Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art: Audacities of Color 9781350187498, 9781350187528, 9781350187504

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art Audacities of Color LaNitra M. Berger

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Reprinted 2021 (twice) This paperback edition first published 2022 Copyright © LaNitra M. Berger, 2022 LaNitra M. Berger has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image: Maid in Uniform (oil on canvas), Irma Stern (1955), Irma Stern Museum. (© 2020 Irma Stern Trust / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Berger, LaNitra M., author. Title: Irma Stern and the racial paradox of South African modern art: audacities of color / LaNitra M. Berger. Other titles: Required reading range; v. 25. 1234-567X Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Series: Required Reading Range; volume 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034424 (print) | LCCN 2020034425 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350187498 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350187504 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350187511 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Stern, Irma, 1894–1966–Criticism and interpretation. | Painting, South African–20th century. | Modernism (Art)–South Africa. Classification: LCC ND1096.S8 B46 2020 (print) | LCC ND1096.S8 (ebook) | DDC 759.968–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034424 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034425 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8749-8 PB: 978-1-3501-8753-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8750-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-8751-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Matthew M. Berger and my parents, Florrie J. Walker (1946–2011) and Earnest Walker Jr.

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Contents List of Plates List of Figures Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 1 Irma Stern in a Global Context: Expressionist Influences 17 2 Cape Town Blues: Painting South Africa 37 3 Congo and Zanzibar 77 4 Modernism under Apartheid: Art and Social Context 105 5 If Rhodes Must Fall, Must Stern Fall? Audacities of Color in Post-Apartheid South Africa 139 Biographical Timeline and Selected Exhibitions Bibliography Index

157 159 171

Plates   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Irma Stern, Two Malay Musicians, 1930 Irma Stern, Maid in Uniform, 1955 Irma Stern, The Eternal Child, 1916 Winold Reiss, Black Prophet (The African), 1925 Moses Kottler, Small Coloured Girl, 1917 Irma Stern, Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky, ca. 1930s Irma Stern, Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen, ca. 1930s Irma Stern, Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin, 1941 Irma Stern, Bahutu Musicians, 1942 Irma Stern, Arab Priest, 1945 Gerard Sekoto, Sixpence a Door, 1947 Irma Stern, Xhosa Woman, 1941 Irma Stern, Malay Girl, 1939 Duduzile (Dudu) More, Pink Things, 2018 Pule Ratsoma, Nurture, 2018 David Madlabane, Existence, 2018

Figures Irma Stern, Two Malay Musicians, 1930 Irma Stern, Fishing Boats, 1931 Irma Stern, Maid in Uniform, 1955 Irma Stern, The Eternal Child, 1916 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Girl with a Pendulum, 1900 Max Pechstein, Nursing Child, 1918 Max Pechstein, Letter to Irma Stern, 1917 Irma Stern, Dumela Marena, Title Page, 1920 Max Pechstein (group of natives around a hut), 1919 Irma Stern, Dumela Marena, Panels 1–4, 1920 Winold Reiss, Black Prophet (The African), 1925 Walter von Ruckteschell, Young Africa, 1919 Moses Kottler, Small Coloured Girl, 1917 Irma Stern, Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky, ca. 1930s Irma Stern, Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen, ca. 1930s Irma Stern, Cover Image, Black and White: Stories of South Africa, 1935 Irma Stern, Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin, 1941 Irma Stern, Congo: Woman with Bananas, 1942 Irma Stern, Congo: Mother and Young Child, 1942 Irma Stern, Congo: Woman Sitting on Stool, 1942 Irma Stern, Congo: Man with Spear, 1942 Irma Stern, Congo: Tutsi Woman, 1942 Irma Stern, Bahutu Musicians, 1942 Irma Stern, Zanzibar: Arab Man with Pipe, 1948 Irma Stern, Arab Priest, 1945 Gerard Sekoto, Sixpence a Door, 1947 Constance Stuart Larrabee, Young Gold Miner Watching Sunday Mine Dance, Witwatersrand, South Africa, 1948 4.4 Irma Stern, Xhosa Woman, 1941 4.5 Irma Stern, Malay Girl, 1939 I.1 I.2 I.3 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3

2 2 8 19 20 22 23 26 26 27 29 31 40 41 41 51 64 84 86 87 87 91 92 97 109 111 114 116 117

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4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3

Figures

Jewish Affairs, 1957 Irma Stern, Pimento Harvest, 1962 Duduzile (Dudu) More, Pink Things, 2018 Pule Ratsoma, Nurture, 2018 David Madlabane, Existence, 2018

121 130 147 149 150

Acknowledgments This book has been in various phases and stages for twenty years. Along the way, many people have supported, assisted, fed, sheltered, comforted, and provided critical feedback to get the manuscript to publication. First, I must thank my family for providing me with a loving home and instilling a sense of purpose focused on racial justice and public service. I am eternally grateful to my parents, Florrie J. Walker and Earnest Walker Jr., for all of the sacrifices they made for me to get an education and the love and support they gave me. They put aside their own hopes and dreams so that I could attend Stanford and Duke universities. I appreciate the cost of this sacrifice, and it guides my work in supporting underrepresented students in higher education. Although my mother is not alive to see the book’s publication, her intellectual curiosity, brutal honesty, cutting sense of humor, and love of African American history provided the earliest inspiration for my interest in art history of the African diaspora. She was the smartest person I will ever know. My father has always been a quiet, sage person who gently encouraged and supported me in acts large and small. Other family members have also been supportive. My cousin, Vonn Huckabee, has done everything from caring for my boys to helping me find newspapers in the South African archives. She is a second mother to me. I would also like to thank the rest of my family: my aunt, Ruby Huckabee, and my cousins Maurice and Reisha Martin, Jessica Huckabee-Webb, Nicholes Guillory, Ondriah Guillory, Michael Martin, Joshlyn and Kristina Taylor, Camella Huckabee, Melody Curry, Rodrick Curry, Barbara Jo Pope, Lela Huckabee, Earl Huckabee Jr., Shavonia Pope, Rosalynd Aguirre, Christopher Pope, Brian Larkin Sr. and Jessica Larkin, Jesse Larkin and Stephanie Cuevas, and Arthur Horne Jr. Each of these people has, in their own way, made it possible for me to work toward completing this book. I am fortunate to have wonderful in-laws. The Berger family has been tremendously kind and supportive of this project. My father- and stepmotherin-law, Karol Berger and Anna Maria Busse Berger, are widely published academics who gave excellent, grounded advice on writing and scholarship. My sisters-in-law, Susanna Berger, a fellow art historian, and Kasey Harboe Guentert

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have offered thoughtful advice. Antoni, Malgorzata, Ola, Ian, and Magda have been wonderfully curious about Irma Stern, asking good questions that made me think. Thanks also to Lidia T. Berger and Michael Kott. Tara McKelvey, an outstanding editor, taught me how to write clearly, concisely, and on deadline. My dissertation adviser, Dr. Richard J. Powell, was instrumental in guiding me to study Irma Stern from an African American perspective. He, along with my dissertation committee members, Dr. Mark Antliff, Dr. James Rolleston, and Dr. Michael Harris, provided extensive guidance on the dissertation that helped shape the manuscript as well. C. T. Woods-Powell was also there with a smile and an opportunity to laugh. At Duke, I received the Duke Endowment Fellowship in the Humanities, the Duke-Free University Exchange Fellowship, and an International Studies grant through the graduate school to support my field research. Other Duke faculty and staff were also important scholarly mentors. Dr. Thavolia Glymph taught me how to ask good questions and became a mentor and friend. Dr. Jacqueline Looney has inspired me since the first day of graduate school. Friends in graduate school also made the journey more exciting. My dissertation writing group, Erica Edwards, Stephane Robolin, and Phil Rubio, kept me moving forward. Phil Rubio and his wife Paula are two of my dearest friends, and they provided me a good barbeque and a nice place to stay whenever I visited Durham. Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd has been a wonderful friend and inspiring role model throughout graduate school and beyond, reading drafts, sharing teaching tips, and providing so much laughter. In 2001, I received a graduate student summer research grant from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art to support my dissertation research. Elizabeth Harney was my mentor, and she helped shape the early direction of the project. Christine Mullen-Kraemer was also helpful as I developed my thesis. Janet Stanley provided invaluable thoughts on how to use the museum’s archival materials. Roz Walker mentored me at a pivotal moment in my professional development. Karen Milbourne and Heran Sereke-Bhran offered great conversations about African art and became not just colleagues, but friends. Margaret Doyle sat with me for several weeks as I read over 1,000 pages of German archival material, and we have been friends ever since. I met Jos Thorne that summer in DC, but we have collaborated across continents on many art projects in the ensuing years. I am a proud graduate of San Bernardino High School in San Bernardino, California. My intellectual journey in art history began in this unlikely place

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thanks to two incredible women: Blythe Anderson and Jan Ebey. They identified my potential early and selected me for the Academic Decathlon team for the art history subjects. They introduced me to the Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, and LACMA. I have never looked back. They set ambitious goals for me and had a vision for my life and career that has shaped everything I do as an educator. I am eternally grateful. At Stanford, Jody Maxmin welcomed me into the discipline of art history and has maintained a twenty-year letter correspondence where she sent encouragement and advice, and set an inspirational example for being a teacher and a scholar. Friends have sustained me with companionship and good food during this journey. Christine Rinne and I met in Berlin as graduate students in 2002, and since then, she has not only been one of my best friends but also my German translator and Lutheran godmother. Samantha Cereceres is my oldest childhood friend. The Rojansky family, Lucy, Matt, Edie, Abe, and Sol, has been a source of strength and support throughout the book writing process. With our shared Duke and Stanford connections, Lucy and I became fast friends, and from there she kept my momentum going with her steady voice, offers to help with my kids, and her editorial eye. I would also like to thanks: Rob Rakove, Tamara Ashford, Kelly Denson, Selena Mendy Singleton, Tonija Hope Navas, Kari Miller, Malaika Marable Serrano, Sally Schwartz, Keshia Abraham, Megan Patrick, Meredith and Aaron West, Evan and Tabitha Liddiard, Jennifer Crewalk, Garey Davis, Lily Lopez-McGee, Esther Brimmer, Jill Welch, Bonnie Bissonette, Jessie Lutabingwa, Marlene Johnson, Betty Soppelsa, Andrew Gordon, Gary Rhodes, Jason Terry, Mary Catherine Chase, Lezli Baskerville, Liz Veatch, Tara Yglesias, Deirdre Moloney, Saskia Campbell, Julian Williams, Tiwana Barnes, Garvel Newburn, Andrew Walter Sparling, Neelam and Hemang Shah, Kathleen and Dan Kasper, Illisa Suss, Marcia Chatelain, Allan Goodman, Rajika Bhandari, Mary Kirk, Daniel Kramer, Lee Rivers, Cheyenne Boyce, Bill Gertz, Paul Watson, Angela Manginelli, Susana Carillo, Danielle Mayall, Sheila Budoff, Elizabeth Franklin, Gretchen Cook Anderson, Beth Frame, Beth Weller, Eliza Berkon, Amanda Wahlig, Suzana Chowdury, Katie Forde, Olivia Blackmon, Ann Aspnes, Vika and Mladen Nesic, Pastor Tom Knoll, Pastor Phil Huber, Pastor Wendy Moen, Erica Lutes, Alfonzo Davids, the entire Mitchell family, and Josh Walden. Kerry Wallach is a wonderful mentor, colleague, and friend. In 2004, I joined a dissertation writing group for women of color in Washington, DC, called SisterMentors. This group was the difference between completing the dissertation and not finishing the degree. Dr. Shireen K. Lewis founded the organization and led the group, and she became the task master

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that I needed to find time to write the dissertation with a full-time job. Tisha Lewis Ellison was a member of the group who wrote with me late into the night even when we both had to go to work the next day. She continues to inspire me. Adriane Williams and Fanta Aw gave excellent feedback on my chapters and helped me to focus on the finished product. The History and Art History Department at George Mason University has always welcomed my research and teaching interests in the department. The department chair, Brian Platt, and the program director, Michele Greet, have been incredible resources of support and encouragement throughout the writing process. Other members of the department—Robert DeCaroli, Angela Ho, Jacqueline Williamson, and Larry Butler—have also been helpful. My students have guided my work as an educator since the beginning: Jeffrey Wood, Chanel Grice, D’Juan Mercado, Jeremiah Foxwell, Stephanie Skees, Ruth Jackson, Esther Jackson, Haley Vaseghi, Conor Moran, Sasha Pierre Louis, Anjana Radhakrishnan, Denisha Hedgebeth, Endia Hunt, Asha Athman, Desmond Moffitt, Beverly Harp, Sameen Yusuf, Patrick Finney, Joseph Russell, Patrick Grady, Aja Clark, K. T. Nguyen, Matthew Robinson, Doreen Joseph, Taylor Pigram, Karen Therrien, Abbey Harless, Erik Carey, Emily Engdahl, and Neuteyshe Felizor. They continue to shape how I talk about Irma Stern why she still matters today. Alexandra Tyson is my muse. She inspires me to bring Irma Stern to wider and wider audiences. Rasheda Elsamahi and Rachel Zelizer have been my excellent research assistants for two years. They know what I need before I do. Jordan Beltran Gonzales is my editor, coach, supporter, and friend. He helped with every aspect of this book, and I am eternally grateful for everything he has done to bring it to completion. He provided insight, a sharp mind, a warm spirit, and a fantastic sense of humor. My dissertation research in Berlin, Germany, and Cape Town, South Africa, serves as the foundational research for this book. In both places, I was fortunate to have worked with smart, generous people who provided me with the resources I needed. In Germany, Dr. Irene Below hosted me in Bielefeld and generously shared her archival material on Irma Stern and continues to be a model scholarly mentor. Liz Crossley also gave me access to archival materials, but in the process, she became a dear friend, hosting me for “cold plate” and taking voyages in her canoe, “LaDucky,” along the Spree River. Liz introduced me to her South African colleagues, who welcomed me with open arms when I arrived in Cape Town in 2004. The Peters family, Ian, Judy, Karen and her

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husband Jason, and Robert helped me to understand their perspective on life in South Africa during apartheid. Yvonne Flack started out as my landlord but quickly became my friend. She even taught me how to drive on the other side of the road. Sheila Lawrence was my first friend in Cape Town, and she shared her valuable perspective on South African Jewish life during apartheid. In the South African art history community, I am grateful to so many people. First, Christopher Peter and Mary von Blommestein at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town embraced me and my project from the beginning. They allowed me to come and go in the Irma Stern Museum and conduct my research at her dining room table. Kathy Wheeler, of the Irma Stern Trust, provided invaluable support as I gathered images at the end of the process. I would also like to thank Tania Pretorius and Virgil Lawrence for assisting with the image permissions. Veronica Belling at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Melanie Geuytsen at the National Library of South Africa helped me to trace some obscure leads in the archives, and they knew where to find everything. Hayden Proud and Carol Kaufmann helped me think through my later chapters during my 2015 visit to give the keynote address for the “Brushing up on Stern” exhibition. Joline Young has contributed her editorial advice and also her unique South African perspective. Lizelle and Frank Kilbourn have been strong supporters of my research and teaching for many years. I am also thankful to Khwezi Gule, Tracey Rose, Wilhelm van Rensburg, Marilyn Martin, Sarah Sinisi, and Conrad from Woolworths. Nadja Daehnke, the new director of the Irma Stern Museum, has been a joy to work with on new ways to keep Stern’s legacy fresh and relevant. This book is written to bring Black perspectives from the African diaspora into the discussions about Irma Stern. In my research, I encountered many Black South Africans who questioned why I would write a book about an artist who supported apartheid. I hope that readers find some answers to this question in the pages that follow. Most importantly, I want readers to understand the gravity of colonialism and apartheid’s devastating effects on Black South Africans in economic, social, and cultural ways that persist today. In particular, Black South Africans still struggle to be heard in academic and political discourse. Chumani Maxwele helped me and my students take even greater intellectual risks as scholar activists. Ronel Stevens provided the often overlooked or downplayed Black feminist perspective. To Tracey Munungufhala at the Artist Proof Studio as well as all of the Artist Proof Studio artists—Duduzile More, Pule Ratsoma, David Mdlabane, and Thuli Lubisi—you are the new art history in South Africa. Colleagues at George Mason University have also been helpful. Zofia Burr encouraged me to turn the dissertation into a manuscript and then gave me

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the space to work on it for several years. She also took the time to read the manuscript and offered detailed feedback. Kathy Alligood was also supportive in encouraging me to keep moving forward as a scholar and an administrator. Patty Granfield was there to read chapter drafts and dispense thoughtful advice on virtually any topic over lunch. Kay Ágoston kept my office running during several periods of extended leave. Dr. Ángel Cabrera wrote so many notes of encouragement to me and my fellowship applicants, and I enjoyed the view from his office. Thanks also to Peter Stearns, Bethany Usher, Kim Eby, Ann Ardis, Wendi Manuel-Scott, Kevin Stoy, Jeannie Brown Leonard, Chuck Leonard, Andy Hoefer, Jan Allbeck, Todd Stafford, Blake Silver, Claudia Rector, Marilyn Clark, Gaby Guzman, Bob Sachs, George Oberle, and Ben Carton. And every Friday for more than five years, the Stearns Center’s Faculty Writing Group created a strong community of academic writers and a wonderful space to focus on writing. This group, including Hongmei Sun, Doug Eyler, Vivek Narayanan, and Rashmi Sadana, cheered me on as I worked toward the finish line. I would also like to thank my graduate assistants, Betsy Allen, Suzy Rigdon, Lindley Estes Thomas, Zachary Barnes, and Kristina Medlock, who kept the office going while I was on leave to work on the book. The Bloomsbury editorial and production staff have been amazing. Margaret Michniewicz believed in my project, and this book’s completion is a testament to her vision throughout the process. James Thompson and April Peake at Bloomsbury worked hard to shepherd the manuscript through the production phase and persisted through the COVID-19 pandemic. I would like to thank the anonymous readers whose advice strengthened the manuscript. Peter Chametzky and Sue Felleman have been wonderful advocates, mentors, and friends. I am also grateful to the late Marion Deshmukh, who not only introduced me to Bloomsbury but was also my earliest mentor at George Mason University. Although her passing has left a void in my life, her commitment to teaching and scholarship continue to shape my own work. Other women have been part of my “village” in helping care for my children while I worked on this book. I sincerely appreciate the friendship and helping hands of Larisa Malts and Emily Jaime. I had two au pairs who have been incredible. Kinga Zychlewicz lived with us for two years and was my right hand throughout my work on the manuscript. We traveled the world together. She even helped care for our dog, Bella Bean (may she rest in power) at the end of her life. Taina Scarabelli Felix followed, and she has provided our family with patience, love, and kindness. These women will always be part of our family.

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Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, Matthew M. Berger. We have been on a twenty-year journey together, traveling the world in search of great art, delicious food, and interesting people. We’ve successfully indulged in all three. Along the way, we’ve built a life together that has been full of spirited and intense conversations. Matthew has followed me to three continents as I researched Irma Stern, and I’m glad that my final move to South Africa nine days after our marriage in 2004 didn’t severely impact the relationship. Matthew is my first and best editor, my greatest cheerleader, and the love of my life. We have two amazingly brilliant boys, Nathan and Luke, who keep us from taking ourselves too seriously and remind us why we want to make the world a more tolerant place. I love them all more than anything else. A smile means I’m trying.

