Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

PROVENANCE Acquired from the artist by Dr Martin L du Toit, 1933. Acquired fromDr Martin L du Toit by the previous owner, circa 1952, thence by descent. The Property of an Important Collector. Offered at market for the very first time, Cape Malay Woman with a Head Scarf is a vibrant gouache that arrives directly from a private family collection where it has remained treasured for seventy-four years. Irma Stern worked with gouache throughout her career, both in the studio and on her extensive travels. Its immediacy and portability made it ideally suited to recording people and places with remarkable economy, while its opaque, matte surface allowed for a richness of colour distinct from oil paint. This intimate portrait of a young woman set against a variegated blue ground demonstrates Stern’s assured command of the medium, balancing fluid draughtsmanship with passages of saturated colour. Starting in the late 1920s, Stern became increasingly interested in colour theory, devoting herself to what she described as “studying and building up a newpalette”.1 This enquiry occupied her for several years. In June 1935, she delivered a lecture in Pretoria titled“The relativity of colour and form in art”. Yellow, which had appeared only sparingly in her work of the 1920s, assumed growing importance as her palette became richer and more expansive. The expressive possibilities of yellow had been transformed by an earlier generation of painters, notably Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848- 1903), standard-bearers of autonomous colour with whom Stern felt a profound affinity. In a 1937 letter to her friend Freda Feldman, she wrote: “At present I feel I can do the same as the best here and that is to say the best living and strangely enough Gauguin and mostly van Gogh seem to me very much like a level I have also reached.”2 An early indication of this chromatic confidence appears in Madeira Portrait (1931) (fig 1), also handled by Strauss & Co, where yellow assumes a far more commanding role. In the present work by contrast, its use is more restrained, anticipating the way Stern would later deploy the colour to energise compositions such as Malay (Black Headdress) (fig 2), 1946. Here, yellow animates the sitter’s blouse and lends warmth to the modelling of her heart-shaped face. It functions neither symbolically nor decoratively, but as a means of investing an anonymous sitter with vitality, warmth and quiet dignity. The ordinariness of the subject – a working woman depicted in unremarkable dress and a simple white headscarf – is equally significant, signaling a move away from the high romanticism of her depictions of Black and Coloured women in the 1920s towards the dignity of everyday life. The shift did (fig 1) Madeira Portrait (1931) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 10 August 2021, lot 282, Sold R 432 440.00 (USD 26 742).