IRMA STERN | Two Malay Women with a Rose

 

Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Private Collection, South Africa

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A major figure in modern South African Art and one of the most sought-after female artists on record, Irma Stern is known for her bold use of colour, exaggerated distortions and heavy contours, all of which point to the strong influence of the German Expressionists on her work. Executed in 1924, the sensitive double portrait Two Malay Women with a Rose synthesises the artist’s experience of growing up in South Africa with the tenets of European modernism. Born in Transvaal to German-Jewish parents, Stern spent her childhood in South Africa before moving to Europe with her family in 1913 where she began her formal art training. A pivotal meeting came in 1916 when she met Max Pechstein, a key champion of her work who introduced her to the gallerist Wolfgang Gurlitt. The publication by Gurlitt of Stern’s lithographic series Dumela Morena Bilder aus Afrika in 1920 cemented her connections with the German Expressionist circle. The present work was painted on Stern’s return to Cape Town after 1921 at the start of an important and fruitful decade which built on this formative early period spent in Germany.

Stern was a skilled portraitist and soon developed an interest in depicting the local people encountered on her travels. Her fascination with Islam grew from an introduction to Cape Malay culture and she was attracted by the rich attire of the Muslim women. The contrasting blue and gold headscarves in the present work are characteristic of her interest in the variety of headdresses she found in different communities across the country. Simultaneously intimate and aloof, the sitters engage the viewer with their confident but demure expressions. The present work is an interesting negotiation of the representation of two emphatically modern women; on the one hand, their fashionable garments locate them in Stern’s temporal present, on the other, their vacant attitudes position them within Stern’s repertoire of the timeless, exotic ‘Other’. While the work colludes to a degree with Western Orientalist preconceptions, Two Malay Women with a Rose demonstrates Stern’s immersion in the lives and cultures of her subjects and her contribution to the cultural, ethnic and social diversity of South Africa.