Strauss & co - 15 October 2018, Cape Town

220 Stern’s biographers 12 agree that the mid-1940s marks the highest point of her career, a moment at which she was at the height of her powers both technically and professionally. In its mastery of technique, style and content, this painting provides ample evidence of this. It was exhibited at the Argus Gallery in Cape Town in 1947 along with a number of significant Zanzibar- and Congo-inspired paintings, including Watussi Woman in Red (1944) and Banana Carrier, Lake Kivu (1946) (fig. 7). In the same year Stern also exhibited at the Gainsborough Gallery in Johannesburg and the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris, and the first of two films on her work was released by the South African Department of Information. It is likely that it was also at this time that the paintings was acquired by its first owners, the Cape Town-based collectors Ben and Cecilia Jaffe. The Jaffes’ Rosebank home, ‘The Boltons’, was a centre of bohemian cultural life in the 1940s and 50s. As the composer Stefans Grové recalled, On Sunday evenings the Jaffes’home would be open to anyone with an interest in the arts. Amongst the regular visitors were Lippy Lipshitz, Irma Stern and others. With a glass of whisky in one hand and a pipe in the other, Oom [uncle] Ben would always stand, like a chairman by these improvised debates on all subjects under the sun. Only politics and religion were taboo. 13 .5Despite his relatively modest income as a bookkeeper, over the course of their lifetimes the Jaffes acquired a remarkable collection of artworks by South African artists who were their contemporaries. After their deaths a portion of the collection was auctioned by Sotheby’s, in October 1981. Dahlias was not amongst the works in that auction, having been bequeathed to the Jaffes’daughter Phyllis Levenstein. Levenstein later put the painting up for sale, at a Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby’s auction on 24 March 1994, where it was acquired by Count Natale (Luccio) Labia. Count Labia, who died in November 2016, was a scion of the prominent Cape Town family. His father, the Italian diplomat Natale Labia, had been the first royal minister plenipotentiary appointed by the Italian crown to South Africa, and was posthumously awarded the hereditary title of Prince in 1936. Prince Labia’s wife, Princess Ida Louise (née Robinson) had inherited a substantial art collection from her father, the Randlord Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson. Upon her death in 1961 the collection was in turn inherited by their two sons who divided it equally amongst themselves. Over the course of his lifetime, Luccio Labia acquired a collection of his own to augment the Robinson Legacy, a selection of which, including the Dahlias , is now being sold by his heirs. Dahlias has an impeccable provenance. It began its life keeping company with some of Stern’s most admired paintings, and has spent most of its seventy-one years gracing two of Cape Town’s most respected collections. Combined with its technical virtuosity, it is therefore difficult to overstate the importance of this painting. Formally, it is probably the finest example of the kind of technical breakthrough that Stern described in 1945, characterising her works of the period as, “abstract of curious values … [that] … one day soon … will bring me the same freedom in form and composition – as I have gained in colour”. 14 In the final analysis, however, it the painting’s glorious and irrepressible sense of dynamism and joie de vivre that makes it an extraordinarily compelling work in, even in an oeuvre as prolific and rich as Stern’s. – Prof. Federico Freschi 1. In a letter to her friend Trude Bosse, dated 14 November 1928, Stern described the scene in her garden:“[L]arkspur, stocks, enormous geraniums, all shades of pelargoniums, great balls of white and also yellow daisies, violet and yellow poppies, sunflowers, and many, many roses, carnations, petunias, fuchsias”(in Karel Schoeman (1994). Irma Stern: The Early Years , South African Library, Cape Town. Page 88). Ninety years later, the scene is somewhat different. As Christopher Peter, long-time Irma Stern Museum curator, notes,“The garden at ‘The Firs’… is cold, shady and tricky. … Not nearly enough sun or the right soil for zinnias, larkspurs and delphiniums which often feature in her still lifes”(Christopher Peter, ‘The Creation of Irma’s Still Lifes – A Personal View’ in Wilhelm van Rensburg (ed.), Life Force: The Still Lifes of Irma Stern, RMB Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, 2018, unnumbered page) 2. A Still Life of Dahlias and Fruit (1960) was auctioned by Strauss & Co on 25 March 2010. 3. Strauss & Co. Irma Stern - Still Life with Dahlias and Fruit , 25 March 2010. Accessed 18 August 2018. https://www.straussart.co.za/press/release/2010-03-25-irma-stern-still-life-with- dahlias-and-fruit. 4. Ibid . 5. A 19th or 20th century copy of a Yuan jar in the Irma Stern Trust Collection, accession number 528. 6. Irma Stern Trust Collection accession number 530. 7. A martaban jar of Southern Chinese origin, possibly Yuan or later. Irma Stern Trust Collection accession number 533. 8. Both this martaban jar and the Zanzibari mat are featured in Still Life with Magnolias, Apples and Bowls , indistinctly dated 1944/49. Photographs of similar mats are illustrated in Irma Stern’s Zanzibar . JL van Schaik: Pretoria, 1948; pp. 42, 63-64, and 80. 9. Chimaimba Banda, Irma Stern painting sells for record R1m , 8 November 1999. Accessed 18 August 2018. https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/irma-stern-painting-sells-for-record- r1m-18924.E 10. Marion Arnold mistakenly identifies this as a“woven Congolese mat”( Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye , Fernwood Press: Vlaeberg, 1995, p. 126. However, as noted in footnote 8 above, the mat is of Zanzibari origin. 11. A Sung dynasty monochrome celadon bowl, Irma Stern Trust Collection accession number 512. 12. See Esmé Berman, Neville Dubow, Marion Arnold, Irene Below, et al . 13. Stefans Grové, ‘Uit herinnering se wei’, in A Composer in Africa: Essays on the Life and Work of Stefans Grové , by Stephanus Muller and Chris Walton, Stellenbosch: SUN Press, 2006, pages 77-78. My translation. 14. Quoted by Sandra Klopper in ‘Life Force: The Still Lifes of Irma Stern” in Wilhelm van Rensburg ( op. cit. ). Fig 7. Argus Gallery, Cape Town, 1947 ©National Library of South Africa