Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

PROVENANCE Acquired from the artist, 20 May 1935. Private Collection. EXHIBITED The Criterion, Johannesburg, 20 May to 1 June 1935, cat. no. 46. Glen’s Gallery, Pretoria, June 1935, cat. no. 46. LITERATURE (1935) The Star , 20 May, illustrated in black and white on page 7. (1936) The South African Lady ’s Pictoral, March, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated. Flower paintings occupy a central place in Irma Stern’s prodigious output. While flowers appeared in her earliest drawings and watercolours, and often formed part of her controversial figure paintings of the 1920s, it was only after she settled at The Firs, her home in Rosebank, Cape Town, in 1927 that they truly emerged as independent subjects capable of sustaining her ambitions as a painter. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stern coupled this enthusiasm for floral subjects with increasingly bold experimentation in colour. Dahlias (1935) represents the culmination of this sustained process of innovation. Stern repeatedly returned to the same luxuriant blooms – particularly lilies, magnolias, hydrangeas and dahlias – their visual profusion, rather than any symbolic significance, marking them out for repeated depiction. Here, arranged in a copper pot and flanked by bowls of fruit, the abundant dahlia blooms are set against the distinctive yellow wall of her studio, their mauve, pink, orange and red petals animated by generous impasto and assertive brushwork. The composition reveals an artist increasingly interested in the expressive possibilities of colour rather than merely its descriptive function. It marks an important transition in Stern’s mature style. During the 1930s, she gradually abandoned the hard-edged Expressionist manner associated with her early work in favour of a more personal idiom in which colour, applied with brush and palette knife, became the organising principle of the composition. In Dahlias, line yields to chromatic rela- tionships. The lustrous copper pot, the turquoise tablecloth and the richly varied blooms are unified by what her biogra- pher Bernard Sachs memorably described as Stern’s “sonorous colour harmonies The present lot is illustrated as hanging in the artist’s sitting-room in The South African Lady’s Pictora l, March 1936. Magnolias and Fruit (1947) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 21 October 2013, lot 701, Sold R 9 662 800.00 (USD 597139.65).