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Introduction

This story begins in the present with an art heist. In November 2012, armed robbers—posing as an art teacher and his students—held a security guard at gunpoint at the Pretoria Art Museum and stole five oil paintings, including two by South African artist Irma Stern.1 Brandishing weapons and pursuing a list of specific paintings, including Stern’s 1930 oil painting Two Malay Musicians (Figure I.1) and her 1931 oil painting Fishing Boats (Figure I.2), the daring thieves knew exactly what they wanted. Yet despite their detailed list, their Toyota Avanza getaway car was not large enough to hold all of the stolen loot. They left behind the most expensive work, Stern’s Two Malay Musicians, valued at over $1.5 million. After several days, four of the five stolen paintings were recovered in a Port Elizabeth cemetery.2 The thieves were never captured. The robbery and the high value of the stolen paintings made international headlines. How could thieves so easily carry out such a daring heist? Reporters and South African art experts blamed lax museum security for the dramatic crime.3 “The criminals walked in like art lovers and robbed the museum at gunpoint,” said Pieter de Necker, spokesman for the mayor of Tshwane, the metropolitan area where the Pretoria Art Museum is located.4 “I hope the government learns a lesson and puts in security structures that keep our art and heritage safe,” Imre Lamprecht, head of the art department at the South African auction house Stephan Welz and Co., told reporters.5 But, the most puzzling question was why the thieves didn’t understand that Stern’s Two Malay Musicians was the most valuable part of the loot if they had done their research beforehand. The painting depicts two young Muslim boys wearing fezzes and dark trousers and playing percussion instruments against a green and yellow-hued background. Considered as “Coloured” or mixed-race by South African racial standards, the youth represent the musical traditions in the Coloured community, a unique aspect of South African culture. To the untrained eye and the harried thieves, this painting and its subject might seem too local and perhaps undesirable compared with Stern’s more generic Fishing Boats painting, which they might have thought would be more appealing in the global art market. The bizarre

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

Figure I.1  Irma Stern, Two Malay Musicians, 1930. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Pretoria Art Museum. (See Plate 1.)

Figure I.2  Irma Stern, Fishing Boats, 1931. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Pretoria Art Museum.

crime brought new international attention to Stern and revived the domestic debate over her representation of South Africa’s heritage. Most people outside of South Africa, including art historians, have never heard of Irma Stern. Within South Africa, Stern is one of the country’s most famous modern artists. There is, however, a sharp racial divide over her work. During her lifetime, the predominantly white press and arts communities in South Africa and abroad praised Stern for her willingness to travel internationally and paint people of different cultures and races. She traveled extensively around South Africa and painted stunning images of Black, Coloured (mixed-race), Jewish, Asian, and white South Africans as well as the country’s unique flora and landscapes.6 But despite her international outlook and her exposure to South Africa’s racial diversity, Stern held deeply racist views and supported segregation

Introduction

3

through apartheid, the Afrikaans term for “separateness” that became the government policy of legal racial discrimination and state-sponsored violence. These paradoxical views have tarnished her reputation among the Black South African majority. Stern’s life and work are characterized by this racial paradox, and this tension between her art and her personal views is the subject of this book. As Sir William Clarke noted in the Cape Times, Stern and other South African artists’ embrace of race or the “close affinity with the primitive” both defined modern art in South Africa and illustrated the country’s embrace of racial segregation and the form of white supremacy known as apartheid. Stern established herself as a modern artist who sought out Black and Coloured people as subjects for her work. But even as she used brilliant colors, expressive lines, and her own artistic genius to paint the African continent’s beauty, her reactions to the political and social forces that resulted in colonialism and apartheid fell short. As a result, Stern is both celebrated and criticized by her South African compatriots. In analyzing her art, audacities of color abound. At various times in her life, she was a cultural and political insider and an outsider. And for a white South African artist who enjoyed her skin color’s privileges, she painted images of Black and Coloured (mixed-race) women that both foreshadowed apartheid’s onset and revealed its untenable principles. Her embrace of modern art’s “close affinity with the primitive” provided her with both insider and outsider status that allowed her to work to become a powerful social commentary on South Africa and its fraught racial history.7 As an insider, Stern enjoyed immense financial and critical success at the height of her career, receiving apartheid government support for her work and representing South Africa at major exhibitions around the world. Yet Stern was also an outsider, spending much of her early artistic career on the margins of the Cape Town art community, which did not readily accept her vibrant paintings of Black and Coloured South Africans. Using Stern’s rich trove of letters, diary entries, press clippings, first-hand accounts from friends, historical analyses, interviews, and, most importantly, her art, this book explores these paradoxes that established Stern as an important, yet controversial modern South African figure. Stern’s life and work illustrate how a twentieth-century artist chose to interpret issues of race, gender, and national identity, which were central aspects throughout South African cultural and political discourses at the time. Through her frequent travels in South Africa and globally, Stern routinely interacted with young Black and Coloured South African women, convincing them to become subjects for her work. Yet during apartheid, Stern could not reconcile the cultural richness of the racial diversity

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

she observed in her travels with the regime’s position on white supremacy. Stern often demonstrated that she knew what it meant to acknowledge the humanity of those whose backgrounds she did not share. In her public statements, however, she seems to be completely unwilling to empathize with the racially determined fate of her Black and Coloured South African compatriots. Thinking about Stern’s insider and outsider status throughout her life also offers a conceptual framework for understanding the artistic exchanges between the African and Jewish diasporas. These two communities have intersected around the world, but most intimately in South Africa and the United States, places where Black and Jewish citizens were considered social and political outsiders even as they made significant societal contributions. In both countries, Jewish communities initially had extremely fragile connections to white identity, but many members continued their social activism against racism. Even when tensions flared between Black and Jewish people, their combined efforts have produced important social change and artistic genius. Through Stern’s work, which was encouraged and supported by her politically progressive circle of Jewish friends, this book examines the social and cultural tensions and synergies that arose from Black and Jewish South African responses to political marginalization.

A Note on Terms Although fluid in almost every way, racial categories in South Africa follow a unique set of defined terms. In 1950, the apartheid government passed the Population Registration Act, which created three major racial categories: Black or “Native” (people of African descent), white, and Coloured (people of mixedrace heritage). In South Africa, the term “Coloured” was an official racial category that referred to people of mixed-race heritage or their descendants. It is also a cultural, religious, linguistic, and social identity. For its entire history, Black peoples’ bodies have been South Africa’s cultural, political, and economic currency. This is also the case in the context of Stern’s work. Sheila Smith McKoy, a US-South African comparative scholar, offers a useful framework for understanding the Black body as a “social text” that reflects the “binary opposition of blackness and whiteness that lies at the root of white supremacy.”8 Looking specifically at apartheid South Africa, she notes that “apartheid cultures are structured around a definition of whiteness that needs blackness to exist. In essence, whiteness simply cannot exist without the existence of the contaminating Black social space.”9 White privilege,

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then, comes from the social, political, and cultural efforts to maintain racial supremacy. Stern and her work reflect this strangely intimate relationship between white privilege and Black bodies. She was emotionally connected to her female subjects while being gradually socialized as a Jewish South African into white supremacy through the colonial and apartheid systems. Even with this socialization, her Jewish identity kept her on the margins of whiteness, and her self-esteem suffered. “The only time I feel properly happy is when I have palette in hand and then I have a sudden sense of the right to exist. . . . Otherwise my life swings spasmodically between self-denigration and self-evaluation,” she wrote in her diary in 1925.10 This outsider status helped her to develop some empathy and even admiration for the Black women she painted throughout the continent, which I argue explains the disconnect between the emotional connection visible in the paintings and her own personal views on race. Additionally, since this book discusses art of the twentieth century, the terms “modern” and “modernism” will be used frequently in reference to the social and cultural context of the period. There are no single definitions of these terms, but some more general characteristics include a break with the past and its traditions and a desire to seek inspiration in other locales. In their book, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, authors Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers discussed modernism as a “problem” to be considered, offering a description of the term as “a kind of strange attractor around which different creators, events, objects, and media can be gathered and dispersed.”11 In thinking about how modernism developed in South Africa, concepts of race and racial difference function as the “attractors” to which Latham and Rogers refer in their description of the term. Implicitly and explicitly, twentieth-century South African cultural production was a reaction to race and racial difference. Until recently, modernism has been primarily defined as a male and Eurocentric project. Scholars such as Partha Mitter, Chika Okeke-Ogulu, and Ann Ardis have conceptualized modernism’s different trajectories outside of Europe and among women. Mitter and Okeke-Ogulu, for example, both connect modernism’s development in “peripheral” places such as India and Nigeria to the British process of colonialism and decolonization, arguing that artists in both places developed sophisticated artistic practices that went beyond mere emulation to respond to their changing environments.12 Okeke-Agulu also describes modern African art and “the critical connections between political developments and transactions in the cultural-artistic landscape.”13 Ardis, a literary scholar, suggests that modernity looks completely different when

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

studied through a broad range of women’s perspectives. Borrowing from Paul Gilroy’s term the “Black Atlantic,” Ardis uses the term “female Atlantic” to describe “the larger context of the global diaspora of feminist thought and its complex relationship to the history of Anglo-American colonialism.”14 These ideas provide a useful framework for thinking about how Stern’s biography and major life events correspond to developments in modern South Africa, such as colonialism, the Boer War, and, later, apartheid.

Stern’s Early Years Irma Stern was born in the Schweizer-Reneke region of the Transvaal, South Africa, on October 2, 1894. Her mother, Henny Fels, was born in Einbeck, Germany (near Hannover), in 1875, and her father, Samuel Stern, was born in an unknown town in Germany. Samuel and Henny Stern moved to the Transvaal as part of a wave of wealthy German-Jewish immigrants seeking business opportunities near mines and farms in rural South Africa. In 1899, the war between the British and Afrikaner (Boer) settlers, known as the Boer War, began, marking the first of many times in Stern’s life when political turmoil would leave its imprint on her psyche. Samuel Stern was arrested by British soldiers for aiding the Boers, and the rest of the Stern family was sent to Cape Town and given refugee status. As soon as Samuel was released and joined the family in Cape Town in 1901, an outbreak of the bubonic plague forced them to flee to Germany. From a young age, Irma Stern began traveling frequently between Europe and Africa, a practice she continued for most of her life. In 1910, the Stern family moved to Germany from Wolmaranstaad, South Africa. They settled into an apartment on Berlin’s most fashionable boulevard, the Kürfürstendamm, in the Charlottenburg neighborhood. Berlin, by then a bustling metropolis, served as an unparalleled European center for fashion, politics, and culture. For sixteen-year-old Irma Stern, moreover, Berlin was conservative Cape Town’s polar opposite: youthful, vibrant, cultured, and edgy. Because of their commercial success and family fortunes, Samuel and Henny Stern could afford to expose Irma and her brother Rudi to a life that few in Germany or South Africa could imagine. The Sterns provided Irma with the educational advantages to succeed as an artist, such as exposure to cultural excursions, access to books, and entrance into German high society.15 By 1912, Stern found herself fully immersed in the nuances of Germany’s rich culture; she read widely and regularly attended music concerts and the theatre.

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Stern’s diaries provide a detailed picture of a young girl who was intellectually curious and eager to learn about other cultures beyond Western Europe. As a young woman, she demonstrated the capacity to expose herself to new ideas and ways of thinking. The list of books she read during her youth is astounding— this list numbers more than a dozen pages long and including literature from Germany, Britain, the United States, Russia, and South Africa, among others. The eclectic listing of titles ranged from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to the Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching.16 Russian author Fyodor Dostoeyevsky appears several times. Titles from South Africa, such as Olive Schreiner’s novel Story of an African Farm, are also listed. In addition, Stern kept a “theatre list” in her journal describing the operas and plays she attended at Berlin’s top venues, such as the Deutsches Theatre and the Künstler Theatre.17 She listened to Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach, and other composers. In 1913, at age nineteen, Stern enrolled in art classes at the Weimar Academy, three hours southwest of Berlin. There, she studied with several international artists connected to contemporary art movements in Germany, including American-born artist Gari Melchers, Norwegian painter Carl Frithjof Smith, Max Brandenburg, and Worpswede founder Fritz Mackensen.18 Formally, Stern also began to develop her interest in oil as a medium. About her study under Brandenburg and what she learned, for example, Stern wrote, “Under Mr. Brandenburg’s tuition [sic] I now started to paint in oil, the only adequate medium for expressing one’s ideas in a larger style.”19 Having access to these artists afforded Stern the opportunity to witness modernism’s development in Germany through a South African lens.

Irma Stern’s Polarizing Influence This book not only examines Stern’s life and work and places it into a more global context but also uses Stern as an example of how individuals struggle with the complexities of navigating opposing or contradictory viewpoints in their daily lives. For example, Stern not only openly supported a “color line” that segregated people by race but also regularly crossed this line herself to paint women in Black and Coloured areas.20 Her hauntingly beautiful paintings of Black South African women in particular reveal a woman whose artistic vision transcended the rigid social and political structures of the era even when her personal views did not. To many Black South Africans, the term “modern art” describes the painful period when white artists were celebrated and Black artists were neglected at best

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

and persecuted and tortured at worst.21 Today, mentioning Stern’s name in Black South African circles will invoke angry glares and negative comments about the artist. Across races, South Africans continue to disagree vehemently about the role the German-Jewish artist played in South African culture, particularly during apartheid. In particular, Black South Africans resent Stern’s acceptance of government support during apartheid despite spending so much time in rural Black areas painting Black life in vivid color and having such close connections to Jewish anti-apartheid activists. Stern lived during the most pivotal social and political moments in Europe and Africa, and she capitalized on these moments in her art. As a young woman, Stern’s African childhood helped her influence artists such as expressionist Max Pechstein. Her affiliation with the avant-garde led her work to be labeled “degenerate” by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. During her travels to the Belgian Congo in the 1940s, she observed and painted the festering ethnic conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis that later resulted in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In South Africa, Stern’s work managed to both capture apartheid’s rise and foreshadow its end. For example, her 1955 painting, Maid in Uniform, depicts a Black woman whose uniform signifies subservience and limited social mobility, yet whose demeanor is defiant and resistant, an ethos and attitude that fueled the anti-apartheid resistance movement (Figure I.3). Although Stern’s education in Germany exposed her to a new thinking about race and gender, the South African Jewish community’s support helped to solidify her ability to become a leading member of the nation’s avant-garde. Created through a series of immigration waves of Jews fleeing oppression in various parts of the world, the South African Jewish community supported

Figure I.3  Irma Stern, Maid in Uniform. Oil on canvas, 1955, 69 × 63 cm. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 2.)

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the Jewish diaspora from its beginnings through its embrace of new ideas, merger of cultural traditions, and intense skepticism of the dominant—in this case, white—culture. During apartheid, members of the South African Jewish community participated in internal debates about how to respond to the racist regime. Conservative members argued for a measured response that protected the Jewish community from retaliation and pogroms. Liberal and more radical members advocated for an outright rejection of the apartheid system and vocally opposed and resisted all forms of racism. Across the political spectrum, members of the South African Jewish community supported Stern financially and emotionally by purchasing her paintings and providing her with moral support for painting mostly Black and Coloured female subjects. In public, Stern often equivocated on apartheid, but she did receive government support and she did condone racial segregation. Her paintings of Black and Coloured women, however, present aspects of a culturally rich and ethnically diverse South Africa that the apartheid regime was trying to systematically annihilate. Because of her bold and colorful depictions of a multiracial South Africa, Stern’s paintings arguably served as a strong rebuke to apartheid even as her own political beliefs aligned with government policy.

Contemporary Scholarship about Irma Stern Scholarship on Stern exists in several languages, including English, Afrikaans, German, and French, but the majority of the criticism of her work is written in English, German, and Afrikaans. From these different national viewpoints, scholars have drawn distinct conclusions of Stern and her work. Historical events have also played a major role in defining the direction of Stern scholarship. The total destruction of many German cities during the Second World War meant that traces of Stern’s work and its fate in German private or public collections are difficult to establish. The rise of apartheid in 1948, followed by periods of intense political violence and anti-apartheid protests that led to the cultural boycott in the 1980s, prevented many scholars from conducting research on South African artists. In addition, most of South African art historical material has been readily accessible to scholars only since the country became a democracy in 1994. The convergence of these historical, geographic, and social threads provides a brief explanation about the reasons for which there are gaps in the historical scholarship on Stern.

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

In 1926, Austrian critic Josef Kalmer published the first scholarly analysis of Stern in Europe, “Die Malerin Irma Stern,” in Menorah, a journal of Jewish art and literature. Kalmer was struck by Stern’s interest in Black African subjects, but he also mentioned South Africa’s racial diversity as an artistic asset, writing, “She has the good fortune of finding . . . the most that a painter could wish for, the mixture of people from Hindus to Dutch and the English are found in her African home.”22 Kalmer was one of the first European scholars to discuss South Africa’s significance as a subject for Stern, opening the door for a discussion of the social relevance of Stern’s work. German art critic Max Osborn wrote the first monograph on Stern in 1927. As part of the Junge Kunst (Young Art) series of books on young modern artists, Osborn’s publication not only ranked Stern as a rising talent in Europe but also legitimized Stern as an artist in South Africa, where critics were initially skeptical of her chosen subjects and modern style. In his study, Osborn argued that because Stern spent part of her childhood in Africa, she was a “unique case” among her European contemporaries.23 He described Stern as “bringing a picture epic of the native world of South Africa” to Europe, placing her as an intermediary between modernism in Europe and South Africa.24 In 1942, South African writer Joseph Sachs published Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa. By this time, Stern was viewed as one of South Africa’s most accomplished artists with an international reputation. Sachs’ book is one of the most important texts on the intersections between South African art and European modernism and the rest of the African continent from a South African perspective, even though many of his assertions and assessments of both Stern and the direction of South African art are incorrect and racist. Although the book accepts many fallacies in African art scholarship that have since been refuted (e.g., that the Portuguese taught the Benin people how to create ornate bronze sculpted heads using the lost-wax casting method), Sachs places Stern at the confluence of African and European modernism by describing her as a pioneering artist who moved South African art in new directions: When Irma Stern first began to exhibit, native studies were not popular in South Africa. There was a prejudice against the portrayal of native life in picture. Irma Stern was the first South African artist to turn away from landscape in order to deal with native life . . . she paints the crisis in the life of the dark races.25

Following Stern’s death in 1966, studies of her work proliferated in South Africa. Art critic Neville Dubow, who was also one of Stern’s personal friends, wrote a scholarly monograph on Stern in 1974 that described her contributions to South

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African art but suggested that Stern should not be considered among the great (mostly male) modern artists: “[Stern’s] work never attained the intellectual and innovative qualities that that would imply,” Dubow stated.26 Notably, Dubow also edited Stern’s posthumously discovered journal and letters for the 1991 publication, Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1933) of Irma Stern. In 1994, Karel Schoeman wrote a biography of Stern’s life up to 1933 in honor of her centenary, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 1894–1933. Schoeman’s book provides valuable translations of primary sources, including Stern’s letters and newspaper accounts of her exhibitions, but its focus is on constructing a detailed biographical sketch of Stern’s early years rather than offering an analysis of her work or her career. Greater scholarly interest in feminist art history in the 1990s coincided with the publication of South African art historian Marion Arnold’s beautifully illustrated 1995 book, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye. Arnold’s book analyzes Stern’s work from national, private, and corporate collections, adding richness to the scholarship by expanding the number of images that are easily available for study. In addition, Arnold begins to interrogate Stern’s search for the exotic in her Black female subjects. Most importantly, Arnold identifies the visual paradox of Stern’s studies of Black people as “ambivalent, presenting both stereotypical and individual characteristics.”27 Later, in her 1996 article in the book, Women and Art in South Africa, Arnold draws from feminist theory and social history to become one of the few scholars to suggest that Stern’s work, while problematic, was “unremarkable for the time” and instead was part of her search to create an identity for herself as a modern artist on the African continent.28 Feminist art historian Irene Below, a professor at the University of Bielefeld, has undertaken the compelling European research on Stern since the artist’s death in 1966. Below discovered Stern through Bielefeld Kunsthalle Museum director Dr. Wolfgang von Moltke, who wrote an assessment of Stern’s work for a German audience in 1960.29 Connected to South Africa through his dual German and South African heritage, von Moltke served as the scholarly bridge that joined African and European scholarship on Stern in the late twentieth century.30 Building on von Moltke’s early interest in Stern, Below, with co-curator Jutta Hülsewig-Johnen, wrote the 1996 exhibition catalog Irma Stern und der Expressionismus: Afrika und Europa, which was the first major study to examine Stern within the context of both postcolonialism and feminism. In the catalog and in her essay “Peripherie und Zentrum: Irma Stern im Kontext,” Below uses evidence of Stern’s work with German women’s groups, such as the Frauenkunstverband, which was founded by artist Käthe Kollwitz,

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

to strengthen her claim that Stern strongly identified with feminist causes and issues in Germany and South Africa.31 She also uses postcolonial theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue that, although Stern and other female artists have been left out of previous histories of modernism, research on these women’s contributions is vital to gain a more complete sense of how modern artists struggled with questions of identity interwoven with gender and race. Below’s work, however, focuses on Stern’s early years in Germany and her reception at the end of her career with an emphasis on examining Stern from a feminist perspective. Other recent publications on Stern’s work in South Africa, such as the “Brushing up on Stern” exhibition at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town in 2015, have reexamined Stern’s relationships to her subjects and to South African identity.32 Sandra Klopper’s 2017 book Irma Stern Are You Still Alive? is a collection of scholarly essays and letter correspondence between Stern and her friends Richard and Freda Feldman. The book gives the reader an in-depth view of Stern’s thoughts and feelings on everything from personal to political issues, as well as her close friendship with the Feldmans. Klopper’s compilation of these letters provides great insight into Stern as an artist, a friend, and a businesswoman. What is missing from previous studies, though, is a discussion of how Stern used aesthetics and politics to build a successful artistic career during South Africa’s apartheid years. This book is a departure from studies like Marion Arnold’s because it suggests Stern’s racism prevailed despite being at the center of a liberal friendship circle in the Jewish community. Combined with her frequent interactions with her Black female subjects and being widely read and intellectually curious, Stern knew better but chose to accept support from the apartheid government to advance her career. Stern’s exhibitions brought racial politics and aesthetics together in an area of South African culture that resisted connecting to European trends since modern artists in Europe were embracing—rather than repelling—African ideas. Although Stern only lived eighteen years under apartheid, she developed a complex relationship with the apartheid government that continues to affect her artistic legacy. She was invited to participate in several state-sponsored exhibitions and competitions including the Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Exhibition of 1952 that celebrated the 300-year anniversary of the first Dutch colony in South Africa. She also represented South Africa at the Venice and São Paolo Biennales from 1948 until her death in 1966. Stern’s participation in these events helped her to become the public and international face of South

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African art. Despite spending many years traveling and studying abroad and being a member of the marginalized Jewish community, Stern’s artistic approach and outlook resonated with a more provincial white South African audience, one that was paradoxically both deeply attracted to aspects of Black culture but afraid to acknowledge the basic humanity of Black people themselves. This ethos contributed to apartheid’s development and entrenchment as well as to Stern’s polarizing status in the country today. As societies continue to debate the ethical and moral standards to which artists should be held, Stern provides an example of how this dilemma is unfolding in South Africa. For these reasons, a broader global audience will benefit from learning about Stern’s life and her observations of race, gender, and religion in her native South Africa.

