Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

258 329 Irma Stern SOUTH AFRICAN 1894–1966 Freda with Roses signed and dated 1943 oil on canvas 50 by 50 cm R3 000 000 – 5 000 000 PROVENANCE Purchased by the sitter, thence by descent. LITERATURE Mona Berman (2003). Remembering Irma. Irma Stern: A Memoir with Letters , Cape Town: Double Storey Books. Illustrated in colour on page 174. imagine herself with the appearance and bearing possessed by my mother. In every portrait she did of my mother, four oils, several charcoals and a gouache, she showed a completely different aspect of Freda’. 9 Freda with Roses , the first to be painted in the series of three portraits, brings together Stern’s love of flowers (which was shared by Freda 10 ) and skill as a portraitist with dazzlingly intensity. The almost garish lime-green background vividly offsets Freda’s blazing blue eyes and red lips, while the pale rose in her immaculately manicured hand creates a visual link between the rose orange, pink and yellow roses in the vase and the bright flecks of colour on the black ground of her dress. While for one of the fictitious dinner guests at Freda’s party the painting ‘holds no joy… as though the roses were being placed on the graves of fallen soldiers’, 11 one could equally argue that this is Stern at her most audacious as a painter, the strident colours and confident, vigorous brushstrokes combining in a flamboyant celebration of friendship and femininity. The third of the series to be painted, Freda in a Khaki Dress , is very different, both in colour and in mood. The formal severity and drab colour of the dress in question is barely mitigated by a blue and orange brooch in the form of a jeweled cockerel. The blue tones of the brooch in turn offset the pale wistfulness of Freda’s eyes, which no longer blaze with the bright intensity of the previous painting, while the distorted elongation of the neck adds to the sense of unease. Indeed, in its melancholy introspectiveness, it is in many ways atypical of Stern’s work of the period. Interestingly, this portrait only came into Freda’s possession shortly before Stern’s death. Although all three portraits date from the same visit to their home in 1943, this portrait was produced later in Stern’s studio from drawings, without Freda’s knowledge. In fact, Freda was only alerted to its existence by the Adler-Fielding Galleries in 1966, who sent it to her for verification. She bought it as she ‘couldn’t bear the idea of it being shown in a gallery or hung in a stranger’s home’. 12 She wrote to Stern enquiring after it, but Stern, in one of the last letters she ever wrote to Freda, denied ‘ever selling a picture of yours to anybody but yourself’. 13 Given both the relationship of the sitter to the artist, and in resisting the usual epithets applied to Stern’s paintings of the 1940s, this painting is a compelling testimony to the intensity of a ‘friendship and mutual dependence [that] had endured through time and circumstance’. 14 In deflecting us for a moment into a space of unquiet intimacy, it also has the effect of rendering more visible and poignant the dazzling sensuousness of Stern’s oeuvre. Federico Freschi 1 Freda Feldman, née Ginsberg, 1910–1987. 2 They called their home Ny-Hame, meaning ‘new home’ in Yiddish (Mona Berman, personal communication, 21 September 2017). 3 Richard (Rachmiel) Feldman, 1897–1968. 4 Below, Irene. ‘Between Africa and Europe’, in Paul Cullen (ed.), Expressions of a Journey , Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 2003, p. 36. In 1935 Feldman published a book of short stories in Yiddish , Shwartz un Vays (‘Black and White’), which dealt with the plight of the downtrodden black population and the poverty of Jewish immigrants arriving in South Africa. 5 Mona Berman, personal communication, 21 September 2017. 6 From the Russian Obchestvo Remeslenogo Truda , ‘Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades’. 7 Mona Berman, personal communication, 21 September 2017. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Berman, Mona, Remembering Irma. Irma Stern: A Memoir with Letters , Double Storey, Cape Town, 2003, page 28. 11 Ibid ., page 173. 12 Ibid ., page 176. 13 Ibid . Berman writes that Freda ‘suspected Irma knew that Richard would have disliked [the painting] – which he did when he eventually saw it – and so had stashed it away in her storeroom cupboard. A dealer may have come in the months before she died, and bought a number of her discarded paintings’( ibid . 178). 14 Ibid ., page 177. continued from page 248