoise dress contrast strongly against her beautiful chestnut skin tone.

Stern’s paintings of Coloured people are among her most significant contributions to South African art. Coloured South Africans include people who are biracial—with parents of different races—and people whose parents are Coloured, or the descendants of the interracial relationships between the original Dutch settlers and indigenous Black people. They can also be descendants of enslaved people from Indonesia, formerly part of a colonised region of Southeast Asia known as Dutch East India, who were brought to South Africa beginning in the 18^th century.

Stern was keenly interested in painting aspects of the Coloured community. In her search for new South African subjects and fresh perspectives, Stern found a culturally rich and complex community with its own traditions and social structure tied to Islam and slavery’s legacies. She made a strategic decision to add Coloured women to her body of work, using the modernist painting methods—bold colors, strong outlines, and geometric forms—she had learned in Germany.

The Yellow Shawl is intriguing because it defies categorization, and it’s so layered in meaning that the viewer will form a connection to the work over time with deep reflection. As with many of Stern’s paintings of Black or Coloured women, the painting depicts a profound sense of ambiguity from the female sitter.

By 1939, when “The Yellow Shawl” was painted, Stern’s career had taken off, and she was an established artist in both Europe and South Africa. She was able to use her nationality and background to distinguish herself as one of only a handful of modern white artists, and an even smaller group of women artists, who had direct access to African people to paint in their work. This access helped Stern to become successful artistically, but it was also culturally loaded with power imbalances and racial prejudice.

At times, she entered communities as a curious and empathetic observer, but she often chose not to acknowledge her Black and Coloured sitters by name as she did with her portraits of white people. This naming convention was a common practice among artists during Stern’s time, but it deprived sitters of their humanity. Today, scholars are working to restore that humanity and reshape the historical narrative about women artists and their female sitters. The value in Stern’s work lies in contemplating these relationships and their implications for her legacy, and for ourselves.

Dr. LaNitra M. Berger

Dr Berger is Affiliate Faculty, African and African American Studies Program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the author of Pictures that Satisfy: Modernist Discourses and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Nation in the Art of Irma Stern (1894-1966) (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008), and Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art: Audacities of Color (Bloomsbury, 2020).