Overview of the Book This book discusses Stern’s experiences as a German-Jewish South African artist and how these experiences contributed to her artistic success and her controversial position as a modern South African artist. More specifically, this book focuses on Stern’s engagement with Black and Coloured female subjects in her work. In turn, Stern’s ability to travel internationally significantly enhanced her exposure to new cultures and facilitated the transmission of new ideas to more remote places like South Africa. Stern’s early adoption of the German expressionist style and its views on “primitive” African art allowed her to gain entry into important artistic venues in Europe as a young artist. These views also made her work subject to greater scrutiny in South Africa, where artists were more aligned with Dutch and British traditions that were less concerned with exploring African themes.33 This book is divided into five chapters that correspond with Stern’s biography. Chapter 1 places Stern into the global context of German expressionism through her Berlin experiences, ending with a discussion of how her work intersected with Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke’s conception of the New Negro. Chapter 2 explores Stern’s return to Cape Town as a young woman in 1920 and explains how support from South Africa’s Jewish community encouraged her to use the principles of German expressionism to bring racial issues into the artistic realm in South Africa. Chapter 3 follows Stern through central and east Africa, where she focused her work during the Second World War. Based on her travels and observations in the two regions, Stern published two illustrated travel narratives, Congo and Zanzibar. Stern’s richly illustrated travel narrative

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about her visit to the Belgian Congo documents the political and ethnic conflicts in the region that foreshadowed the Rwandan genocide at the end of the century. In comparison, Zanzibar explores Muslim life in the old city of Stone Town. Chapter 4 connects the rise of the apartheid state in 1948 with Stern’s increasing international profile and her artistic response to Black political resistance. Finally, Chapter 5, the concluding chapter, discusses Stern’s artistic legacy in the post-apartheid era from the perspective of young, Black South African artists of the “Born Free” generation (South Africans born at the end of or after apartheid). Using interviews from young artists who studied Stern’s work and participated in the 2018 Turbine Art Fair in Johannesburg, these artists discussions reveal the varied and nuanced ways that Black artists interpret Stern’s work. It argues that a more culturally relevant contemporary discussion of Stern’s work depends on recentering the Black experience in the social history of South African art. Throughout her life, Stern was a controversial figure. As a young artist, many of her paintings defied the conventional ways that Black women were depicted in South African art, which piqued community interest. During apartheid, Stern defied the advice of Jewish anti-apartheid activists and chose to take a neutral stance on racial discrimination. In the post-apartheid era, Stern’s political beliefs during apartheid jeopardized her stature in the art historical narrative. More than fifty years after her death, in the postcolonial Rhodes Must Fall, Black Lives Matter era, now is an urgent time to reflect on the ways in which even progressive art can be complicit with oppression.34

Notes 1 Sipho Masombuka, “Anatomy of a Brazen Art Heist: Art Theft Pandemic Hits SA with Pretoria Robbery,” The Times, November 13, 2012; Micel Schenhage, “Stolen Art Will Be Hard to Sell,” Citizen, November 13, 2012. Many thanks to Special Collections librarian Melanie Guysten at the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town for her assistance with these articles and other important aspects of this project. 2 “Stolen Pretoria Art Museum Artworks Found,” Mail and Guardian, November 13, 2012. 3 Emma O’Connor, “Art Robbers Ditch Their Most Valuable Stolen Painting,” Time, November 13, 2012. 4 Robyn Dixon, “Art Worth $2 Million Stolen from South African Museum,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2012.

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5 Ibid. 6 The term “Coloured” refers to a specific category of people who are a mixture of Dutch, Afrikaner, Black, and/or Asian heritages in South Africa. 7 Partha Mitter questions the idea of “affinities” in the context of the distinction between non-Western artists’ emulation of Western art and Western artists perceived borrowings from African and Asian cultures. Instead, he suggests that “influence as an analytical tool may have outlived its usefulness.” See Parta Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde (1922–1947) (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 8. 8 Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 24. 9 Ibid. 10 Neville Dubow, ed., Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1923) of Irma Stern (Diep River: Chameleon Press, 1991), 89. 11 Seth Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 5. 12 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 9–10; Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 6–7. 13 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 3. 14 Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis, eds., Women’s Experience of Modernity, 18751945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 5. 15 Karel Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 1894–1933 (Cape Town: South African Library, 1994), 36. 16 Ibid. 17 “Theatre List,” manuscript held in the archive at the Irma Stern Museum, the University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa. 18 Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 44–6. 19 Ibid., 46. 20 “Stern Words on Dakar,” Johannesburg Sunday Times, 1938. 21 Z. Pallo Jordan, “Forward,” in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, exh. Cat. Hayden Proud, ed. (Cape Town and Johannesburg: UNISA Press and South Africa History Online, 2003), 13. The Bruce Campbell Smith Collection is a rich collection of South African artists with a focus on Black and Coloured artists who are not well known because of apartheid. 22 Josef Kalmer, “Die Malerin Irma Stern,” Judisches Familienblatt fur Wissenschaft/ Kunst und Literatur, no. 8 (1926): 26. 23 Max Osborn, Irma Stern (Leipzig: Verlag Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1927), 24. 24 Ibid. 25 Joseph Sachs, Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa (Pretoria: Van Schaik, Ltd., 1942), 47–8.

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

26 Neville Dubow, Irma Stern. Cape Town: Struik, 20. 27 Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Winnipeg and Stellenbosch: Fernwood Press/Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation, 1995), 102. 28 Marion Arnold, ed., Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910-1994 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 64. 29 Wolfgang von Moltke, “Zwei Sudafrikanische Expressionisten,” Mouseion: Studien aus Kunst und Geschichte fuer Otto H. Foerster (1960): 263–4. 30 Under von Moltke’s tenure, the Bielefeld Kunsthalle purchased two Stern paintings, which represent the sole holdings of her work in public collections in Germany. 31 Jutta Hulsewig-Johnen and Irene Below, Irma Stern und der Expressionismus: Afrika Und Europa (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 1996). 32 Andrea Lewis and Carole H. Kaufmann, Brushing Up on Stern: Featuring Works from the Permanent Collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town: Bonhams, 2015). 33 Esme Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists since 1875. (Cape Town and Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1983), 1. 34 I thank the anonymous reviewer for this phrase and whose comments helped me to think through this idea.

1

Irma Stern in a Global Context Expressionist Influences

Throughout Irma Stern’s life, Africa and Europe intersected in ways that profoundly shaped her career. One of the most important intersections occurred during Stern’s stay in Germany from 1910 to 1920. This ten-year period coincided with the height of Germany’s colonial activities, the emergence of expressionism, the onset of the First World War, and Germany’s economic and political collapse at the beginning of the Weimar years. Having arrived in Germany as a teenager and left as a young adult, Stern treated her time in Berlin as her opportunity to explore her own artistic identity. With guidance from expressionist artists such as Max Pechstein, Stern used the Berlin milieu—a society fascinated by conversations about difference—to understand how racial difference contributed to new perspectives on both formal and thematic approaches to art. Being in Germany during this pivotal historical moment allowed her work to be noticed by critics and thinkers from Europe and North America, including African American philosopher Alain Locke. This early transatlantic artistic engagement with expressionism established Stern’s global perspective as an artist and encouraged a genuine curiosity for other cultures that fueled her desire to record her travels on canvas.

Expressionist Beginnings: Artists Exploring Questions about the State As there is no single definition of the term, scholars agree more broadly that expressionism constituted a break with Western artistic conventions of naturalism and an embrace of the “universal, metaphysical, and transnational power of the new art forms.”1 For young artists seeking opportunities to channel their energies into a more critical assessment of their rapidly changing society, expressionism freed them from state-sanctioned academic principles

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and guided them toward a more vibrant sense of individual engagement with the world.2 Many expressionist artists used their work to respond to the ways in which Germany was transforming itself and developing its national ethos. Since France was still considered the center of European art world in the early twentieth century, German artists viewed expressionism as one way to articulate new questions and artistic issues in a more culturally specific way. Scholar Carol Washton Long writes that compared with other artistic movements in Europe at the time, “Expressionism was more involved with the relationships between art and society, art and politics, and art and popular culture. Because of this engagement, artists and critics dealt with a wider range of questions about the artists’ interactions with the state.”3

The Eternal Child and the Context of the First World War Stern’s study in Germany coincided with the emergence of expressionism, giving her the opportunity to interact with artists who were critically engaging with politics in their work. Through her relationship with German artists such as Max Pechstein and her immersion in the German cultural environment that nurtured its beginnings, expressionism made the most significant and longlasting impact on Stern’s artistic career by influencing her stylistic approach and her understanding of the relationship between an artist and society. Stern’s global mindset was further developed by the onset of the First World War, the political event that would reshape world order. Although no fighting occurred on German soil, the First World War’s devastation created an international political and social vacuum that left an impression on Stern and an entire generation of artists who struggled to describe their frustrations in visual terms. Artists responded to the conflict in different ways. Many artists supported the war, but few were prepared for the violence that resulted from trench warfare and new weaponry, such as chemical weapons and machine guns.4 Franz Marc, for example, volunteered as a soldier and died in battle in France. Käthe Kollwitz lost her son in Flanders and used much of her work afterward to address themes related to war and suffering. Stern bore witness to the social and political upheaval around her, noting the war’s effect on Germans’ daily lives. At Christmastime in 1914, she wrote in her diary in somewhat hyperbolic terms, And Christmas trees are fragrant in the streets. The rushing, warm blood is steaming—I see wasted lives, thousands, millions of men. And are we to wait

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here and celebrate Christmas, this feast of peace, while everything is running with blood, among all those staring dead eyes? Every festive light reminds one of the broken hearts of women, of bitter, innumerable tears shed by children, of disappointed hopes, of all this horror, of the war. And is this how we are to celebrate Christmas?5

Stern spent time with German soldiers who were recuperating from war injuries, painting with them and entertaining them. Her interactions with people, especially youth, raised her awareness of the war’s impact on German society. In 1916, while still a student at the Weimar Academy, Stern painted her own response to the war in an oil painting she called Das Ewige Kind (The Eternal Child), which marked a turning point in her understanding the relationship between art and society (Figure 1.1).6 After seeing a gaunt young girl on a tram, Stern decided to paint her. The Eternal Child depicts a young German girl sitting on a high-backed wooden chair, holding a bouquet of flowers. Her wide-set, dark-brown eyes and long nose dominate her face. The child has a slightly disheveled look; the part between her shoulder-length braids is crooked, and the red and blue bow on her dress is askew. Her lips are pursed in a position that forms a slight frown, just enough to indicate that she is uncomfortable. Her dress, a patchy, red frock, has a white lace collar and frayed sleeves. The beige background gives no indication of location or time of day, bringing more focus to the child’s grim expression. The Eternal Child conveys Stern’s desire to understand German youths’ plight. German men were particularly vulnerable since they were sent to fight on the front lines, yet they had no political voice. As an upper-middle class family visiting from South Africa, the Sterns remained insulated from many of

Figure 1.1  Irma Stern (1894–1966), The Eternal Child (1916). Oil on board. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Rupert Family Foundation, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch, South Africa. (See Plate 3.)

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Figure 1.2  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Girl with a Pendulum. Oil tempera on cardboard, 1900. © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Photo © Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen.

the hardships faced by lower-class Germans who were forced to participate in combat. But, they were not isolated from the tens of thousands of grief-stricken families mourning lost children. Throughout the country, the war’s violence had permanently altered citizens’ views on their role in German society, particularly for young people. Observing severely wounded veterans and starving children heightened her political awareness and made her more attuned to social issues in general. Years later, she reflected on her decision to paint the child, stating, “I shuddered and awoke to my own generation.”7 Stern’s The Eternal Child was her first serious painting that demonstrated artistic vision and social consciousness, fitting within the tradition of women artists such as Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker.8 In fact, The Eternal Child bears similarities to Modersohn-Becker’s 1900 oil painting, Girl with a Pendulum (Figure 1.2).9 Both paintings focus on young girls sitting awkwardly on a chair. Painted sixteen years apart, the two paintings each capture a malaise that goes beyond the typical childhood worries and seems to evoke deeper concerns. For both works, the child’s sullen facial expression and few details in the background focus the viewer’s attention on the child’s discomfort. Having shared instructor Fritz Mackensen with Modersohn-Becker, Stern began to understand and read her diaries, Stern began to understand how to shape her female subjects from a woman artist’s perspective.10

“You Are Equipped with Your Own Language”: Irma Stern and Max Pechstein The Eternal Child revealed Stern’s ability to interpret contemporary society through the medium of painting, a practice that she would continue throughout

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her career. The work attracted the attention of expressionist artist and political activist Max Pechstein, who would become Stern’s primary expressionist mentor in Germany.11 Pechstein was one of the most prolific expressionist artists, working across media in drawings, lithography, painting, and woodcuts, in addition to his political work creating posters for socialist causes.12 Over several decades, Stern and Pechstein developed a deep bond characterized not only by an interest in painting but also by a shared curiosity about nonWestern cultures. Stern brought her South African childhood experiences to the relationship, whereas Pechstein had recently returned from living in Palau, the German colony in the South Pacific. In their letters and through the stylistic similarities in their work, it is evident that Stern and Pechstein were bound by a mutual desire to be innovative as artists while illustrating an understanding of the world outside of Europe. By her own account, Stern met Pechstein in 1916 or 1917, after she painted The Eternal Child, through her mother’s friend.13 She described her initial encounter with Pechstein as follows: I showed Mr. Pechstein some of my drawings and paintings to hear his opinion. To my great joy, he liked them all. . . . The next day, he visited my studio. He spent the entire afternoon looking at my work, and when he left, it was as if we had known each other for years, such good friends we had become.14

Pechstein, who was thirteen years older than Stern, was born in Zwickau, Germany, and attended the Dresden Kunstgewerbeschule, where he studied decorative arts.15 His early work was steeped in medieval and gothic aesthetics, as well as in the Jugendstil movement.16 Pechstein joined the expressionist art group Die Brücke in 1906, and in 1907, he went to Paris where he discovered Matisse and the Fauves and their brazen use of bright colors.17 Pechstein had viewed African and Oceanic sculpture in the ethnographic museum in Dresden and was interested in using African sculptural techniques of abstraction in his own work. He created several woodcuts, such as the 1917 illustration Säugling (Nursing Child) for the expressionist publication Das Kunstblatt (Figure 1.3). In this illustration, Pechstein reinterprets the Western artistic theme of a mother nursing her child using African sculpture. Although the child in the illustration has simian physical features that could be interpreted as representing Africans in a demeaning or derogatory manner, for the time period, Pechstein’s interest in African sculpture exemplified a larger effort among German expressionists to pursue their interest in the African continent.18

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Figure 1.3  Max Pechstein, Nursing Child. Woodcut, 1918. Pechstein, Max (1881–1955) © Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2019. Infant (Saugling) (plate, preceding p. 161) from the periodical Das Kunstblatt, vol. 2, no. 6 (June 1918). 1918 (executed 1917). Woodcut. Composition: 8 7/8 × 4 5/16 in. (22.6 × 10.9 cm); sheet: 11 1/4 × 8 1/2 in. (28.5 × 21.6 cm). Publisher: Verlag Gustav Kiepenheuer, Weimar. Edition: Periodical, 1918: deluxe edition: 110 (this ex.); regular edition: unknown (approx. 1,000); posthumous reprint, 1980: 3000 in the exhibition catalog Sechzig Jahre Galerie Nierendorf (Berlin, 1980). Transferred from the Museum Library. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Building on his curiosity about non-Western cultures, Pechstein and his wife Lotte moved to the German colony of Palau in 1914 to observe its people and paint its tropical landscape. Pechstein’s art dealer, Wolfgang Gurlitt, owner of the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt, agreed to finance the trip if Pechstein gave him exclusive rights to exhibit his Palau work.19 Pechstein intended to stay for an extended period, but the outbreak of the First World War forced them to return after one year. Like French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin, who spent time living in the French colony of Tahiti, Pechstein had become immersed in his South Seas lifestyle. Consequently, his abrupt return to Europe affected him deeply. In a letter to Stern years after his return, Pechstein described his premature departure from Palau as being “like Adam banned from Paradise.”20 Pechstein influenced Stern both stylistically and professionally, offering guidance on technique and choice of subjects.21 In mentoring Stern, Pechstein found a kindred spirit who was interested in the artistic exploration of similar themes, such as Africa and idyllic landscapes. Like the other expressionists, Pechstein did not seek to imitate nature in his work; rather, he viewed his paintings as interpretations of nature’s emotional effects on himself.22 He tried to instill this view in Stern as well. Their letter exchange included discussions of their work, words of encouragement, and painting suggestions. For example, Pechstein urged Stern to follow her own desires and instincts when painting.

