Irma Stern

Acquired directly from the artist by Caroline ('Ina'), Lady Oppenheimer, 24 June 1944
Collection of Sir Ernest and Lady Oppenheimer, Brenthurst, Johannesburg
Private Collection, United Kingdom

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd. Structural Condition: The canvas is unlined and is attached to what certainly appears to be the artist's original fixed wooden stretcher. This is ensuring a stable structural support. Paint Surface: The paint surface has an even and sympathetic varnish layer. The paint surface has scattered areas of raised lines of craquelure, including those corresponding to the stretcher members. These are stable. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows small carefully applied retouchings, the most significant of which are: 1) several retouchings within the upper petals of the flower towards the upper part of the right edge and some further small spots of retouchings within the background in the upper right corner, and 2) a vertical line of retouching within the upper petals of the flower in the centre left of the composition. Other very small spots and lines of retouching are also visible. Summary: The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition.
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Sunflowers was painted in the same year as Stern’s seminal trip to the Belgian Congo. The Second World War had prevented her from returning to Europe, and her wanderlust inspired travel within Africa instead. Following her first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, by March 1942 she was planning to visit the Congo: “I want a change badly. Here if war is at the door – what do I do – but sit and get bombed” (as quoted in Remembering Irma, Mona Berman, Cape Town, 2003, p.84). An oil painting titled Sunflowers, most likely the present lot, was included in Stern’s Elisabethville (present-day Lubumbashi) exhibition at the Musée Ethnographique at the end of her Congo trip in October 1942. The exhibition included other paintings apart from those of Congolese subjects, including Cape landscape and at least five other flower still lifes: Carnations, Gladioli, Dahlias, Magnolias and Roses. It is unlikely that these still lifes were painted in the Congo, the focus of her trip being the Watussi and Mangbetu people. She had planned the exhibition in advance of her departure, so it is more likely she brought these paintings with her from Cape Town, storing them in Elisabethville while she made the arduous journey further north: “My plans are to go up to Elisabethville by rail – truck my car – then get a chauffeur there – and motor for three days – then the road stops – and I can rail my car for 12 hours then I arrive at Albertville. I shall want to paint the Watussi – and a tribe much further north still beyond the Kivu… a 2,000 miles trip through the Lake district” (Berman, p.84-5). Stern probably completed Sunflowers in Cape Town during the antipodean summer of 1942, before leaving for the Congo in May.

Sunflowers returned from the Congo with the artist, and remained in her collection until purchased by Lady Caroline (‘Ina’) Oppenheimer two years later. Lady Oppenheimer was the second wife of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, who founded the Anglo American Corporation in 1917, and took over de Beers in the late 1920s. The Oppenheimers were great art collectors and philanthropists, amassing a priceless collection of art and antiques at their Johannesburg estate, Brenthurst. Their patronage is recorded by Stern in her letters to her close friends Richard and Freda Feldman, writing on 24 June 1944 “have sold the Sunflowers to Lady Oppenheimer", and in her accounting ledger, “June 24 Lady Oppenheimer/ Little Brenthurst/ 3rd Ave Parktown Johb. in exchange of Malay head £44.5 taken the Sunflowers £78.15 to pay £31.10” (Irma Stern archives, National Library of South Africa). The Oppenheimers were early supporters of Stern’s work, and purchased several paintings both for their own private collection and for the South African National Gallery (Zionist Record, 15.3.1929). Stern was also the recipient of the Oppenheimer Trust Award, a prize founded in Sir Ernest’s memory, in 1963.

Irma Stern’s visual fascination with the natural world is clearly demonstrated in her still lifes, which span her full career from the 1920s to the 1960s. These depictions of flower arrangements provided the artist with an opportunity for formal experimentation, and Sunflowers illustrates perfectly the rich colours and brushwork that are typical of Stern’s work in this genre. Sunflowers is naturalistic and descriptive; it manages to combine an intensity of expression with a true sense of character and colour. The deep, sensuous blues and greens of the leaves and vase are complemented by bright accents of the golden sunflowers. In keeping with a typically Expressionist style, Stern makes use of thick impasto applied in short assertive brushstrokes, especially apparent in the moulding of the table surface and flower petals. This energetic and expressive paint application combines with the lush colours to create a uniquely colourful and vital interpretation of the traditional still life. This sensual and eclectic still life sees the artist at her most inspired; it is a quintessential Stern, infused with drama and executed with an elegant and masterful control.

These abundant and seductive still lifes were usually set up in the artist’s studio at her home in Cape Town, The Firs (now the Irma Stern Museum). While many of her paintings are the result of hasty experiments on the move, “the interior spaces of her home and the sanctuary that was her studio were as important to her as the world at large” (Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Vlaeberg, 1995, p. 125). To one side of her studio, French doors opened onto her mature garden, where she cultivated a wide variety of flowers including “larkspur, 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” (the artist’s letter to Trude Bosse dated 14 November 1928, as quoted in Karel Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, Cape Town, 1994, p. 88). Stern was a keen collector of Chinese antiques, and the large green-glazed martaban jar depicted here (Irma Stern Museum collection no. 520) makes an appearance in numerous other works, including Still life with Dahlias 1947, Still life with Roses 1934 and Bowl of Flowers 1946 (all illustrated in Arnold, p.114, 134, 136). The distinctive Bedouin fabric also features in Vase of Poppies 1938, “a vigorously patterned cloth, occupying the foreground plane, introduces a processed design which offsets the informal pattern of pale petals in the upper format” (Arnold, p.129). Sunflowers were not a common subject for Stern, and on first glance this double variety may be mistaken for chrysanthemums. The present lot compares closely, both stylistically and in the variety depicted, with another dated 1945 in the collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Irma Stern: Impressions of a Journey, Standard Bank exh. cat., Johannesburg, 2003, illustrated p.165, mistitled Chrysanthemums).