Irma Stern

Acquired directly from the artist, South Africa

Thence by direct descent

(Possibly) Johannesburg, Irma Stern, Exhibition of Paintings from Zanzibar, Bothners Gallery, 25 April - 8 May 1946, cat. no. 45 'Reposing Arab Woman'

"Arab women are still in purdah and only deeply veiled may they leave their house... They live in seclusion in a harem, in rooms on the top floor of the house." (Irma Stern, Zanzibar, 1948)

While Hamida Hamed was painted during Stern’s second visit to Zanzibar in July-October 1945, widely considered the very epoch of the artist’s career, the artist’s interest in Islam grew from an introduction to Cape Malay culture on her return from Germany to South Africa more than 20 years prior. She was always attracted by the rich attire of the Muslim women, and in Zanzibar she found a sharp contrast between how these women presented themselves in public and in private.

"In this Eastern world the woman has no rights. They run about like ghosts, black, with their Jashmak covering their faces and bodies."

What is fascinating is the access Stern had to the interior lives of these women in the harem, with their “lovely old eastern silks with heavy gold fringes, trousers ruched at the ankles with the frills falling over their feet”. We see this woman in relaxed repose, slippers kicked off to one side, looking directly at the viewer and with a mischievous wink to boot. She is no "ghost" - rather, Stern has chosen to give us her name right there on the page, in block capitals, HAMIDA HAMED. So many of her other sitters became anonymised, titled ‘An Arab’ by the time they were exhibited back in South Africa the following year. 

Stern's travels were inspired in part by Expressionists like Pechstein, and Paul Gauguin’s travels to the South Pacific. Crucially, however, where artists like Gauguin travelled to unfamiliar ‘other’ lands to explore themes of mystery, Stern’s fascination with the ‘exotic’ was rooted in her intimate experiences of Africa’s people, landscape and culture. Her works demonstrate a confluence of widely divergent cultural traditions and aesthetic values, and combine her Western heritage and formal artistic training with a colourful exoticism derived from her life in South Africa.

Born in the Transvaal to German-Jewish parents, Stern spent her childhood in South Africa before moving to Europe with her family, where she gained admission to the Weimar Academy in 1913, six years before it was to be reformed into the famed Staatliches Bauhaus. 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, the year before her return to South Africa, cemented her connections with the German Expressionist circle.

"Bored and lethargic, tired of this infernal wind, I was walking down Adderley Street one morning in 1938, remembering the stories told by our old Arab cook… when I was a child and he used to spend the time of day reminiscing about his island home… I walked into a travel bureau and asked: Can I motor to Zanzibar?"

A truly international creative force, Stern never felt restricted by the physical or cultural boundaries of South Africa, travelling extensively throughout Europe and Africa in search of new inspiration and subjects to paint. However, the Second World War had prevented her from returning to Europe, and her wanderlust inspired travel within Africa instead. Her visits to Zanzibar (1939 and 1945) and Congo (1942 and 1946), and her resulting artistic outpouring, are widely considered the very pinnacle of her ouevre.

The present lot compares closely to Lady of the Harem, also painted in Zanzibar in 1945, which was sold at Stephan Welz and Co in association with Sotheby's in 2006 for $334,555, and remains the world auction record for an Irma Stern work on paper.