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Figure 1.4  Max Pechstein, Letter to Irma Stern. Ink on paper, 1917. Pechstein, Max (1881–1955) © Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2019. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

“You are equipped with your own language and have your own things to say,” he wrote to Stern on July 19, 1917.23 Pechstein’s experience outside of Europe in Palau helped him to find common ground with Stern, and they often wrote of the importance of nature as a source of inspiration. In the same July 19, 1917, letter, Pechstein added, “throw yourself into nature, then I will help you find your own path in your work and show you how it achieved such great value.”24 As artists, Pechstein and Stern naturally expressed themselves visually. Pechstein frequently illustrated his letters to Stern, adorning them with watercolors of landscapes, seascapes, and human figures. For example, in a letter to Stern dated July 16, 1917, Pechstein included a drawing of a nude woman nursing a baby, Letter to Irma Stern (Figure 1.4).25 The nursing child obscures the woman’s body, but her face is visible, and its angularity and simplicity of form resemble an African mask. The fusion of Africa and Europe in this image reinforces how strongly Pechstein (and, by association, Stern) connected to the expressionist ethos of exploring new artistic ideas by merging artistic elements from different cultures together. Pechstein invited Stern to become a founding member of the Novembergruppe (November Group) in 1919, a group of artists who believed that the new socialist government established after the First World War would support artistic freedom, make contemporary art more accessible to all citizens, and provide artists from lower-class backgrounds the opportunity to attend trade schools and exhibit their work.26 Stern attended the inaugural December 3 meeting.27 Her invitation to join the Novembergruppe—the first page of its manifesto include the self-description “the German Union of radical artists”—could have

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reflected her interest in being considered an artist with a social conscience since her signature painting during the war, The Eternal Child, dealt with the conflict’s effect on young children.28 She exhibited with the Novembergruppe in 1919, 1920, and 1927. Although it is unclear exactly how many paintings she exhibited with the group, her work during this time focused on images from South Africa. In the 1927 exhibition, she showed Frauenbildnis (Picture of a Woman; 1925) and Drei Negerinnen (Three Black Women; 1926).29

The Berlin-Africa Nexus Stern’s paintings of Black Africans exhibited with the Novembergruppe during the Weimar years (1919–1933) served to remind German audiences of their failed attempt at colonialism and their increasingly uncomfortable relationship with racial difference. Since Germany had to surrender its colonies to other European countries after the war as a condition of the Treaty of Versailles, Germans entered the postcolonial sphere much earlier than other European countries.30 “Colonial loss left behind a strong legacy for Weimar Germany; reaction to this outcome of the Great War permeated many political and cultural discourses of the period,” write Florian Cobb and Elaine Martin.31 In addition, Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke –Muniz de Faria note, “European metropolitan centers also brought Africans to Europe, and with them, a new set of problems for defining the relationship between Europeans and people of African descent.”32 French forces, for example, used African soldiers to occupy the Rhine region, which only exacerbated tensions between the two countries and heightened German fears of racial difference and miscegenation.33 For viewers more interested in improving domestic political and economic conditions in Germany rather than focusing on regaining colonial territories, Stern’s African paintings in the Novembergruppe’s exhibition signaled a closed chapter in German history.34

The Galerie Fritz Gurlitt and Dumela Marena After meeting Stern, Pechstein helped her find a receptive audience for her paintings and drawings from South Africa by introducing Stern to his Berlin art dealer, Wolfgang Gurlitt. Gurlitt owned the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt, which he inherited from his father, Fritz, one of the most prominent and successful art dealers in Berlin. Of her first encounter with Wolfgang Gurlitt, Stern wrote:

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Mr. Pechstein put me in contact with Wolfgang Gurlitt, the owner of the most prominent art gallery in Berlin. After he looked at my work, he immediately arranged an exhibition for me. I showed around 30 large oil paintings and a large selection of oils and watercolors. The exhibition was surely my springboard into the art scene in Central Europe. Invitations to exhibit my paintings suddenly came from everywhere.35

Gurlitt’s family had deep connections to the German art world, and the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt facilitated connections between post-Impressionists in France and expressionists in Germany early in the twentieth century.36 Under Wolfgang Gurlitt, the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt thrived, supporting artists who were setting trends and forging new directions in modernism. Gurlitt was particularly interested in artists who were working outside of Europe, subsidizing artists’ (such as Pechstein) short-term overseas trips. Through visionary leadership of his printing press, the Verlag Fritz Gurlitt, Gurlitt used the graphic arts to support expressionists including Stern and Pechstein.37 Of the dozens of printing presses that emerged in Germany in the early twentieth century, the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt’s press was the leading publisher of expressionist illustrations, with twenty-nine illustrated books credited to its name.38 The gallery specialized in limited-edition works created for collectors with specific interests, such as erotic works by and about women, illustrated versions of literary classics, and colonial literature.39 Working with Pechstein and then Stern helped Gurlitt extend his gallery’s global reach by supporting artists who wanted to explore life in non-Western locales outside of Europe. Stern’s meeting with Gurlitt in 1916, therefore, fostered a critical artistic connection between South Africa and Germany. In 1920, he commissioned Stern’s lithographic series Dumela Marena: Bilder Aus Afrika (Images from Africa). Dumela Marena’s publication marked the beginning of a lifelong professional relationship between Stern and Gurlitt. Dumela Marena consists of twelve lithographs, each measuring 29.5 by 40 centimeters. From its cover page, Dumela Marena introduces Stern’s early vision of South Africa to a German audience (Figure 1.5). It was named after a traditional greeting in the Sesotho language group in southern Africa. Even the title is significant—Stern misquotes the greeting, which should be Dumela “Mma” for a woman or Dumela “Rra” for a man. The word “dumela” is significant since it is more than just a greeting; it is also an affirmation of another person’s humanity. The term also translates to “I believe in you” or “I see great potential in you.” Although it is unlikely that Stern understood the deeper philosophical meaning behind the phrase, her decision to use it for the series’ title signals an

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Figure 1.5  Irma Stern, Dumela Marena, Title Page. Lithograph, 1920. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

Figure 1.6  Max Pechstein (group of natives around a hut). Lithograph on wove paper, 1919. Pechstein, Max (1881–1955) © Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2019. Sheet: 10 7/8 × 14 in. (27.62 × 35.56 cm) Imge: 5 3/8 × 6 1/2 in. (13.65 × 16.51 cm). The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, purchased with funds provided by Anna Bing Arnold, Museum Associates Acquisition Fund, and deaccession funds. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, USA. Digital Image © Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

early interest in engaging with African culture beyond its visual elements. The series is a combination of Stern’s memories of South Africa and the expressionist artistic techniques she was honing in Germany, and it also stylistically resembles some of Pechstein’s drawings from Palau, such as an untitled 1919 lithograph of native Palauans sitting in a hut (Figure 1.6). Since Gurlitt supported both Pechstein and Stern’s artistic projects, he may have imposed his own vision for what his clientele would expect from colonial drawings. Like much of Stern’s early work, Dumela Marena captures modern European art’s paradoxical relationship with the African continent. On the one hand, the series represents Stern’s effort to reconcile her childhood memories of South Africa with the idealized Africa that was familiar to her German audience. On the other, even though the drawings are based on Stern’s first-hand impressions

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of South Africa, Stern seems to be giving her audience a taste of a generalized “exotic” Africa. For example, all of the women are naked in the series, and the men are covered only with loincloths, reinforcing German perceptions of African people as primitive and sexually uninhibited. All of the figures are faceless characters, contributing to the idea that African people are “types” that possess no individuality. Yet based on her experiences as a child in the Transvaal interacting with local Black people, Stern knew that this was not true. Despite having her own personal observations as evidence to the contrary, she struggled against the dominant European paradigm of Africa. The lithographic series consists of eleven pages, or panels, and depicts Stern’s interpretation of daily life in a rural Black community. The title and first image depict the bust of an African woman against a stylized horizon (Figure 1.7). The woman’s body partially blocks the sun. Her facial expression is neutral, and she has a sharp, pointed chin and a broad nose and forehead, similar to a Baule mask from West Africa that Stern may have seen in a Berlin ethnographic collection. The woman’s breasts are conically shaped and unnatural looking, conveying an exoticism that would have appealed to Gurlitt’s clientele. In panel 1, there are two naked women in a palm-filled village, one sitting and one standing and balancing a pot on her head. Like Pechstein’s drawings from Palau, these types of images suggest that inhabitants of the South Seas and Africans live in an idyllic state of arrested development, removed from the passage of time and rigid social conventions. The Weimar era’s period of social and political disarray may have attracted audiences to such fantasies. Narratively, Dumela Marena gives the audience a brief and oversimplified view of Black African culture and is a display of Stern’s early and immature

Figure 1.7  Irma Stern, Dumela Marena, Panels 1–4. Lithograph, 1920, 29.5 × 40 cm. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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understanding of Black life in South Africa. The series is significant because it solidified the relationship between Stern, Gurlitt, and Pechstein, thereby connecting Stern to a global artistic discussion about non-Western influences in modern art. Pechstein’s stylistic influence and his artistic observations in Palau also made an impact on Stern and Dumela Marena. Despite their broad approaches to depicting places like Palau and South Africa, Pechstein and Stern were still breaking new ground as artists interested in brown and Black bodies. Their work would soon be noticed and celebrated in the United States, where a new movement to inspire modern art in the Black community was taking shape.

Enter Alain Locke’s The New Negro Nearing the end of her stay in Germany in 1920, Stern was departing a country that was struggling to rebuild after the war and reeling from the loss of its colonial territories. Yet despite its dire economic conditions and political turmoil, Germany continued to serve as a meeting point for culturally and socially progressive ideas, a reputation that would only intensify as the Weimar era progressed. In addition to its world-class universities, young people from around the world were attracted to cities like Berlin and Munich for their reputations as places of literary vibrancy, musical and theatrical experimentation, and sexual freedom. One such young person was African American philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke. Locke was the first African American to receive the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford in England in 1907, continuing his overseas study at the University of Berlin from 1910 to 1911. While studying in Berlin, Locke followed the academic conversations about the “discovery” of African art by Europeans, specifically the Benin Bronzes that were confiscated by British soldiers during the Benin Punitive Expedition in 1897. The bronzes, exquisite examples of bronze casting created using the sophisticated lost-wax casting (cire perdu) technique, were forcefully stolen from Benin City and sold throughout Europe to wealthy collectors. Eventually, newly established ethnographic museums in major cities such as Paris and Berlin acquired many of the finest examples of the bronzes. Austrian scholar and ethnographer Felix von Luschan, for example, used personal family resources to acquire Benin Bronzes for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Locke believed that the bronzes’ arrival in European museum collections signaled a shift in European views on African art, led by von Luschan, who he describes as “the outstanding authority of his generation on primitive African

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art.”40 According to scholar Malgorzata Irek, von Luschan’s perspective on the bronzes was one of admiration and respect for the works’ artistic achievement.41 Von Luschan held what would have been considered more liberal views on Africa and was critical of European colonialism—he once famously quipped, “There are no other savages in Africa other than some whites acting crazily.”42 Von Luschan’s positive views on African art opened Locke’s mind to the possibility that other German artists were producing positive artistic representations of Black people. He discovered several German artists who were doing innovative work that incorporated an embrace of African sculpture or used Black people as subjects for their work. As a result, he forged strong partnerships with German artists and drew heavily from German thinkers in his effort to convince Black artists in the United States to adopt a new artistic paradigm. For example, Munich-educated artist Winold Reiss illustrated many of Locke’s publications, such as The Survey Graphic, and had a unique approach to portraiture in which he created detailed renderings of the sitter’s head and torso in color with the other details broadly sketched in black and white in the painting Black Prophet (Figure 1.8). Reiss went on to mentor African American modernist Aaron Douglas, who was instrumental in helping Locke realize his vision for a politically transformative Black modernism.43 In 1925, Locke published his seminal work The New Negro, a critical anthology of Black artists, poets, writers, musicians, and scholars who declared their autonomy from the dominant narrative in American society that depicted Black people as culturally, politically, and intellectually inferior. In his own essay for the anthology, The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts, Locke describes how European artists have been incorporating African sculptural elements and Black bodies in their work to great acclaim on the continent. In his own attempts to empower young

Figure 1.8  Winold Reiss, Black Prophet (The African), 1925. © Reiss Partners. (See Plate 4.)

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Black artists in the United States to rise above racism and segregation, Locke saw potential in Stern, the only woman among other German artists who also worked to transform the way the Black body and African identity were depicted in art. Max Pechstein, Elaine [sic] Stern, von Reuckterschell [sic] . . . All these artists have looked upon the African scene and the African countenance, and discovered there a beauty that calls for a distinctive idiom both of color and form. The Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own patterns if it is ever to be seriously and importantly interpreted.44

In other words, Locke wanted Black artists to fight against American stereotypes and embrace Blackness as an aesthetic asset in a similar way as he perceived German artists treating Black people in their work. It was not a coincidence that Locke made a connection between Pechstein, Stern, and Walter von Ruckteschell. By the time Locke published The New Negro in 1925, Pechstein was a prolific and established expressionist with a large body of work that demonstrated his interest in African sculpture and in Germany’s former colonies. He had also heavily influenced Stern’s artistic approach and helped her establish connections to important German artists’ organizations as well as the gallery dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt. Walter von Ruckteschell (1882–1941) was a captain and illustrator in the German army who was commissioned to work with General Paul von LettowVorbeck, the notoriously aggressive commander of the German army in German East Africa (now Tanzania).45 In honor of Lettow-Vorbeck’s departure from German territory in East Africa, Von Ruckteschell created a series of ten lithographs called Kwaheri Askari: Auf Wiedersehen Askari. During the First World War, the “Askaris” were African soldiers who fought with Lettow-Vorbeck against the British. Despite the fact that they were outnumbered by British forces, the Askaris remained “loyal” to Lettow-Vorbeck and fought until the Germans capitulated. Their brave “allegiance” to the German army was celebrated in Germany, and the Askaris were immortalized in postwar German culture as an example of loyal colonial subjects, making East Africa “an important site of postcolonial memory in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” according to Sebastian Conrad.46 Furthermore, when the lithographs had been printed in 1918, Kwaheri Askari had potent visual and political meaning for Germans—they symbolized the country’s dominance of African peoples and their acceptance of Germany’s colonial rule. Locke was enchanted by the ten plates in Von Ruckteschell’s series, using one in his publication The Survey Graphic to depict the true nature of Young Africa (Figure 1.9).47 The boy’s face is captivatingly drawn, with dark, striking eyes and a

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Figure 1.9  Walter von Ruckteschell, Young Africa. Lithograph, 1919. © The Proprietors of the Boston Athenæum.

penetrating gaze. He looks wise and thoughtful beyond his years. Despite LettowVorbeck’s reputation as a vehement racist and an ardent colonialist, Locke found artistic power in Von Ruckteschell’s celebratory images of Lettow-Vorbeck’s Askaris. By focusing on the image as message, instead of the artist as messenger, Locke established a powerfully complex paradox for Black artists in the United States, namely how to harvest ethnic pride and artistic innovation even from images that were intended to reinforce racial stereotypes and colonialist thinking.48 In his essay “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” Locke uses Pechstein, Reiss, Von Ruckteschell, and by extension Stern to bolster his argument for why Black artists should look to Europe for advice on depicting African themes: “It is not meant to dictate a style to the young Negro artist, but to point the lesson that contemporary European art has already learned—that any vital artistic expression of the Negro theme and subject in art must break through the stereotypes to a new style, a distinctive, fresh technique, and some sort of characteristic idiom.”49 This strategy, and Locke’s inclusion of Stern in it, established Stern as an artist who would “seriously and importantly” depict the Black body as Locke described.50 Locke’s problematic strategy and his acolytes did not escape criticism. The origins of Black aesthetic politics and their connections to race consciousness in the early twentieth century were high-stakes and politically charged. In a 1934 essay “The Negro in Modern Art,” African American artist Romare Bearden criticized Black artists who looked to Europe for inspiration: It is interesting to contrast the bold way in which the African sculptor approached his work, with the timidity of the Negro artist today. His work is at best hackneyed and uninspired, and only mere rehashing from the work of any artist that might have influenced him. They have looked at nothing with their own eyes—seemingly content to use borrowed forms.

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Similarly, African American artist and art historian James A. Porter wrote a scathing 1937 critique of Locke’s book, Negro Art Past and Present, in which he expands on the ideas introduced in the essay “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts.” Porter categorizes Locke’s ideas as “one continuous plea for racialism in Negro Art.”51 He goes on to question how African American artists using European art as models “could possibly be construed as an object lesson to Americans in the painting of a Negro subject. Nor can it be proved through this that Europeans respect the Negro more.”52 The contradiction between Stern’s haunting, piercing, and beautiful images of Black Africans and her own often uninformed and retrograde opinions on race fits squarely within this global conversation on race consciousness in art, particularly as she became more deeply embedded in the South African art world where race was both a subtle and obvious theme for many artists. As she prepared to return to Cape Town in 1920, Stern’s interactions with expressionists like Pechstein and her experience with the beginnings of the tremendous social upheaval that ushered in the Weimar era helped her develop a race consciousness that resonated with a global audience. Equipped with both the desire and skills to express radical ideas such as race through art, Stern was prepared to challenge the Cape Town art establishment’s status quo. Her early work in Germany demonstrates her awareness of art’s inextricable relationship to society, a realization that would wield significant consequences for her work in South Africa.

Notes 1 Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5. 2 Ibid., 67. 3 Long, German Expressionism, xxii. 4 Walter Grasskamp, “A Historical Continuity of Disjunctures,” in The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism, ed. Irit Rogoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15. 5 Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 51. 6 Ibid., 51–2. 7 Ibid., 52. 8 The painting continued to be a source of debate for scholars for decades, with most agreeing that it launched her artistic career by gaining the attention of

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artists, including Max Pechstein. Some scholars, such as Karel Schoeman, argue that outside of a few diary entries, Stern’s life on the fashionable Kürfürstendamm in Berlin was shielded from the realities of the war. Meanwhile, German scholar Irene Below offers a completely different interpretation of Stern’s early adulthood: “As a child, Irma Stern was politically awakened by the arrest of her father during the Boer War, and as a young woman, by the First World War and the subsequent political turmoil in Germany (Expressions, 34).” 9 Paula Modersohn-Becker was a member of the Worpswede colony, a group of artists led by Fritz Mackensen, one of Stern’s early instructors. Modersohn-Becker’s artistic approach shows how women artists in particular sought ways to legitimize the female subject from a woman’s perspective. According to art historian Diane Radycki, “no woman artist painted herself nude, or mothers nude, or girls nude” before Modersohn-Becker, signaling the emergence and refinement of a modernist female gaze in European painting. Her numerous nude paintings and self-portraits, including the only known pregnant self-portrait, depict candid self-reflections in Modersohn-Becker’s work that could only come from a female perspective. For younger women artists like Stern, who read Modersohn-Becker’s letters and diary pages, artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker established a precedent for women asserting more agency and self-confidence in addressing themes such as femininity, motherhood, and female corporality in their work. For more information on Modersohn-Becker, see, Diane Radycki, Paula ModersohnBecker: The First Modern Woman Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). 10 The female gaze is an important concept in understanding and interpreting Stern’s work. Griselda Pollock’s foundational text, Vision and Difference, signals the paradigm shift in thinking about how we view women artists and their work within the discipline. Her work has continued to influence other feminist art historians and the discipline in general. For more information, see Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). 11 Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 63. 12 See Magdalena Moeller, ed., Max Pechstein: sein malerisches Werk. (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1996); Bernhard Fuldha and Aya Soyka, Max Pechstein and the Rise of German Expressionism (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies) (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012). 13 Irma Stern, “Audio Clip of Irma Stern Interview” (Jewish Museum of South Africa Exhibition). During the interview, Stern does not mention her mother’s friend’s name. 14 Irene Below, “Irma Stern Und Max Pechstein,” in Liebe Macht Kunst: Kunstlerpaare Im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Renate Berger (Cologne: Bohlau, 2000), 41. Translated by author.

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15 Max Pechstein, Errinerungen, ed. Leopold Reidemeister (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1960). 16 Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 17 Ibid. 18 Jill Lloyd has written a comprehensive study of primitivism in German Expressionist art. For more information, see German Expressionism. 19 Ibid. 20 Letter from Max Pechstein to Irma Stern, September 11, 1920, Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. Translation by Dr. Christine Rinne. In 2016, Aya Soika curated an exhibition of Pechstein’s work in Palau Der Traum vom Paradis: Max und Lotte Pechsteins Reise im Südsee at the Kunstsammelung Zwickau in Germany. The accompanying catalog is titled Der Traum vom Paradis: Max und Lotte Pechsteins Reise im Südsee (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag: 2016). 21 In her important article, “Irma Stern und Max Pechstein,” Dr. Irene Below suggests that Pechstein and Stern had a romantic relationship. Although Below makes a compelling case for this relationship, even suggesting that Pechstein included Stern in one of his paintings, it is still difficult to conclusively make this determination based on her evidence, particularly since Stern did disclose in her diaries when she had romantic feelings for men, such as Hippolyto Raposo, a man she met on a boat while on her way back to Germany (see Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 80). 22 Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 111. 23 Letter from Max Pechstein to Irma Stern, July 19, 1917, Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. Translation by Dr. Christine Rinne. 24 Ibid. 25 Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. MSC 2(3). These letters were written after Pechstein saw Eternal Child, but before the first Novembergruppe meeting, and they help to establish the artists’ mutual interest in non-Western subject matter as a central aspect of their relationship. 26 Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–2. 27 Ibid., 252, note 16. 28 Peter Hopf, ed., 15. Europäische Kunstausstellungen Berlin 1977: Tendenzen Der Zwanziger Jahre, Die Novembergruppe Teil I- Maler (Berlin: Buchdruckerei Erich Proh, 1977). 29 Galerie Bodo Niemann, Novembergruppe (Berlin: Galerie Bodo Niemann/Heinz Stein, 1993). By this time, Stern has moved back to South Africa. The dates of these works coincide with her trip to Swaziland, where she completed several studies of groups of Black women.

