Strauss & co - 15 October 2018, Cape Town

218 Still life paintings featuring flowers and fruit feature prolifically in Irma Stern’s oeuvre. Grouped with the objects she collected – in particular, her oriental ceramics and African artefacts and textiles, and sometimes presented in Zanzibari frames – the celebration of floral and vegetal forms gave free rein to her abundant creative passion for exoticism, sensuality and, above all, colour. Although she would return to this subject throughout her career, some of the most powerful examples of this genre were produced during the 1930s and throughout the 1940s. While every one of Stern’s many flower paintings is unique, they generally share some common characteristics. In addition to the inclusion of objects from her collection (which serve at once as vessels to contain the organic elements as compositional elements of visual interest in their own right), they are set in a fairly shallow pictorial space with a forced perspective that tilts the horizontal plane towards the viewer and are often set against the backdrop of Stern’s canary-yellow studio. This backdrop – so omnipresent as to almost be a subject in itself – in turn allowed a dramatic and dynamic play of complementarity, particularly when set behind the brightly coloured flowers that Stern preferred. While Stern’s taste in flowers was catholic – any and all flowers, from common varieties that grew in her garden, 1 to blooms from the giant Magnolia grandiflora that still graces ‘The Firs’, her former home and now the Irma Stern Museum, to lush hothouse varieties that she would have acquired from local flower sellers – were painted with the same sense of reckless delight. Nonetheless, she would return to some varieties again and again, particularly those, like chrysanthemums, lilies, anthuriums and dahlias, that lent themselves to her expressive impasto technique. Of particular interest with regard to this painting is that dahlias were a recurrent theme during the 1930s and 40s, with five still lifes – of which this painting is the fifth – featuring these sumptuous cut flowers dating from this period. Stern would return to the theme a decade later, in 1958, in the uncharacteristically muted Still Life with Dahlias in a Vase with Fruit in a Dish , and again in one of her late important paintings, A Still Life of Dahlias and Fruit , in 1960 (fig. 1). 2 Although the 1960 painting is notable for its “almost delirious explosion of brilliant, hot colour” 3 and a particular kind of expressive freedom that suggests that she “was closer in spirit to her international, post-war contemporaries than she has been given credit for”, 4 it is in many ways a restatement of this 1947 painting. This is not surprising: of the seven, the 1947 Dahlias is arguably the most compelling in its balancing of colour, the most dynamic in its disruption of pictorial space, and the most compositionally unusual. One can thus understand the mature Stern’s desire to return to its vigour and visual drama. In order to better understand the particular strengths of the 1947 Dahlias , it is worth considering it in relation to its predecessors. The first (fig. 2), painted in 1930, is perhaps the most conventional. Reminiscent of 18th-century Dutch flower paintings both in mood and style (unusually in Stern’s flower paintings the wilting blooms shedding their petals hearken back to the lugubrious symbolism of vanitas ), there is little in this painting, apart from some vigorous brushwork and brownish-green glazed Chinese jar 5 in which the flowers are placed, to suggest the expressive dynamism and exoticism that would famously come to characterise Stern’s mature work. The second (fig. 3), painted in 1937, pushes a relatively modest bouquet of pink and red dahlias to the back of the composition, which is dominated by the watermelon, shown sliced in half on the left with a single wedge presented on a copper bowl with brass feet and handles to the right. While more assertively expressive in its style and effect, the composition is conventionally triangular in a shallow pictorial space with a somewhat foreshortened perspective. Fig 1. Irma Stern, A Still Life of Dahlias and Fruit, 1960, oil on canvas, 100 by 92,5cm Fig 2. Irma Stern, Still Life with Dahlias, 1930, oil on canvas, 92 by 67cm Fig 3. Irma Stern, Still Life with Watermelon and Dahlias, 1937, oil on canvas, 67 by 70cm