IRMA STERN | MANGBETU CHILDREN

Bonhams, London, The South African Sale, 10 September 2008, Lot 353, titled Two Young Congolese Girls

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Probably Elizabethville, Musée Ethnographie, 1942, no. 25 Mangbetu Children

Probably Johannesburg,Gainsborough Galleries, Irma Stern Congo Exhibition, 1942, no. 6 Mangbetu Children

Mangbetu Children was painted during Stern’s seminal trip to the Belgian Congo (now DRC); the Second World War had prevented her from returning to Europe, and her wanderlust inspired travel within Africa instead. Following her first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, by March 1942 she was planning to visit the Congo: “I want a change badly. Here if war is at the door – what do I do – but sit and get bombed… My plans are to go up to Elisabethville by rail – truck my car – then get a chauffeur there – and motor for three days – then the road stops – and I can rail my car for 12 hours then I arrive at Albertville. I shall want to paint the Watussi – and a tribe much further north still beyond the Kivu… a 2,000 miles trip through the Lake district… I can only go from May on as that is the dry season” (letter to Richard and Freda Feldman, 24 March 1942).

The focus of this arduous journey were the Watussi and Mangbetu people, “tribes mixed with old Egyptian blood (Sudan) – I shall be at the source of the Nile – I have a lot of work to do here” (letter to Richard Feldman, 17 April 1942). The young girls depicted in Mangbetu Children bear the unmistakeable characteristics of the Mangbetu: their almond-shaped eyes, their headdresses identifying them as members of the ruling-class, and their famously elongated heads that had been tightly wrapped from birth, a practice that died out in the 1950s due to the influences of westernisation. Stern, herself a keen collector of objets d’art, was already familiar with the Mangebtu people’s “rare artistic taste which had for years been exciting and stimulating the art world of Europe. Here were the creators of magnificent pieces of sculpture, carved out of wood, of fetishes and masks, grotesque and beautiful revealing primitive ancestral worship and its world alive with spirits. Here live men who are treated with respect due to their artistic craft” (Stern, Congo, 1943, p.23).

An oil painting of the same title, most likely the present lot, was included in Stern’s Elisabethville (present-day Lubumbashi) exhibition at the Musée Ethnographique at the end of her Congo trip in October 1942. The Congolese paintings were also the subject of further exhibitions at the Gainsborough Galleries in Johannesburg in 1942, and at the Argus Gallery in Cape Town in early 1943 alongside the publication of her travel journal Congo. Although her correspondence depicts the very real hardships of her time in Congo, Stern nonetheless yearned to return, which she did in 1946 and 1955.