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30 For more on German colonialism and its impact on the Weimar period, see Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sarah Lennox, and Susanne Zantop’s The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998) and Britta Schilling’s Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 31 Florian Cobb and Elaine Martin, “Introduction: Coloniality in Post-Imperial Culture,” in Weimar Colonialism: Discourses and Legacies of Post-Imperialism in Germany after 1918 (Bielefeld: Asthesis Verlag, 2014), 10. 32 Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of the Imperial Imagination,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, eds. Friedrichsmeyer et al., 205. 33 Ibid., 206–7. 34 Several other female artists exhibited with the Novembergruppe in later years, including one of Stern’s good friends, Katharina Heise. For more information, see Niemann, Novembergruppe. 35 Below, “Irma Stern Und Max Pechstein,” 41. Translated by author. 36 The Gurlitt family was one of the most prominent families in German art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wolfgang Gurlitt’s grandfather, Louis Gurlitt, was a painter. Louis’ son, Fritz, established the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt, which initially specialized in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. Fritz Gurlitt died in 1893. His wife, Annarella, briefly ran the gallery before transferring ownership to her son Wolfgang in 1907. Wolfgang decided to keep the gallery’s name. See Peter Lasko, The Expressionist Roots of Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press/Palgrave, 2003). 37 Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 54–5. 38 Lothar Lang, Expressionist Book Illustration in Germany: 1907-1927 (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976). 39 Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, 54–5. 40 Malgorzata Irek, “From Berlin to Harlem: Felix von Luschan, Alain Locke, and the New Negro,” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, Werner Sollers and Maria Dietrich, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 175. 41 Irek argues for a reconsideration of Germany’s role in shaping a more positive view of African art in the early twentieth century, focusing on Von Luschan’s influence on Locke. 42 Irek, 175. 43 For more on Aaron Douglas and his relationship to Winold Reiss, see Renee Ater and Susan Earle, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), exhibition catalog.

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

44 Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, Alain Locke, ed., with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 263–4. 45 Peter Schneck, “The New Negro from Germany,” American Art 22, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 104–5. 46 Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 54. 47 Maria Dietrich and Jurgen Heinrichs, From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 18. Peter Schneck also provides an in-depth discussion of Locke’s interest in von Ruckteschell’s work in his article “Vom Askari zum Negro: Alain Locke und Walter von Ruckteschell,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 51, no. 4 (2006): 499–522. 48 Ibid. 49 Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” 266–7. 50 Ibid., 264. 51 James A. Porter, “Negro Art: Past and Present by Alain Locke” Review. The Journal of Negro Education 6, no. 4 (October 1937): 635. 52 Ibid.

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Cape Town Blues Painting South Africa

Irma Stern returned to South Africa from Germany in 1920 to establish herself as a South African artist. Compared with Berlin, Cape Town might have seemed like a provincial outpost. The city, however, offered a young, cosmopolitan woman like Stern the opportunity to bring a new and fresh artistic perspective to an audience that was anxiously trying to maintain connections to Europe while establishing its own traditions. To Stern, Cape Town may have seemed quiet and boring, however, like the rest of South Africa, significant changes were occurring as the country was beginning to segregate along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Although these fractures would deepen enough to become obstacles for Stern in later years, as a young Jewish female artist in 1920, she was in a unique position to move between communities to search for subjects who interested her. Emboldened by her work with Max Pechstein and the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin, Stern continued to pursue Black Africans as artistic subjects that she could paint in the expressionist style. As the nexus for slavery, capitalism, and colonialism in southern Africa, Cape Town was the ideal place to explore issues of race, gender, and religion from a modernist perspective that viewed the friction these issues often produced as catalysts for new ideas. The time that she spent with the German expressionists in Berlin showed her that Africa and the “idea” of Africa were relevant topics to explore in modern art. With this mindset, Stern began her career in Cape Town determined to find ways to express her artistic vision of Africa through her work. As a young adult, settling into Cape Town’s Jewish community provided Stern with a network of feminists, intellectuals, and social advocates who helped challenge and shape Stern’s approach to her subjects. In turn, Stern’s paintings of Jewish South Africans serve as a record of a diverse and vibrant community that sought to influence, yet remain distinct from, the rest of South Africa.

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

Accepting the Privileges with “Both Hands”: Whiteness and the South African Jewish Community Even before apartheid codified racial discrimination, race was the primary method of social stratification in South Africa, but Jews did not fit conveniently into white culture and struggled to gain approval from both the English and the Afrikaners. The “Boer-Brit-Black axis” defined social relations and political power purely in terms of relationships between the Afrikaners, the English, and the original Black inhabitants.1 In an effort to establish the community’s economic base, Jewish leaders focused on the “Boer-Brit” part of the South African “BoerBrit-Black” axis, choosing to overlook Black peoples’ poor treatment in favor of normalizing relationships with white South Africans. Scholar Gideon Shimoni even argues that some Litvak Jews may have been predisposed to treating Black people in a subservient manner because of their own social position above Lithuanian peasants in the Russian Empire.2 “One accepted the privileges ‘with both hands’ and allowed oneself to be served by the Africans just as all other whites did,” wrote Leibl Feldman, a Lithuanian immigrant.3 Although Jews benefited from white privilege in South Africa, other white South Africans viewed them with suspicion. In the 1930s, thousands more Jews attempted to enter the country to escape anti-Semitism in Europe only to be denied entry by the country’s new immigration quotas. In addition, the Jewish community’s embrace of Zionism aroused concern among Afrikaners, who were concerned about their ability to commit to building a white-dominated South African society.4 As a result, the Jewish community remained segregated from the other white communities in South Africa, which allowed it to simultaneously become self-sufficient and view the dominant white culture with skepticism. Once Stern moved to Cape Town as a young woman, she quickly settled into its Jewish community, which provided her with a receptive audience for her work. South African Jews looked to continental Europe for artistic trends and viewed modern art as the model that South African artists should emulate.5 South African Jewish critics embraced the idea that part of art’s function is to address social concerns, and they celebrated artists who tackled social issues in their work. Specifically, Stern’s friends Hilda Purwitsky, Roza Van Gelderen, and Richard Feldman supported her career by writing about her for several Jewish and secular publications, shaping her reputation in the press as a modern South African artist who defined her approach to modernism through her unique perspective on South Africa.

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Hilda Purwitsky’s interest in art and Jewish culture made her ideally suited to begin the conversation about the role for the arts in South African Jewish identity. Born in 1901 in Kovno Province, Lithuania, Purwitsky immigrated to South Africa with her family when she was a baby. She grew up in and was educated in Cape Town, where she eventually became an educator herself, working as a teacher and administrator at the De Villiers Street School.6 Outside of her teaching, Purwitsky was also an intellectual who wrote criticism of the arts and culture for Jewish publications such as the Zionist Record. She was interested in the question of how to define Jewish art in a frontier country such as South Africa: Was Jewish art produced by Jewish artists, or was it art that focused on distinctly Jewish subject matter? In a 1925 Zionist Record article, Hilda Purwitsky posed the question, “Will South Africa yet produce a Jewish ‘Jewish’ artist?”7 In the article, she suggested that Jewish art should consider Jewish subject matter, writing critically that artists such as Stern were not yet “stirred to depict a Jewish idea”8. Purwitsky refers to two other Jewish artists in her Zionist Record article, Moses Kottler and Wolf Kibel. Unlike Stern, these two artists were both immigrants to South Africa, but they were both trained in Europe as well. Kottler and Kibel were, like Stern, also synthesizing their European and South African experiences in an effort to conceptualize “a Jewish idea.” Born in Joniskis, Lithuania, in 1896, Kottler’s parents immigrated to South Africa and sent Kottler to Jerusalem to study art at the Bezalel Art School before transferring to the Munich Academy in Germany.9 Kibel was born outside of Warsaw in Poland in 1903 and came to South Africa in 1929 to join his brother, who was a cantor at the Gardens Synagogue in Cape Town.10 Kibel also spent time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and studied art in Europe. Although not depicted through Jewish subjects, modern South African Jewish artists such as Stern, Kibel, and Kottler were addressing Jewish themes through their work, such as tikkun olam, a commitment to social action and repairing the world. The perhaps narrow “Jewish idea” that Purwitsky describes could be interpreted more broadly as exposing South Africa’s social and racial fault lines through art. Neither Kibel nor Kottler, for example, painted Jewish subjects, but their work did address racial subjects. Kottler’s 1917 painting Small Coloured Girl (Figure 2.1) depicts a young Black child sitting in a chair staring directly at the viewer in a piercing gaze. The painting resembles Stern’s The Eternal Child in both style and sentiment. Kottler’s subject does not have the carefree attitude that might be expected of a child; instead, she communicates anger and distrust. As with Stern’s work in the 1920s, Kottler’s paintings and his later sculptural

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

Figure 2.1  Moses Kottler, Small Coloured Girl, 1917. © Johannesburg Art Gallery. (See Plate 5.)

work invited audiences to consider Black people as human beings instead of as primitive tropes. Social action was an important aspect of many Jews’ work in Cape Town. Purwitsky’s co-educator and lesbian partner, Roza Van Gelderen, was an active member of the Cape Town Jewish community and Stern’s friend. Of Dutch Sephardic heritage, Van Gelderen trained as an educator and worked in Cape Town schools for most of her career. Van Gelderen and Purwitsky were iconoclasts in the Jewish community and in the Cape Town community at large. They worked together as teachers at the DeVilliers Street School in Cape Town, which provided education to Coloured, or mixed-race, girls. The curriculum was progressive and included training in self-confidence and public speaking, as well as art.11 Irma Stern was a regular guest at the school. In addition, they occasionally wrote articles together under the pen name, “Rozilda.” In the 1930s, Stern painted portraits of Purwitsky and Van Gelderen (Figures 2.2 and 2.3) .12 Both women were striking in opposite ways, and Stern brings out the differences between their Ashkenazi (Purwitsky) and Sephardic (Van Gelderen) physical traits. Van Gelderen’s Iberian heritage comes out in her portrait—she wears a turban, has olive skin, dark hair, and strong cheekbones.13 Ironically, Van Gelderen disliked the portrait so much that she hid it under her bed, and when she did show it, she claimed, “Look at this hideous thing that Irma did of me.”14 In Purwitsky’s portrait, Stern highlights her Eastern European roots through her light brown hair, pale skin, and more delicate facial features. Physically more petite than Van Gelderen, she is elegantly dressed in a red coat and black pants, looking urbane and sophisticated. When viewed together, perhaps Van Gelderen felt that her portrait emphasized her own minority status as a Sephardic Jew within the minority Jewish community.

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Figure 2.2  Irma Stern, Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky. Oil on canvas, ca. 1930s. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 6.)

Figure 2.3 Irma Stern, Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen. Oil on canvas, ca. 1930s. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 7.)

The South African Jewish Community’s Support for Irma Stern As recent immigrants to South Africa, Jews played a unique role in contributing to South Africa’s modern identity. Emigrating from different regions of Europe—from Great Britain to Germany to the Russian Empire—Jews arrived in South Africa with vastly divergent views on religious practices, social customs, and political activism.15 Yet, even though they never comprised more than 5 percent (less than 150,000 people) of the total white population, they formed a community whose members disproportionately shaped modern

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

identity in South Africa. For her part, Stern’s recent sojourn in Germany, her war-time experience, and her participation in Weimar culture in Berlin allowed her to make a unique contribution to debates within the Jewish community. The first Jewish immigrants arrived with the British in the nineteenth century, establishing the Tikvat Israel Congregation in Cape Town in 1841.16 The South African Zionist Foundation was founded in 1898, and a branch of the Jewish Board of Deputies was founded in the Transvaal in 1903, merging with the Cape branch to become the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) in 1912.17 By this time, most of South Africa’s Jews emigrated from the collapsing Russian Empire, specifically the Kovno Province in what is now Lithuania. Known as “Litvak” Jews, these immigrants had left shtetl communities that were highly autonomous and observant. Whereas the immigrants from Britain sought opportunities to experience a new “frontier” lifestyle, Litvak Jews came to South Africa seeking economic opportunities and freedom from persecution.18 Primarily Yiddish speaking, the Litvak Jews quickly established their own Jewish day schools, synagogues, community centers, and publications. Almost immediately, though, white South Africans enforced restrictions on Jewish immigration, making it more difficult for Yiddish speakers to enter the country. As a result, establishing Yiddish as a European language for immigration purposes was one of the SAJBD’s first tasks and one of its initial signs that the community’s “whiteness” would be questioned and that assimilation would be nearly impossible. Although she was not observant, Stern was an active participant in Jewish life in Cape Town, and she developed close bonds with Jews throughout South Africa. Through these friendships, Stern developed a network of supporters who helped promote her work. During her early career in Cape Town, Stern began to explore South African subjects in more depth, focusing on painting Black and Coloured (mixed-race) women, Jewish community members, as well as South Africa’s flora and fauna. Stern’s paintings of Black and Coloured women often depicted them in a complex manner, showing a range of emotion, character, and racial diversity. Along these lines, the Jewish community welcomed a discussion of race and its role in contemporary art. In this sense, Stern’s interest in Black Africans as subjects urgently advanced an important discussion about modernity in South Africa that used race and religion to understand how the country would develop a national identity through its ethnic diversity.

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Stern and “Modernism”: The Exhibitions at Ashbey’s Art Gallery Stern arrived in Cape Town as artists were grappling with the relationship between art and national identity. As a German-Jewish woman, Stern was considered an outsider among Cape Town’s English-speaking, male-dominated artists, but she continued to establish herself as a professional artist in the city. In 1922, she held her first major exhibition at Ashbey’s Art Gallery in Cape Town. The list of paintings at the first “Exhibition of Modern Art by Miss Stern” at Ashbey’s Art Gallery on Long Street, held from February 7 to February 21, 1922, included Guinea Fowls, Hermanus (Stern later claimed to have painted this one from memory), Zulu Woman, Malay Girls in Twilight, and Water Colours, and her materials ranged from woodcuts, lithographs, drawings to oils.19 The list of paintings emphasizes Stern’s interest in Black and Coloured South Africans as subjects. The exhibition opened with much fanfare and was reviewed in the local press. Elected officials often presided over exhibition openings to both add a sense of pageantry and legitimize the work in the hope of creating a standard definition of a national art. G. F. C. Faustman, an Afrikaner and Dutch Reformed Church member and family friend from Schweizer-Reneke, Stern’s birthplace, provided opening remarks for her Ashbey’s exhibition.20 In his remarks (in Afrikaans), Faustman expressed his appreciation of Stern’s independent spirit and her choice of subjects. He also applauded Stern for her originality and for painting South African subjects, which he believed would urge South Africans to become more assertive in claiming a national artistic identity: Nobody will deny that her [Stern’s] art is multi-faceted. One just has to cast one’s eye on the exhibition to see proof of this. Above all, Miss Stern is original. She has her own outlook on things; she is completely and utterly independent and she thoroughly expresses herself and her ideas on canvas. In addition to this, Miss Stern is a South African through and through. How true to life she expresses life in South Africa. No one can argue that Europe has the most beautiful scenery and it is indeed no wonder that many an artist get [sic] their inspiration there. In this respect, South Africa does not have to stand back (South Africa also has a lot to offer) and it is indeed a joyful sign when artists, especially South Africans, remember South Africa.21

Yet officials deemed the Ashbey’s exhibition too scandalous for viewers and briefly shut it down, which only aroused more interest in Stern’s work. When the exhibition reopened, a long line snaked down the block and around the corner.22

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

After the Ashbey’s exhibition, words, such as “social forces,” “exotic,” and “radical,” began to appear regularly in criticism of Stern’s work, specifically in reference to her “native studies.” As early as 1922, critics began to associate Stern’s work with a change in South Africa’s social structure. A Cape Argus article, “Modern Art: New Wine in New Bottles, How to Regard It,” named Stern a “member of the radical school of painting,” noting, “It is no wonder that the very latest art reflects strongly the social forces of our disturbed and unbalanced times.”23 In this single sentence, the piece captures how critics struggled to discuss how rapidly the country was changing through urbanization, industrialization, and most importantly, how these issues changed race relations. The more critics tried to ignore artists like Stern who engaged their audience in questions about race, the more obvious it became that these issues would define the direction of modern South African art. Stern’s exhibition at Ashbey’s established the terms under which this debate would take place by making the depiction of race a central theme for modern South African art. Furthermore, the association of modernism with race in South African art began to occur more frequently as Stern settled into Cape Town’s art scene. One reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor wrote: “There is one artist in South Africa who is as deliberately modern as the others are deliberately conventional. . . . There is in the work of Irma Stern an Oriental obsession, the result of wanderings among the brown folk of the Cape.”24 The reviewer perceptively identified what increasingly became an important attribute of Stern’s approach to her work—her interest in spending time with her subjects in their spaces. This approach required Stern to leave her comfortable Cape Town neighborhood and travel throughout the country and, later, the African continent. Some critics refused to grant Stern any agency in her selection of racial subjects despite the fact that she had already held solo exhibitions at the Galerie Gurlitt in Berlin in 1919 and was preparing to return to Europe to exhibit in London, Frankfurt, and Chemnitz by 1924.25 Writer H. E. du P., for example, wrote in the February 8, 1922, Cape Argus, “I suspect that Miss Stern has a genuine sympathy for the exotic, but that she is strongly under the influence of painters who have the same preference seems to me to be clearly inferred.”26 Although critics wanted to see a South African style of painting develop, they were skeptical of female painters like Stern, especially when they addressed racial subjects. Their only point of comparison at the time was Stern’s female contemporary, painter Maggie Laubser (1886–1973), who had studied in Germany after Stern and painted Black people. Although Laubser and Stern

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had similar styles and subjects, at the time, Stern had already established strong connections to German expressionism.27 The Ashbey’s exhibition established Stern’s presence as an independent woman artist in Cape Town. Her paintings sparked curiosity among the public, as well as the press, and challenged conventional visual representations of Black people as “native subjects.” By 1923, Stern had begun traveling throughout South Africa searching for new subjects. She packed her painting materials and headed east to Zululand and the Natal coast for several weeks, completing her first (unpublished) travel narrative, Das Umgababa Buch. A 1923 Cape Argus article noted about her trip that Stern was “keenly interested in South African subjects and some time ago spent a few months living among the native tribes in Natal.”28 Stern posed an interesting challenge for critics because her work made it difficult for them to discuss art without addressing the racial and social issues represented there. The reviews of Stern’s 1925 Ashbey’s exhibition reveal how, three years later, critics were still uncomfortable with examining how race influenced modernism in her work. Critics expressed their “most profound distaste” for Stern’s paintings of Black people, viewing the term “modern” as being synonymous with her paintings of “native” types.29 A reviewer for the Cape Times wrote: Abounding vitality and a . . . greediness for colour are the dominant impressions one receives after seeing the pictures exhibited by Miss Irma Stern at Ashbey’s Galleries today. A good many of us will be forced to do some elementary thinking about art when confronted with this challenging modernism. . . . Miss Stern reveals a genius for black and white work . . . the two native studies reproduced on this page will challenge comparison with some of the finest work done in South Africa.30

The reviewer’s use of the term “challenging modernism” in this quote illustrates how critics struggled to find language that acknowledged how Stern’s colorful painting style and her choice of Black artistic subjects were changing viewers’ perceptions of aesthetic quality. As in the quote before, there was a palpable sense among the critics that South African art was moving in new directions and that racial subjects were playing a role in this change. All the while, though, they were reluctant to embrace the avenues that Stern’s version of modernism was opening for South Africa. The 1922 and 1925 exhibitions at Ashbey’s Art Gallery were crucial in defining the terms by which Stern’s later work would be discussed and judged. As critics grappled with her “challenging modernism,” Stern proceeded to

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

shape her artistic identity through her desire to paint Black people.31 From that point forward, Stern’s work set the stage for the term “modernism” to be linked with race in South African art criticism. Stern’s approach, derived from her recognition that the Black body was a worthy subject of exploration in art, came to symbolize how critics described her work’s innovative qualities, even when they were unsupportive in their reviews.

