Irma Stern
In 1931, Stern left South Africa for Madeira off the coast of Portugal, where she stayed for three months. Intended as a refuge from her fraught marriage to Johannes Prinz, Stern found the island suffocating in its patriarchal traditions and was treated for a nervous breakdown shortly after her arrival. Of the Madeiran women, she wrote that "the heavy incense-laden air of the Catholic Church prevents them from breathing." Their menfolk, however, proved more compelling, endowed with "a shamelessly lovely and restrained glow." To this, Stern's paintings from the island predominantly feature men – Madeiran Man among them – where previously she had favoured women as subjects. Despite her emotional distress, Stern's time in Madeira proved both prolific and formative, the artist finding in her isolation the distinctive use of colour that would come to characterise her later work. On her return to South Africa, Stern and Prinz formally separated. Their divorce was finalised in 1934.
b.1894, Schweizer-Reneke; d.1966, Cape Town
Throughout her life, Irma Stern pursued visions of the exotic. She travelled widely in both Europe and Africa and found in the latter reflections of a timeless idyll. Stern was particularly drawn to the otherness of the people she encountered, to – as she wrote – “the hidden depths of the primitive and childlike yet rich soul of the native.” Unconcerned with the particularity of individuals, her paintings of African figures are seldom portraits but rather ethnographic imaginings (to this end, these sitters are seldom ever named). All this considered, there remains a compelling complexity to her paintings. An artist seduced by colour and rhythm, she in turn seduces the viewer. There is a material richness to Stern’s canvas, a sensual pleasure to her impasto paint. While her words more often revealed her colonial sentiments and a profound lack of insight into the lives of others, in paint, she was redeemed. Stern can perhaps be forgiven for being of her time and, like so many modernists, excused her primitivism. Beauty, above all, was what Stern sought to express, and the lasting influence of her paintings is a testament to her aesthetic achievements. She remains a commanding presence in the South African art world, in death as she was in life.