Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

1. Joseph Sachs (1942) Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa , Pretoria: J L van Schaik, page 36. 2. Melvin Simmers (1938) ‘South Africa’s most vital painter, the art of Irma Stern’, The Cape Times , 28 March. 3. (1935) ‘Art Exhibition in Pretoria: Arresting Studies by Irma Stern’, The Star , 12 June, page 8. 4. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma , Cape Town: Double Storey Books, page 52. and daring contrasts”,1 and evidence what the critic, Melvin Simmers characterised as her “daring use of richly dangerous colour harmonies”.2 The result is a still life of remarkable vitality that remains faithful to observed nature while asserting the modernist autonomy of paint itself. The significance of this development was recognised by critics and patrons. Dahlias was exhibited at the Criterion Restaurant Ballroom in Johannesburg in May 1935, where it was among the most highly priced works in the exhibition and sold on the opening day. It travelled the following month to Glen’s Gallery in Pretoria, where a reviewer singled out Stern’s flower paintings as “beautiful pieces of work, full of depth, of light and shade and of gracious loveliness”, adding that “the gladioli, the magnolias and the dahlias are exquisite”.3 The acclaim heaped on Stern’s flower paintings was not confined to South Africa. While exhibiting in London in 1937, Stern met the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who remarked: “Do you know that nobody living can paint flowers better than you do – that the Renoir roses I just saw look like paper against your flowers.”4 That reputation has endured. Stern’s monumental dahlia paintings of the 1940s remain among the most sought- after works in her oeuvre , achieving some of the highest prices realised for any of her still lifes at auction. The present work stands at the beginning of this remarkable sequence of dahlia paintings that extends to works produced into the 1960s. Detail , Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias (1946) Strauss & Co, Johanneburg, 20 May 2019, lot 233, Sold R16 159 600 (USD 999679.09).