“Macaroons in Profusion”: The Critical Response to Stern’s Modernism By the mid-1920s, critics began shaping Stern as a modern artist by defining the modern element in her work as the representation of Black Africans in her “native studies.” These references revealed the racist and colonial views about Black peoples’ representations in art were endemic in South Africa and shaped the way the public received Stern’s work. There was also a discrepancy between the media’s perceptions of Stern—it expected her to be wild and erratic—and the genteel and worldly Epicurean who often invited critics to her house for tea. One critic was so disarmed upon visiting Stern that in his article, “The Revolutionary—Irma Stern,” he quipped: A critic cannot be scathing, however modern the pictures that surround him, when there are cream buns and macaroons in profusion. . . . She [Stern] brought forth several canvases, many of them African studies. One can quite understand these pictures, shocking suburbia—but they are indisputably fine. Say what you will, there is a tremendous individuality in these paintings that you cannot escape.32

The critic then went on to describe what Stern’s portraits of “dark Africa” could tell us about Black South Africans: “The warm, foetid [sic] atmosphere of the African jungle overwhelms you. She has painted not merely the bodies of the natives but something of their queer, distorted minds.”33 The critic’s crude language was dehumanizing in its racism. At the same time, his characterization of Stern’s chosen subjects was crucial to understanding the hostile environment in which Stern’s South African modernism existed. Stern’s paintings of Black South Africans are often characterized in a category called the South African “native study” or “native type.” Fraught with biased and Eurocentric political and cultural implications, native studies were drawings, sketches, and paintings of Black Africans that focused on the physical features

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and traditional dress that differentiated ethnic groups. While native studies were attributed to artists of all races, the images were primarily created for a white audience and used for the purposes of demonstrating power and dominance over the natural environment, including its indigenous inhabitants. “Control,” writes Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza about the genre, “in the context of the power relationship between the sophisticated European and the primitive African also meant the ‘preservation’ of the ‘nature’ qualities of the colonized, as in the case of the ‘unspoiled’ artist and his artistic scenes.”34 As Xakaza previously mentioned, Black artists were often caught in a power struggle between artist and audience. Gerard Bhengu, for example, an untrained artist from the KwaZulu-Natal region, created studies of male and female sangomas, or traditional Zulu healers, that fit both the native study and the portrait genre. His work attracted the attention of collectors, doctors, and ethnographers, even as his white patrons deliberately prevented him from receiving formal art education, which they believed would “spoil” his natural talent.35 Yet the genre of the native study is laden with the colonial baggage of dominance and racial superiority, particularly in the paternalistic way Bhengu was deprived of educational opportunities. Bhengu’s watercolor and sepia portraits, for example, depict smiling Zulu people in traditional dress, looking directly at the viewer. The smiling sitters may play into the white audience’s belief that Black people were happy to be colonial subjects, but it is also possible that the smile symbolizes a defiant unwillingness to relent to subjugation.36 The distinction between native studies and portraits illustrated how modernism had different meanings for Black and white artists. Black artists were considered more valuable when they painted Black life using artistic styles that highlighted their raw, “untrained” talent, giving white viewers an unvarnished look into Black culture. White artists, on the other hand, were valued for using their artistic training to interpret and refine Black culture through their work, making it more palatable and arguably safer for the audience. Both Bhengu and Stern operated in a unique space between native studies and portraits, but racial differences caused the similarities to end there. Bhengu interprets Black South Africans from an insider’s perspective, with an intimate knowledge of Zulu culture and a respect for its traditions and social relationships. In the twentieth-century South African artistic context, however, Bhengu’s lack of art training, in addition to his race, cemented his status as a cultural outsider. In contrast, Stern’s background allowed her to access art education in Europe, and her art reflected the confluence of her South African upbringing with a white, European gaze. Even though her images of Black people possess a greater

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

level of specificity than traditional native types painted by other white artists, Stern did not typically record the names of her Black sitters as she did with her portraits of Jewish and other white South Africans (a distinction that I will discuss later). As she forged new territory in how Black Africans were portrayed from a white perspective, Stern still struggled to grant her Black sitters the full dignity associated with painting someone’s portrait despite believing that painting Black people was so innate to her artistic identity that she could not articulate her own motivations. For example, when asked why she painted Black people in a 1926 interview for the Cape Argus, Stern replied, “People have often said why do you paint such a lot of native pictures? What do you see in them? These questions seem to me such strange ones.”37 Stern always claimed publicly that she did not care what her critics wrote about her or her work, and her lucrative exhibitions validated her view. Regardless of how critics evaluated her paintings of Black people, Stern’s exhibitions were still popular with the public. She sold paintings no matter what the critics said about her work; perhaps the criticism of her subject matter actually piqued public interest. Stern’s 1925 charcoal drawing titled Zulu Woman illustrates the distinction between the “native study” and portraiture. Despite its generic title, the rich drawing depicts a young Zulu woman in near profile with a thoughtful, pensive gaze—a woman with emotional depth. Her facial features are finely chiseled, with high cheekbones and piercing eyes. The woman’s hair hangs loosely, with a thin band holding it in place on her head. There are no ethnographic markers, such as clothing, that clearly refer to Zulu heritage, nor are her breasts visible to oversexualize her body to a white audience. Yet, Stern also seems to be referencing contemporary European style in the drawing. The Zulu woman’s hair, for example, is straight instead of short and curly, and it is bluntly cut in a style more likely found in Germany than in Zululand. A commentator in the South African Jewish Chronicle noted this period in Stern’s career as her transition from depicting African subjects in a European style to become a South African painter as a both crucial moment for Stern and for South African painting: One is looking forward to the time when Miss Stern will shake off these European influences and develop an art that really springs from African soil. [Stern’s] natives are denizens of Africa but they have gone through the academies, they are painted in the best traditions of the modern and the modernist European schools. If she forgets Paris and concentrate on Pondoland, she may develop into a truly great original creative artist.38

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Artistic and Social Significance of Stern’s Work Stern’s portraits of Jewish South Africans build on modern European methods of ethnic representation in portraiture. European Jewish artists painted much more sympathetic portraits of other Jews than their non-Jewish counterparts. Expressionists such as Otto Dix painted portraits of prominent German Jews in the early 1920s, but their works represented ethnicity as racist caricature, pointing to the prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany at the time.39 Although an equal opportunity misanthrope, Dix was particularly known for painting Jews, such as art dealer Alfred Flechtheim and lawyer Fritz Glaser, with exaggerated features such as long, hooked noses and bad upper body posture. Even when he did paint portraits of Jews who were friends or business associates, such as Glaser, Dix used portraiture as a method of ridicule rather than as a form of respect.40 In the vein of her Jewish contemporaries in France, such as Chaim Soutine and Amadeo Modigliani, Stern’s Jewish portraits use ethnicity in a positive way to create a visual record of the rich history of South Africa’s Jewish community. Her 1922 portrait of Dr. Louis Herrman, for example, Stern portrayed the respected Cape Town scholar and educator. Born in Southampton, England, Herrman immigrated to Cape Town in 1907 to serve as the vice principal at the Jewish Hope Mill School. He later taught at Cape Town High School and received a doctorate from London University.41 Herrman is best known for writing one of the first comprehensive histories of the Jewish community, A History of Jews in South Africa, which documented the Jewish presence in the country from the arrival of the Portuguese through the early twentieth century. Stern’s portrait of Herrman celebrates his Jewish ethnicity and his stature in the community. In Stern’s portrait, the young Herrman looks distinguished, intellectual, and stylish. A pair of thin, wire-framed glasses sits on his nose, and he is wearing a dark blue jacket or sweater over a white shirt and thin black tie.42 Herrman does not look directly at the viewer. Rather, his position presents his profile, revealing his black hair, long curved eyebrows, full pink lips, and olive skin. As a revered member of the Jewish community, Herrman was instrumental in weaving the community’s historical narrative into the larger South African origin story. One of Stern’s most influential friends was Yiddish-speaking writer and activist Richard Feldman. Born in Lithuania in 1897, Feldman immigrated to South Africa with his parents at age thirteen. Educated in Jewish schools in Johannesburg, Feldman eventually became a leading member of the South African

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Labour Party and a strong advocate for maintaining ties to Yiddish language and culture in South Africa. Throughout his life, Feldman was concerned with the deterioration of race relations in South Africa, especially in the mining areas. He devoted his career and his personal pursuits to projects that confronted racial and social inequality, and his written critiques analyzed political issues in a way that few other South African critics were willing to explore.43 Feldman was instrumental in shaping the social criticism of Stern’s work early in her career, commenting frequently about Stern’s role in changing the direction of modern South African art. Some members of the Jewish community distanced themselves from debates about race to avoid becoming targets of racism themselves.44 Feldman, however, confronted race and class issues head on. His reviews helped to bring Stern’s work to the attention of recently immigrated Jews with more left-leaning political views who were following modernist trends in European culture.45 Like Purwitsky, Feldman also wrote for the Zionist Record. Feldman’s 1926 review for the publication is one of the first to describe Stern’s fusion of modernist techniques with Black people as subjects as qualities of “an essentially South African artist,” writing that Stern was “the first artist to reveal, to use the soul of Africa’s Black children.”46 Feldman was a proponent of incorporating social themes into South African art and would serve as Stern’s moral compass on race relations for most of her life.47 In the Zionist Record, for example, he wrote: Art cannot be based merely on sentimental idylls. It must reflect our life. When our times are stormy, the art of the day reflects the storm. Some succeed to portray the coming calm after the storm, others the peace before, but these are few in number and recognized in their own time.48

Feldman’s remarks signified a shift in thinking about art in South Africa at this time that originated in the Jewish community and was part of a more global response to the relationship between art and society. Stern’s youthful curiosity and her fascination with Black culture resulted in paintings that served social critics such as Feldman well. Feldman and his wife Freda eventually became close friends with Stern, hosting her in their Johannesburg home and corresponding frequently through letters. In 1935, Feldman published Shvarts und Weis (Black and White), a collection of Yiddish short stories about race relations and Black life in South Africa (Figure 2.4).49 To illustrate the book’s cover, he used a Stern painting of a Black African woman in the foreground of an ambiguous rural area holding

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Figure 2.4  Irma Stern, Cover Image, Black and White: Stories of South Africa by Richard Feldman, 1935. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Trust.

what appears to be a bundle of hay or grass on her head. Because Stern did not paint images of Black people in urban settings, the work brings out the contradictions between perceptions and reality about Black life in South Africa. Whereas Feldman’s book criticizes the exploitation of Black labor in the gold mines, Stern’s painting on the title page idealizes a vision of pre-industrial Black life. Additionally, Stern’s painting on the cover of the book written in Yiddish shows how her work was linked to the Jewish community’s cultural and social agenda, bringing attention to the inseparable relationship between modern art and politics in South Africa. Stern’s paintings of both Black and Jewish people illustrate ethnicity’s role in shaping modern South Africa. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jewish critics in South Africa had made the strong connection between racial subjects and modern art in South Africa. Back in Europe, however, Jewish critics were just beginning to understand how artists such as Stern were reshaping South African art. In a review of Stern’s work for the Jewish arts journal Menorah, Austrian art critic Josef Kalmer described Stern’s South African subjects to his European audience: The people that she paints are wild. The landscape that serves as a motif is tropical, jungle, bamboo. There, as well as in the cities, she has the good fortune of finding the colors of the Orient, the most that a painter could wish for, the mixture of people from Hindus to Dutch and the English are found in her African home . . . all serve as subjects that Irma Stern has chosen for her Indian ink drawings, watercolors, and charcoal drawings.50

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Kalmer showed his misunderstandings of the people and the land in South Africa, as well as the way in which critics in Europe and South Africa used a specific vocabulary to create different perceptions of Stern’s subjects. Kalmer’s use of words such as “wild,” “tropical,” and “jungle” presents an exotic picture of Stern’s work to a European audience unfamiliar with Africa. In contrast, Feldman used words such as “native,” “soul,” and “black” to establish connections between race and national identity, urging white South Africans to reflect on Black peoples’ centrality to the South African nation. In 1926, at age thirty-two, Stern married Johannes Prinz, who had been her longtime private tutor as a child and was also a lecturer in German at the University of Cape Town. Unlike most South African women, Stern had established an identity through her career before she married. The marriage would eventually end in divorce, but at the time, it had a liberating effect because it allowed Stern to move out of her parents’ house and live independently in Cape Town. Stern’s marriage and new independence corresponded with the beginning of a period in which she enjoyed international success, a rarity for a woman artist at the time. In 1927, she received the Prix d’Honneur for painting at the Bordeaux International Exhibition in France, a prize so infrequently awarded to women that the accompanying certificate recognized “M. [Monsieur] Irma Stern.”51 The same year, German art critic Max Osborn wrote the first monograph on Stern for the popular Junge Kunst series of art books.52 The text included a critique of Stern’s work as well as a selection from Umgababa, an early travel narrative, and reproductions of her charcoal drawings, mostly of South African subjects. Osborn’s book referred to Stern as a child of Africa, a “unique case,” attributing her contribution to modern art as such.53 “With the exception of a few trips to Europe,” he wrote, “there was no time in which she did not find herself surrounded by dark peoples, by the woods, gardens, and mountains, the nature which she tried to reproduce in her paintings and drawings. And it is this which has given her an individual position in the art world.”54 By writing, albeit in an exaggerated tone, that Stern was “surrounded by dark peoples,” Osborn implied that Stern was qualified to paint Black people because her presence in Africa afforded her a level of credibility that distinguished her from other expressionist artists. Furthermore, in the late 1920s, Stern made frequent trips to rural areas in South Africa to complete paintings for her exhibits in Europe. Her travel schedule allowed her to expose European audiences to contemporary South African life. In 1929, Stern traveled to Pondoland on the Indian Ocean coast

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of South Africa, where she painted several portraits of Pondo women. She also held several major exhibitions in Europe during the same year in cities such as Frankfurt, Hanover, Paris, and Vienna.55 Additionally, Stern exhibited with the Paris Group in the International Jewish Exhibition in Zurich, one of the last international exhibitions of Jewish artists before the rise of fascism.56 She also represented South Africa in the Empire Art Exhibition in London, which served as one of the first official international designations of Stern’s work as representative of South African art.57 With a successful artistic career, Stern began to focus even more on painting South African subjects. Although increasing anti-Semitism in Europe partially contributed to her decision to stay closer to home, Stern was also intrigued by the people and places in the Cape region and other parts of South Africa. One group in particular, the Coloured community, was unique to South Africa and possessed a rich cultural history that was virtually unknown outside of the country.

Van Riebeeck’s Children: Coloured Women in Irma Stern’s Art Stern’s paintings of Coloured South Africans are among her most significant contributions to South African art. Like Jewish people, Coloured South Africans occupied an intermediate political and social space between Black and white people that allowed them to make special contributions to South African culture. Yet, historians and critics have not focused as closely on this work despite its uniquely South African character. Coloured South Africans include people who are biracial—with parents of different races—and people whose parents are Coloured, or the descendants of the interracial relationships between the original Dutch settlers and indigenous Black people or enslaved people from Dutch East India in Southeast Asia. When the Dutch arrived in Cape Town in 1652, they established an all-male settlement that would serve as a rest stop for ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope. The short-term rest station turned into a more permanent settlement, and the male sailors, who had become farmers, ventured into the region searching for sexual partners, which they found by exploiting relationships with the local Black populations. Some Coloured South Africans are the descendants of these interracial relationships. Others, however, are descended from Asian slaves who were imported from what is now Indonesia to South Africa by the Dutch East

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India Company. Concentrated in the Cape region of South Africa near Cape Town, this subsection of Coloured South Africans is often referred to as Cape Malays or Cape Muslims because they practice Islam and speak Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the Boer settlers, in addition to Arabic. Many are devout Muslims who strongly adhere to the Islamic calendar and celebrate festivals and the holy month of Ramadan with music and songs. After slavery was abolished in the Cape in 1834, Coloured South Africans were politically disenfranchised and relegated to certain sections of Cape Town. Because they were “not quite white enough,” as Coloured historian Mohamed Adhikari describes the community, they lived separately from both white and Black communities in what can best be described as lower-working class conditions.58 Despite having less economic and social mobility, many Coloured people embraced their heterogeneity, or creolite, developing a cultural ethos through music, dance, and carnivals that continues to define the community today. Stern was keenly interested in painting aspects of the Coloured community. In her search for new South African subjects and fresh perspectives, Stern found a culturally rich and complex community with its own traditions and social structure tied to Islam. In her 1928 oil painting Malay Mother and Child, Stern depicts a young girl and her mother holding a colorful bouquet of flowers. Other than the bouquet, the painting’s color palette is somber—lots of gray, blue, and deep umber. The young girl stares past the viewer while her mother’s face is turned away and covered in a blue scarf. Stern evokes the subjects’ Coloured identity through their European-style clothing, deep olive skin tones, and the girl’s straight, jet-black hair. Two years later, Stern’s 1930 oil painting Two Malay Musicians depicts two Coloured youth playing the drums (Figure I.1). Wearing the traditional Islamic fez, the young men are sitting and looking in opposite directions. The lighting reflects against their faces, revealing the slight differences in skin tone. Both young men appear to be deeply focused or entranced. Although other South African artists, namely Maggie Laubser, painted Cape Malays, Stern seemed to be the most interested in their culture and traditions, producing the most paintings with a variety of subject matter that included both masculine and feminine cultural practices. Cape Malay culture symbolized the syncretic nature of modern South Africa—born of slavery and colonialism, strongly connected to diasporic religious values, yet rooted in traditions developed through centuries of geographic isolation at the edge of the African continent.59

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Stern made a strategic decision to add Cape Malays to her body of work, using the modernist painting methods—bold colors, strong outlines, and geometric forms—she had gained in Germany and refined through a decade of exposure to South African subjects to bring aspects of Coloured life into the aesthetic realm. She continued to paint Coloured South Africans throughout her life, focusing on the traditional Cape Malay women’s wedding ceremony later in her career. Stern’s paintings of Coloured people were as controversial as her paintings of Black people. In some ways, critics were more uncomfortable with work that expressed Islamic themes than those that dealt with race. In 1930, the same year that she painted Two Malay Musicians, Stern was the center of a controversy over a painting named Khalifa that depicted the khalifa or ratiep, a Cape Muslim rhythmic sword dance originally performed by slaves that is infused with chanting, singing, and dance. Stern created the painting after attending a khalifa performance at Cape Town City Hall. Historically, slaves from Indonesia and Bali imported the dance to Cape Town.60 The purpose of the khalifa was to provide slaves with physical and spiritual methods of transcending their bondage.61 Derived from Sufi Muslim traditions, the khalifa involves ritual stabbings in the face that do not draw blood. According to its records, the South African National Gallery had initially agreed to purchase Khalifa, which was also on display in an exhibition of Stern’s work in the Burlington Gallery on Long Street in Cape Town. Members of the South African National Gallery’s Board of Trustees, however, vehemently disapproved of the museum’s purchase, concerned that Khalifa would sanction both modernism and multiculturalism in South African art.62 The painting was supposed to be purchased along with another Stern painting, Washerwoman, but the museum was able to afford both paintings only if they received support from a donor. Roza Van Gelderen convinced German-Jewish South African diamond magnate Sir Ernest Oppenheimer to purchase Washerwoman, but no record exists showing that the museum purchased Khalifa.63 The critical response to Stern’s works such as Khalifa demonstrated how South Africa’s strict racial categories continued to make it difficult for some South Africans to evaluate modern art. Critics were more disturbed by Stern’s paintings of the Coloured community than her paintings of Black communities. They disapproved of both Khalifa’s style and subject matter. One critic in the Cape Argus wrote, “The work is vigorous, but its merit is uneven and in the results it expresses a feeling of lethargy rather than the savage imagery demanded by the subject.” Another critic responded to both the subject and style of Khalifa by calling modern art “a degenerate form of art,” a phrase that struck a nerve as

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more Jews attempted to escape anti-Semitic labels of degeneracy in Europe by immigrating to South Africa.64 The similarities between the Jewish and Coloured communities in South Africa were striking. Through multiple waves of immigration, both groups were culturally heterogeneous but connected through shared traditions. Racially, both Jews and Coloured people were considered “not white enough” by English and Afrikaner standards, but they were also not native Black Africans either. Not being able to assimilate into the dominant society forced Jewish and Coloured people to shape their own cultural and political identities. Both groups shared traumatic experiences as the genesis of their geographic relocation to South Africa—slavery for Coloured people and anti-Semitic pogroms for Jews. Stern found that the Coloured community in the Western Cape region offered an opportunity to paint an aspect of South African culture that would interest domestic audiences. Despite these critiques, though, Stern’s career flourished in the 1930s. The demand for her work was high, and government officials chose Stern to represent the country in several international exhibitions. Major public figures such as Oppenheimer were interested in placing Stern’s work in public collections. Unfortunately, racism and anti-Semitism had begun to escalate globally, drastically affecting Stern, the Jewish community, and Black people throughout the diaspora.

