Strauss & co - 6 March 2017, Cape Town

240 516 Irma STERN SOUTH AFRICAN 1894–1966 Young Arab signed and dated 1942 oil on canvas 60 by 50 cm R   –    PROVENANCE Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby’s, Johannesburg, 8 May 1995, lot 268, with the title Young Man with Orange Turban EXHIBITED The Museum of Anthropology, Elizabethville, 1942, catalogue number 1 The Gainsborough Gallery, Johannesburg, Private View - an exhibition of Paintings and Drawings from the Belgian Congo , 24 November - 8 December, 1942 LITERATURE Wilhelm van Rensburg (ed.) (2003) Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery. Illustrated in colour on page 73 and on back cover, with the title Young Man with Orange Turban . Stephan Welz. (1996) Art at Auction in South Africa: The Art Market Review 1969 to 1995 , Johannesburg: Art Link (Pty) Ltd. Page 7 and illustrated in colour on page 12, with the title Young Man with Orange Turban . Most of Irma Stern’s Arab subjects derive from the artist’s two visits to Zanzibar in 1939 and 1945 – and she is documented to have made several Young Arab paintings during those visits. Less well-known are the few Arab subjects Stern depicted during her visit to the Congo in mid-1942. Stern had gone to the Congo specifically to paint the Watussi and Mangbetu peoples but along the way – and doubtless prompted by her Zanzibar experience – she painted a few Arab subjects: Stern alludes to these subjects in her book Congo (1943: p.38) “[the Arabs] squat all around, dark bearded men with heavy sallow faces and sad calculating eyes. They wear orange turbans wound around their heads”. Some of these paintings were included in her exhibition in Elizabethville at the end of her stay in the Congo; and, again, at her ‘Congo Exhibition’at the Gainsborough Gallery, Johannesburg, in December 1942. Both the annotated list of this exhibition that is pasted into the