Withdrawing from the Blind Alley: The South African Response to Nazism and Degenerate Art By 1930, South Africa’s identity as a racially segregated nation had solidified. The 1913 Native Land Act prohibited Black people from owning land except on native reserves, allowing the English and Afrikaners to fight among themselves over land rights in mineral-rich areas. Concerned that survival of their language and culture would be jeopardized by English rule and the Black majority, Afrikaners had formed a cohesive political group. James Herzog, leader of the Orange Free State, was elected prime minister of South Africa in 1929. Herzog’s election signaled the country’s growing racial divisions and the gradual rise in Afrikaner nationalism.65 Afrikaners were increasingly sophisticated in their ability to wrest political power from the English in the South African government. The Afrikaner Broederbond (Group of Brothers), a group formed in the 1930s consisting of

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Afrikaner religious and political intellectuals, had been dispatched to Europe to gain better insight into how to form an Afrikaner-dominated government and society.66 Members of the Broederbond traveled to the Netherlands and Nazi Germany to learn how religion, philosophy, and politics could be used to justify racial segregation. Over the next decade, the Broederbond used this information to construct a political platform to create a unified Afrikaner political party that would take control of South Africa away from the British.67 During the First World War, British-Afrikaner relations had reached a low point when South Africa sided with the Allies even though many Afrikaners supported Germany.68 Language and history kept the two groups from finding much common ground. The relationship remained tense into the 1930s with the cultural polarization expanding to cause a nearly irreparable divide. Afrikaner culture derived from the Dutch Reformed Church, which reaffirmed the Afrikaner’s belief in their God-ordained presence in South Africa. The English, on the other hand, desired to maintain a respectable position within the British Commonwealth and remain connected to the international community, both culturally and politically. As English-speaking South Africans gained a greater voice in the arts, Afrikaners aimed for domestic consolidation of political power.69 Stern and her work were central in the bitter battle over South Africa’s cultural past and its future. In their struggle for hegemony, British and Afrikaners argued over which language, religion, and social history would represent South Africa, marginalizing Black, Jewish, and Coloured voices on the subject. Stern’s paintings brought racial issues to the center of the cultural debate by emphasizing South Africa’s rich ethnic diversity. Her portraits of Jewish South Africans reminded the British and Afrikaners that even defining “whiteness” would have political ramifications in a segregated society. And, her paintings of Black people in rural areas brought out cultural distinctions among ethnic groups that urban life had seemingly erased. While modern European art gained acceptance in South Africa in the 1930s, the Nazi government began its campaign to eliminate modern art and its influences in Germany. More than any other regime in modern history, the Nazis used art both as a political weapon against its enemies and as propaganda for its social agenda. Alternatively, artists whose work was deemed incompatible with Nazi values were purged from their teaching positions and their work removed from public collections. They were replaced by artists whose work the Nazis deemed to be more illustrative of their core values: the racial purity of the German people, a rejection of communist and other leftist views, and a

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celebration of Germany’s resurgence as the most powerful nation in Europe.70 In its initial discussions to determine which artistic style would represent Nazi ideals, some Nazi leaders such as Alfred Rosenberg, a key adviser to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda expert, actually clashed over whether expressionism was the best representation of truly “German” art.71 Goebbels, who eventually became Hitler’s propaganda minister, argued in support of expressionist artists such as Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, whose work Goebbels believed embodied the essence of the German spirit and the best that German culture could offer the world.72 Yet overruled by Hitler, an avowed anti-modernist, Goebbels and Rosenberg proceeded to make plans to remove modern art and any other works deemed “degenerate” from public collections for display in a large exhibition that would travel throughout Germany. In 1937, the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition opened to visitors in Munich. Stern was well aware of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic agenda, making her last extended visit to Germany in 1933, several years before the Degenerate Art exhibitions opened. “I get terribly frightened when I think of Germany’s future,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Trude Bosse.73 Her decision was wise since the Nazis began persecuting expressionist artists in the same year. In Stuttgart, an exhibition called Novembergeist: Kunst im Dienst der Zersetzung (The November Spirit: Art in the Service of Destruction) excoriated expressionists who participated in leftist politics such as the Novembergruppe, whose pamphlet An Alle Künstler (To All Artists) was on display. Copies of the works published in the Junge Kunst (Young Artist) volumes on Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Ludwig Meidner were also included in the exhibition.74 Because of her affiliations with both the Novembergruppe and her inclusion in the Junge Kunst series as well as her devotion to painting Black Africans, Stern’s works were consistent with the type of “degenerate” art the Nazis were trying to target.75 According to the inventory of confiscated works kept by the Nazis, several of Stern’s paintings were taken from either public or private collections and sold at auction, destroyed, or burned.76 These pieces listed under the name “Stern” are Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), Sumerun (Sumerian), Afrikanische Szene (African Scene; two paintings), and Negerin (Negro Woman)—all subjects that would have made them targets for state-sponsored destruction.77 It is likely that Stern’s Berlin art dealer, Wolfgang Gurlitt, played some role—whether intentionally or under duress—in Stern’s artwork falling into Nazi possession. In addition to sponsoring modern artists who depicted Black people, many of whom were Jewish, Gurlitt himself had some Jewish ancestry that would have made him a target by the Nazis. His cousin, Hildebrand Gurlitt,

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was also an art dealer who rose to the highest ranks in the Nazi regime as Hitler’s primary art dealer, stealing modern art from private collections and selling it to buy more traditional work for Hitler’s planned “Führer Museum,” intended to be the world’s largest and greatest art collection, in Linz, Austria.78 Although there is no mention that Stern knew the exact fate of her work in Europe, she did know that her participation in avant-garde art movements and representations of Africans, particularly of African women, would place her work in the Nazis crosshairs. In 1937, a Jewish publication in London noted that Stern refused to return to Germany “on account of her disapproval of Nazi policy.”79 However, having survived the criticism of her art in South Africa in the 1920s and early 1930s—the critical response to Khalifa, for example—Stern understood the career “value” of her work being labeled as indecent. Like the long lines outside of Stern’s exhibition at Ashbey’s Art Gallery in Cape Town, people flocked to view degenerate art in Germany in droves, with the total visitors numbering more than 2 million.80 The “negative” publicity from the Ashbey’s exhibit raised Stern’s profile as a South African artist and brought media attention that allowed her a public venue for expressing her views on art. “These exhibitions were also the beginning of her commercial success,” writes Mona Berman, the daughter of Richard and Freda Feldman, “as discerning collectors and speculators started buying her work.”81 In 1935, Stern wrote to Richard Feldman about her financial success due to the increasing domestic interest in her paintings of Black and Coloured women: Sunday a man is coming to the Studio who wants a Malay Picture [sic]. Tuesday some people from Stellenbosch who also want a Malay or Indian Picture [sic]. I am growing rich and more so. I am meeting a lot of very nice people who take a great interest in my work.82

In the same way that her exhibit at Ashbey’s was a turning point for her career in South Africa, any association between Stern’s work and the Nazi campaign against modern art would only solidify her reputation as a modernist and place her name as one of only a few women artists among a list of prominent male artists such as Spaniard Pablo Picasso and German Max Beckmann. At this moment, as she began to focus more on South African subjects, Stern adopted a new ethos that allowed her to craft a strategy by which she could capitalize on morally ambiguous and politically dangerous situations to advance her career.83 She had astutely observed that her insider/outsider status as a German-speaking Jewish woman with “white” racial status and a controversial reputation as a modern painter in South Africa could be used to gain entry into

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political, cultural, and social circles in Europe and South Africa that were not accessible to everyone. This strategy would serve Stern well for the rest of her career—ultimately, though, the dissonance between her racist views and diverse, mostly Black and Coloured subjects helped bolster her support by the apartheid government while compromising her status in the Jewish community. Observing the German campaign against “degenerate” art in Europe, South African artists contemplated the resulting impact on their ability to sell their work. Edward Roworth, the anti-modernist president of SASA, was appointed director of the South African National Gallery in 1939. Upon assuming the position, Roworth continued his own campaign against South African modern art by blocking acquisitions and dismissing modern work as “degenerate ballyhoo.”84 In a 1940 lecture at the University of Cape Town, Roworth appeared to support the Nazis’ purge of “degenerate” art from state collections, intensifying the growing divide between traditional (English) and modern (Jewish) South African artists.85 Led by Jewish painter and sculptor Lippy Lipshitz, the modernists quickly responded to Roworth. Lipshitz, of Lithuanian-Jewish Hasidic heritage, was also a modern artist. Like Stern, he studied art abroad, spending time in Paris and London in his youth. Upon his return to Cape Town in 1933, he helped found the New Group, a group of South African artists who used their work to challenge the conservative art establishment’s strict control over stylistic conventions in South African art. Lipshitz also exhibited at Ashbey’s Art Gallery in 1934 and 1937 and was criticized for the modern works on display.86 Lipshitz wrote a searing essay that is worth quoting at length: Any one of you has the right to prefer Roworth’s or Titus de Jongh’s paintings to Irma Stern’s, for ignorance justifies bad taste. . . . Prof. Roworth seems so self-assured, so unruffled by all of the rational criticism leveled at him by all the independent artists in South Africa because he feels there is nothing to stop him. It is up to the people of South Africa to take direct action against Prof. Roworth, or we may see in the near future an exhibition of “degenerate art” on the pattern of Munich while every significant artist in this country will be given the choice between “the lunatic asylum and the concentration camp [quoting Roworth].” It is thus beyond doubt that Roworth looks greatfully [sic] to Hitler. . . . Roworth admires this Hitler, Hitler, the inferior watercolourist, who purged German art of Liebermann, Corinth, Kokoschka, and Kate [sic] Kollwitz. . . . Indeed, Prof. Roworth’s speeches are mainly composed of such clap trap worthy of a soap box orator, who reviles the modern artists with vile vituperations (“half wits,” “degenerates,” “mountebanks,” and “madmen”), but is unable to offer any

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direct or intelligible criticism of their work from the purely aesthetic angle. [Artists] tend to provide rectification for the evils of society. Their function is to explore new values; they withdraw from blind alleys and seek fresh avenues of expression. . . . Censorship makes them cease this exploration and imposes upon them the form of paralysis which seizes decadent institutions.87

Based on Lipshitz’s comments, the South African avant-garde believed that Stern’s work would be considered “degenerate” by the Nazis. In defense of Stern and other modern artists, though, Lipshitz’s article took a defiant stance supporting modern art’s social value in South African society. His essay also spoke on behalf of the Jewish community and helped establish Jewish artists as avant-garde leaders among the South African modernists. Although she may have agreed with her friend Lipshitz, Stern did not do so publicly. She may have known that she needed support from conservatives such as Roworth, regardless of their position on modern art, to be successful in South Africa. If she wanted to gain a national reputation and reach a wider South African audience, Stern had to be cautious about how she engaged with Roworth in the press. In particular, her “silence” seems intentional as she became caught between siding with the Jewish community’s defense of modern art and the South African establishment’s anti-modernist, pro-Nazi views. Stern’s implicit inclusion in the Nazi movement against modern art affected her career in two important ways. First, in the long term, it placed her on par with male European modern artists, such as Picasso and Pechstein, whose avant-garde status would be solidified in part because their work was defined as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Second, the Nazis’ persecution of artists and Jews forced Stern to stay away from Germany and focus on cultivating a South African audience. This shift in focus helped to crystallize Stern’s South African artistic identity and enabled her to begin developing essential political and social relationships in South Africa.

Women and Changing Attitudes toward Modernism By the mid-1930s, Stern had established her reputation as “the most successful painter of the coloured races” in South Africa.88 Her May 1935 exhibition in Johannesburg, for example, drew an astonishing 3,000 visitors in just 2 weeks, overwhelming museum staff.89 During this period, Stern developed a more complex alliance with the South African government. Stern’s paintings of South African subjects portrayed South Africa as a nation that embraced its

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multiculturalism and were an asset to the government in the 1930s as it sought global recognition and legitimacy in international affairs. Led by Afrikaners James Hertzog and Jan Christian Smuts, the new Afrikaner-led United Party wanted greater political autonomy from the British Commonwealth and seized opportunities to highlight South Africa’s unique national characteristics. Shortly after it purchased some of Stern’s still life paintings in May 1935, the South African government began acquiring Stern’s paintings of Black women. In June 1935, the government bought Swazi Water Carriers for the residence of local politician Rep. D. Steyn.90 Both national and local officials purchased Stern’s work strategically, choosing subjects that fit within their political agendas. In 1936, for example, the South African government purchased Red Camellias, an oil still life depicting a vase of red camellia flowers for display at the South African embassy in Washington, DC.91 The selection of this Stern painting, one of the few known to have reached the United States, demonstrated the government’s calculated imperative of defining its political objectives through cultural diplomacy. Unlike Stern’s paintings of Africans and Coloureds that the government procured for the South Africa House in London and the Empire Art Exhibition in London, Red Camellias was a “safe” subject for the embassy in the United States, where racial segregation and Jim Crow laws ruled. The painting innocuously showcased South Africa’s natural beauty without being provocative in race conscious America, and it proved that South Africans were familiar with Western painting genres. As Stern traveled through South Africa, it would have been difficult for her not to have perceived the palpable frustration among Black South Africans with race relations that worsened with each passing year. The South African Native Trust was established in 1936 to foster the government’s purchase of land from Africans at unfairly low prices to create what would eventually become homelands for Black people.92 Massive migrations, by both Black and white South Africans, into urban areas prompted the government to create pass laws (travel restrictions) for Black people, which exacerbated racial tensions.93 In response, ethnic communities organized to fight against the South African government’s racist policies even as Afrikaners were making plans to permanently institutionalize racial segregation.94 Despite the ominous political scene, though, Stern’s life was filled with people who worked against the status quo in conservative Cape Town. Stern divorced Johannes Prinz in 1934 after eight years of marriage, a bold move for a forty-yearold woman at the time. Although the marriage helped Stern live independently from her parents, Stern and Prinz had little in common. As a recent divorcée and

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a businesswoman who managed her own art sales, Stern immersed herself in a progressive environment that was charged with feminist energy and ideas. In the late 1930s, Stern’s relationship with her Jewish friends—particularly writer Hilda Purwitsky (Figure 2.2) and educator Roza Van Gelderen (Figure 2.3)— allowed her to mentor aspiring young women artists at Girls Central High School in Cape Town, where Van Gelderen was the principal. The school was an experiment in interracial contact and was one of only a handful of integrated institutions in Cape Town that taught an expanded program of academics and craft, and encouraged girls to remain active in their communities.95 Through Van Gelderen’s leadership, the curriculum was infused with feminist elements and progressive politics designed to produce graduates who were independent thinkers and empowered members of South African society, prompting Van Gelderen to declare proudly, “Our children have no sex complexes.”96 Stern visited Girls Central High School frequently to give lectures on modern art, as well as art lessons. She mentored a few of the school’s young artists, including Black artist Valerie Desmore (1925–2008), who later became the first Black woman to exhibit at the Argus Gallery in Cape Town in 1942.97 In Europe and America, artists such as Spaniard Pablo Picasso, Dutchman Piet Mondrian, and American Jackson Pollock moved closer to formalism and abstraction. But South African art did not follow this trend. Through artists such as Stern, the artistic and social elements of South African society were intertwined, and it became impossible to discuss art without also confronting the racial dynamics of South African society. Stern rendered these racial dynamics visible in the most “colorful” ways. In this sense, her work defined modern art in South Africa for nearly a generation and also fulfilled the Jewish community’s expectation that artists “aimed at portraying more than the surface of things, at getting at meaning beneath the skin, at the very mind and outlook of the people.”98 Notably, South African women went beyond the canvas to delve into the connections between race and nation throughout the arts. Writer Sarah Gertrude Millin is one of South Africa’s most respected novelists of the period. Born to Jewish parents in Lithuania in 1888, Millin immigrated to South Africa as a child.99 In her work, Millin was specifically critical of miscegenation, a taboo subject for public discourse that, nonetheless, formed the basis of racial segregation in South African society. A proponent of scientifically based theories of racial determinism, Millin believed that racial mixing would destroy South African society by diluting “pure” white blood with inferior African blood.100 Millin’s beliefs are embedded throughout her 1924 novel God’s Stepchildren. The book examines how racial mixing affects several generations of white

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missionary Reverend Andrew Flood’s family. Flood marries a Khoisan woman (referred to as a “Hottentot” in the book), they have children, and life becomes increasingly difficult for each generation of Flood’s descendants as they straddle Black and white society. As he pondered how he would educate his mixed-race children, Millin describes, “He [Flood] had thought that a child with a white father might be different . . . . It seemed to the missionary as if their [Black children’s] minds were unlocked sooner, but also sooner locked again. He had a vague theory that it all had to do with the traditional hardness of their skulls.”101 Ironically, Millin’s warnings against miscegenation did not encompass the glaring threat to ethnic purity that Afrikaners perceived Jews to be in South Africa. She could not reconcile the arbitrary differences between race and ethnicity that made Afrikaners as fearful of Jews as they were of Black and Coloured people relative to sexual relations. Millin also discovered that she could not control the ways in which her work would be co-opted by anti-Semitic groups. To her horror, German presses widely distributed God’s Stepchildren as a Rassenroman (race novel) and used it to support Nazi claims that Jews were mentally and physically inferior to ethnic Germans.102 Stern and Millin developed a friendship and supported one another’s work. In 1936, when the Rand Daily Mail questioned whether South Africa was ready to accept modern art, Millin defended Stern with the statement, “Miss Stern is the most intellectual, the most brilliant, and the most psychological painter we have in South Africa today.”103 Stern painted a portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin in 1941 (Figure 2.5). In the painting, Millin appears serious and bookish, with red glasses and a dowdy, light blue dress. Her dark, curly hair accentuates her pale skin and her light

Figure 2.5 Irma Stern, Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin. Oil on canvas, 1941. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 8.)

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gray eyes. Like Millin, Stern also believed that Black people were suspended in a state of arrested development, a trait that she deemed crucial to her work. “Only deep in the country do they live as I love them—beautiful creatures living under full tribal discipline, with ancient customs, throwing their shadows right back to Egypt,” Millin wrote in 1936.104 The disconnect between the two women’s fascination with aspects of Black culture and their essentialist views of Black Africans such as Stern’s statement highlight the ways in which their double speak betrays their own struggles with ethnic identity. As Jewish women, fitting into the English-Afrikaner Christian cultural dynamic must have amplified their own sense of otherness.

Pictures That Satisfy: Redefining the Modern in South Africa At the opening of a Stern exhibition in Cape Town in 1936, High Commissioner Sir William Clark commented on Stern as a modern painter: Miss Stern is essentially a modern who delights in audacities of colour and design. Part of the paradox of modern art is its close affinity with the primitive and South Africa is a country rich in primitive themes for artists like Miss Stern. I am sure you will find her studies of native like [sic] exceptionally interesting in the psychological understanding and technical achievement. I notice that modern critics object to the word beautiful and prefer almost any other adjective. If we are not allowed to use that word I think that “satisfying” is a very useful expression, and I am sure you will find that Miss Stern’s pictures, by their intellectual content and their artistic accomplishment, satisfy both your mind and your eyes.105

Stern’s work introduced a new aesthetic that emphasized ethnic difference, particularly Blackness and Jewishness, in South Africa. This new aesthetic, however, developed within the context of South Africa on the eve of apartheid, the country’s darkest historical moment. Modern art in South Africa would be inextricably linked to a precarious vision of the “primitive” that pitted South Africans—Asian, Black, Coloured, Jewish, and white people—against each other in a racial purity contest. As a Jewish artist, Stern’s work raised important concerns about racial tensions in South Africa, but her personal support of racial segregation made her a controversial figure in her own community. In 1938, for example, Stern further complicated assessments of her racial views when she traveled to Dakar, Senegal.

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A beautiful and picturesque seaside city on the Atlantic coast with a deep connection to the slave trade, Dakar’s gleaming pink and white buildings and its mixture of French, Muslim, and African cultures provided an ideal place for Stern to paint. That said, she was deeply troubled by her observations of Senegalese society; Stern openly disapproved of the degree of racial integration that she saw in Dakar. In her statements to the press, for example, Stern noted an incident in which she witnessed a Black man using the same public restroom as a white man as an example of the type of racial mixing she deplored. She was angered by “the absence of a colour bar” in Dakar, stating to the Cape Times on March 3, 1938, “Every person in Cape Town who talks about the colour bar should go to Dakar for a month. That would make them sit up.” To Stern, Dakar’s racially integrated society made the city “the most beautiful place in the world and the most evil,” especially when compared with South Africa, which was a segregated nation well before apartheid.106 These contradictions between Stern’s practice and her stated views would only deepen as she received more critical acclaim in South Africa. It is difficult to imagine how an artist as well traveled and cosmopolitan as Stern could possess such artistic vision in her painting of people of color around the world but become even more entrenched in racist thinking that deemed her subjects inferior. These contradictions, however, established Stern as an enigmatic presence in South Africa—both as cultural agitator, provocateur, and as a staunch proponent of segregationist policies. Stern produced several portraits and landscapes during her visit, including a stunning portrait of a Senegalese woman called Native Woman, Dakar. In the painting, Stern captures the woman’s imposing presence on the canvas by emphasizing her physical stature and colorful clothing. The Senegalese woman’s broad cheekbones and red headscarf contrast strongly against her deep blue blouse and beige shoulder wrap. She faces the viewer directly, and her short, thick arms make her shorter and heavier than Stern’s Black South African subjects. Most importantly, Stern depicts the woman’s extremely dark skin— darker than most of her Black South African subjects—which she accentuates with blue undertones. Although visually striking on canvas, such a large and dark-skinned woman would probably seem intimidating in a white audience’s imagined in-person encounter, reaffirming the need for a “colour bar” to separate the races. Stern’s disgust of racially integrated Dakar (which experienced its own racial tensions with the French colonial government) reinforced the complexity of her worldview and how it influenced her painting. Her press comments are

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ironic given the vehement anti-Semitism in Europe and South Africa that caused South African Jews to worry about their own community’s future. To many Afrikaners at this time, Jewish people seemed more threatening than Black people to white South African identity. By 1936, for example, the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws caused thousands of Jews to flee Germany, some of whom headed to South Africa. Several thousand refugees who arrived in South Africa met strong resistance from Nazi sympathizers such as the Greyshirts, an Afrikaner nationalist group that wanted to end Jewish migration to South Africa.107 For these reasons, it is possible that being a native-born Jewish South African with no direct experience with pogroms or other anti-Semitic violence helped her to feel more insulated from the concerns of more recent Jewish immigrants. Although Jewish South Africans such as her friend Richard Feldman recognized the connection between racism and anti-Semitism in the pre-apartheid years, Stern was not very interested in the topic. While she was shopping and visiting museums in Europe, Feldman was preparing to run for public office to advocate for education and health programs for the Black majority.108 Yet as she traveled increasingly to other African countries, Stern’s racial and political views of South Africa changed to an extent. Although she enjoyed discovering new cultures and subjects to paint, Stern was increasingly uncomfortable with the more fluid racial and social boundaries that existed outside of South Africa. Her paintings and statements in the late 1930s and early 1940s reflect a gradual recognition of the social change occurring throughout the African continent, as well as her fear of how these shifts would affect her work. “What does Richard think of this country and is it a place to stay at,” wrote Stern in a letter to Richard’s wife Freda.109 Despite her exposure to different African cultures, however, Stern was a stubborn individual who resisted change. She adhered to her belief that Black people were an inferior race even as her portrayals of Black life reflected a sense of empathy and admiration for their physical beauty and their emotional strength. Ultimately, she struggled to maintain both her racist views, which supported her view of societal order, and her deep affinity for Black culture as expressed in her work, which provided her with a romanticized escape from that same rigid societal order. Again, this contradiction between thought and action is what makes Stern such a significant figure as both an artist and a cultural icon during this pivotal moment in South Africa’s history. Despite her resistance to categorization—intentionally and by dint of the nature of her work—Stern did not vehemently object to the “degenerate artist”

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label as artists such as Lipshitz did. Although she raised concerns about the fate of Jews in Germany as soon as the Nazi Party gained control of the German government, she maintained her relationship with art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt throughout the war even as his family helped the Nazis obtain and destroy modern art, possibly including some of her own paintings. Stern was a selfpromoting artist, and she understood the need to leverage situations for career advancement. Many of Stern’s statements, such as her comments about Dakar, sounded eerily similar to Nazi claims against Jews. This period of Stern’s life— caught precariously between the turmoil in Europe and the growing racial divide in South Africa—represented a crossroads in her career. Rather than pursue the social justice agenda embraced by her Jewish friends Richard Feldman, Roza Van Gelderen, and Hilda Purwitsky, Stern instead chose to remain a free agent, blazing her own trail in South African art by painting Black people on her terms. In the short term, this strategy led to her success as a great South African artist. In the long term, however, her beliefs severely compromised her place in South African art history. Irma Stern was instrumental in defining the parameters of modern South African art. She started the debate on the role of Black Africans as subjects in modern art even without believing that they deserved equal treatment in South African society (or anywhere else). As the Second World War began and apartheid drew closer, Stern’s travels to Europe became more restricted, and her painting and political views took a slightly different turn. She spent an increasing amount of time traveling around Africa and published more travel writing. She also discovered the Muslim communities in Zanzibar, creating an entirely new genre of work that reshaped the way she viewed the “other.” Beginning in the 1940s, her paintings, travels, and writings would document the most turbulent period in South Africa’s history.

Notes 1 Milton Shain and Sander Gilman, eds., Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 66–7. 2 Ibid., 142. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 6. In 1930, the South African parliament, led by Minister of the Interior Dr. Daniel Francois Malan, enacted an immigration quota law that significantly reduced Jewish immigration from Lithuania. Although the law did not specifically

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prohibit Jewish immigration, Malan stated that the bill’s intention was to prevent the intrusion of “an undigested and unabsorbable minority.” 5 Richard Feldman, “Irma Stern’s New Paintings,” Zionist Record, June 18, 1926. 6 Hilda Purwitsky Papers, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, Cape Town. 7 Purwitsky, “A South African Woman Painter: The Work of Irma Stern.” Hilda Purwitsky immigrated with her parents to South Africa from Lithuania when she was a baby. She grew up in Cape Town and became a teacher at the De Villiers Street School where she met Roza Van Gelderen. Purwitsky wrote for South African publications, such as the Zionist Record, many of which focused on the Jewish community. See the Purwitsky Collection Donated to the University of Cape Town Libraries by Miss Hilda Purwitsky via the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies. List compiled by Margaret Curran, 1982. 8 Ibid. Kottler, who was trained in Munich and Jerusalem, spent time in Paris and sculpted in a cubist style, and like Stern, chose a more cosmopolitan rather than a specifically Jewish approach to his work. 9 Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 231–2. 10 Ibid. 11 Hilda Purwitsky Papers, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town. 12 Shortly before her death, Purwitsky bequeathed the paintings to the Irma Stern Museum in 1999. She requested that the paintings always hang together in the museum. 13 South African Jewish Museum, “Exhibition Text,” in Irma Stern: Studio Encounters (Cape Town: South African Jewish Museum, 2003). 14 Ibid. 15 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, eds., The Jews in South Africa (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008), 1–5. 16 “SA Jewish History,” South African Jewish Board of Deputies, accessed August 16, 2016, http:​//www​.jewi​shsa.​co.za​/abou​t-saj​bd/sa​-jewi​sh-hi​story​/. 17 Ibid. 18 Shain and Gilman, Jewries at the Frontier, 129–30. 19 Exhibition Program, Ashbey’s Art Gallery, Irma Stern Scrapbook. Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa MSC 31(23): 1. 20 Schoeman, Irma Stern: The Early Years, 71. The exhibition was supposed to be opened by F. W. Reitz, president of the Union Senate and former secretary of the State of Transvaal, where he may have met the Sterns. Reitz could not officiate and was replaced by G. F. C. Faustman. 21 Ibid. Translation provided by Katie Irvin. 22 H. E. du P, “Modern Art at Ashbey’s,” Cape Argus, February 8, 1922. 23 “Modern Art: New Wine in New Bottles, How to Regard It,” Cape Argus, February 6, 1922.

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24 “Irma Stern, the Cape Town Modernist,” Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 1925. Among the American press, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor took an early interest in Stern’s work, and it also covered trends in South African art generally during the 1920s. 25 Wilhelm van Rensbrug, Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2003), 186. 26 H.E. du P, “Modern Art at Ashbey’s,” Cape Argus, February 8, 1922. 27 Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 252–3. 28 “Miss Stern: Her Work as a Set Designer,” Cape Argus, March 10, 1923. 29 W. P. M., “Modern Art in the City, Exhibition by Miss Irma Stern: Apotheosis of Significant Form,” Cape Times, February 18, 1925. 30 W. J. M., “The Modernism of Irma Stern,” Cape Argus, February 17, 1925. 31 Ibid. 32 “The Revolutionary--Irma Stern,” Cape Argus, November 10, 1924. 33 Ibid. 34 Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza, “From Bhengu to Makoba: Tradition and Modernity in the Work of Black Artists from KwaZulu-Natal in the Campbell Smith Collection,” in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, ed. Hayden Proud (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2008), 37. 35 Hayden Proud, “Gerard Bhengu,” in Revisions, 68. 36 The Bruce Campbell Smith Collection, contains exquisite examples of Bhengu’s work. 37 Irma Stern, “My Exotic Models,” Cape Argus, April 3, 1926. 38 Josephus, “On the Watchtower,” South African Jewish Chronicle, November 18, 1932. 39 Sabine Rewald, ed. Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, 2006), 105. 40 Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Gross, Dix, and the Philistines,” in Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Matthew Baigell, and Milly Heyd (Hanover: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010), 179. 41 Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, 101. 42 Dr. Louis Herrman was well known and respected in the Jewish community for his commitment to education and his scholarship. He was vice principal for the Hopemill Hebrew Public School in Cape Town before teaching English, serving as principal of Cape Town High School until his retirement in 1943. His seminal work was a book called, A History of Jews in South Africa, which documented the Jewish presence in the country from its beginnings to the midtwentieth century.

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43 Richard Feldman Papers, 1914–1968, University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg, South Africa, A804. 44 Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover: University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press, 2003), 16. The Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa, the governing board of South African Jewry, faced difficult decisions about how to address racism. Because many recent Jewish immigrants had fled pogroms in Europe, the community sought to create a stable and safe social environment. On one hand, the Board wanted to encourage Jews to remain true to their religious mandate to be critical of social injustice. On the other, they did not want Jews to become victims of anti-Semitism as a result of their criticism. 45 A leftist intellectual who studied race relations in South Africa, Feldman and his family came to South Africa from a Jewish village in Lithuania. Notably, Feldman spoke and frequently wrote in Yiddish. 46 Feldman, “Irma Stern’s New Paintings.” 47 Ibid. Even Feldman, however, was a product of racist times in which Blacks were routinely infantilized. In the same articles, he continues to describe Stern’s “natives” in a patronizing manner, describing a Black woman in a Stern painting as “Nature’s unspoilt child with a facial expression that is free of pose.” 48 Ibid. 49 Richard Feldman, Black and White: Stories of South Africa (in Yiddish) (New York: Central Yiddish Culture Organization “CYCO,” 1935). 50 Ibid. 51 Marion Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 80–1. 52 See back cover, Osborn, Irma Stern. When Osborn’s book on Stern was published, there were fifty total Junge Kunst monographs. The series featured such artists as Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cezanne, and Stern was one of four women (Paula Modersohn, Maria Uhden, and Marie Laurencin were the others) who were profiled. 53 Ibid., 24. 54 Ibid. 55 Clippings book (Microfiche), Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. According to papers in the same archive (MSC 31, 4 [2]), Stern exhibited at the Viennese Galerie Würthle, owned by the Jewish art collector Lea Bondi Jaray in 1929. 56 Clippings book (Microfiche), Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. 57 Untitled, Rand Daily Mail, May 4, 1929, from Clippings book (Microfiche), Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

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58 Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005). 59 Mohamed Adhikari, “From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-modern Re-imagining: Towards a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), 16. 60 Demond Desai, The Ratiep Art form of South African muslims, PhD thesis, University of Natal, 1993. http:​//res​earch​space​.ukzn​.ac.z​a/xml​ui/ha​ndle/​10413​ /8929​ 61 Alan Mountain, An Unsung Heritage: Perspectives on Slavery (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2004), 96. 62 “Miss Stern’s Khalifa,” Cape Argus, August 21, 1930. 63 Meeting notes of the South African National Gallery Trustees dated X Nov 1930; Letter from Roza Van Gelderen to SANG director dated November 12, 1930, SANG Museum archives. Special thanks to Acting Director Ernestine White, Carol H. Kaufmann, and the curatorial staff for giving me access to the museum records and for the their invaluable assistance. 64 Brevis, “A Poster in Long Street,” The Cape, August 29, 1930. 65 For more discussion about Afrikaner cultural politics, see Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, and Aran S. MacKinnon, The Making of South Africa (Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). 66 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 177. 67 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 183. 68 Ibid., 184. 69 Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 48. 70 Stephanie Barron, ed., Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 9. 71 Ida Katherine Rigby, “Expressionism in the Third Reich,” in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Sociailism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 296. 72 Ibid. 73 Dubow, Paradise, 105. 74 Barron, Degenerate Art, 99. 75 Although Max Osborn’s monograph on Stern (number 51 in the series) was not listed in the Nazi inventory, at least four books from the series were displayed that do not have titles or series numbers, one of which could have been Stern’s. See Barron, Degenerate Art, 70–1. 76 Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, “Entartete Kunst: Typescript Inventory,” ed. Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und

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Propaganda (Photocopy. London and Washington, DC: Harry Fischer Collection, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1942(?)). The archive is organized by city, and the Stern listings are in the “Dessau Gemäldegalerie” section. It is possible that the public museum owned some of Stern’s work, but most of its collection records were destroyed during the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War. 77 All five of the listed works are prints. The status, or final destination for each work was listed as: Erdgeist (degenerate art exhibition), Sumerun (destroyed/burned), Afrikanische Szene (one destroyed/burned, one sent to the Ewige Jude exhibition), and Negerin (Ewige Jude exhibition). Copies of the monographs from the Junge Kunst series were displayed in a ground floor room of the 1937 Munich Entartete Kunst exhibition. 78 In 2012, German authorities discovered nearly 1,500 works on paper by dozens of modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Henri Mattise in the Munich apartment of Wolfgang Gurlitt’s second cousin, Cornelius Gurlitt. Cornelius Gurlitt’s father Hildebrand was Hitler’s main art dealer during the Second World War. An ailing recluse, Cornelius was housebound at age 85 when the works were discovered in his apartment. Gurlitt claimed that his father gave him the works and that he was keeping them safe in his apartment. He died in May 2014. Scholars have determined that many of the works are stolen from public and private collections. This work is ongoing. Some works have already been returned. The list of confiscated works is available at www.lostart.de. For more information about the Gurlitt art trove, see Alex Shoumatoff, “The Devil and the Art Dealer,” Vanity Fair (April 2014) and “Gurlitt in Österreich,” Art: Das Kunstmagazin, November 12, 2013. 79 “Exhibition Opened by Lady Reading,” Jewish Chronicle London, May 14, 1937. 80 Barron, Degenerate Art, 9. 81 Mona Berman, Remembering Irma: Irma Stern (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003), 43. 82 Ibid., 44. 83 Stern’s careerism and relationship to the Nazi degenerate art campaign run parallel to another German artist, Franz Radziwill, whose work was both embraced and rejected by Nazi officials in the 1930s. Despite his uncertain position within the regime, Radziwill declared his support for the “German Fatherland.” In his important study of Radziwill’s work and its reception, scholar James van Dycke provides another case study of how artists’ careers and historical legacies are affected by their works’ reception and their own political allegiances. See James van Dycke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

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84 Hayden Proud, “The Advancement of Art”: The South African Society of Artists and its Exhibitors, 1902–1950 (Cape Town: South African Society of Artists, Iziko Museums and Scan Shop, 2002), 46. 85 Ibid., 46. 86 Esme Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 266. 87 Lipshitz, “A Considered Reply to Prof. Roworth.” 88 “Irma Stern’s Exhibition: Clever Native Studies,” Johannesburg Star, May 20, 1935. 89 “Irma Stern to Exhibit in Johannesburg,” Rand Daily Mail, May 14, 1935. 90 Rand Daily Mail, June 15, 1935. 91 “Two Pictures . . . Being Sent to Washington,” Cape Times, September 1, 1934. Floral still life paintings were also purchased for the South African houses in Paris and Berlin in 1935. 92 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 163. 93 Ibid. 94 The African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912, but it gained much of its apartheid-era momentum in the 1920s and 1930s. Coloureds and Indians also organized in 1902 and 1912, respectively, but their differing backgrounds made it difficult for them to form coalitions. See Thompson, A History of South Africa, 171. 95 Hilda Purwitsky Papers, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, BC707. 96 Ibid. 97 Elza Miles, Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1997), 89. Other Black artists accused Stern of being unwilling to mentor them. Desmore went on to study in the United States at the Horace Mann Experimental School, and she also studied with Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka in 1948. Segregation laws enacted in the 1940s and 1950s would eliminate interracial education that occurred at Girls Central High School, but Stern’s connection to the institution and her interest in the young artists demonstrated a willingness (if only partial) to mentor young Black artists. 98 Lewis Sowden, “Jewish Art in South Africa,” Hashalom Rosh Hashonah, September 1935. 99 Milton Shain and Miriam Pimstone, “Sarah Gertrude Millin, 1889-1968,” The Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia. Web. http:​//jwa​.org/​encyc​loped​ia/ar​ticle​/mill​ in-sa​rah-g​ertru​de. Accessed August 16, 2016. 100 Peter Blair, “‘The Ugly Word’: Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (2003): 595–6. 101 Sarah Gertrude Millin, God’s Stepchildren, 10th ed. (Grosset and Dunlap, 1924), 77. 102 Blair, “The Ugly Word,” 601. 103 “Outspoken,” Sunday Express, October 18, 1936.

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104 Irma Stern, “My Amazing Models,” Sunday Express, November 6, 1936. 105 Sir William Clark, “‘Pictures That Satisfy’ Opening of Miss Irma Stern’s Exhibition, High Commissioner’s Eulogy,” Cape Times, March 3, 1936. 106 “Stern Words on Dakar,” Johannesburg Sunday Times, 1938. 107 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 13. 108 Mona Berman, Remembering Irma: Irma Stern (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003), 57–9. 109 Ibid., 58.

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Congo and Zanzibar

During the 1940s, Stern began to seek inspiration for her paintings outside of South Africa, and African travel became her most viable option for exploring new places. From 1939 to 1948, Stern used travel narratives—Congo (1942) and Zanzibar (1948)—to portray the relationship between African art and modernism in South Africa. Her engagement with Black Africans and Muslims outside of South Africa played a crucial role in developing her own race consciousness, which led her to accept the Afrikaner arguments for minority rule and racial “separateness” through apartheid. Like South Africa, both the Belgian Congo and the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania were afflicted by the festering wounds of slavery and colonialism, creating ethnic and religious tensions that resulted in political violence, including genocide. Visiting Congo and Zanzibar enabled Stern to continue exploring African and Muslim traditions as she had done in South Africa through her time spent in Black areas and with Coloured women in Cape Town. In Congo, Stern travels to Central Africa, where she visits the Mangbetu and Kuba in the Belgian Congo and the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. In each chapter of the narrative, her interactions with the locals reflect her own colonialist ideology and sense of racial superiority. In Zanzibar, Stern focuses on two main issues: slavery and women’s societal roles. Through her analysis of Zanzibar’s slave history, Stern seems to make the case for racial subjugation while critiquing female subjugation, opening up the broader topic of the different ways human relationships can oppress. To contemporary readers, this might seem like an unsettling contradiction, but to a white South African woman like Stern, these views were consistent with cultural norms. Together, Congo and Zanzibar set the stage for Stern’s apartheidbacked approach to modern art years later where, for the most part, she chose to paint Black people in a state of arrested development and steadfastly refused to acknowledge her approach’s impact on the people she painted. Stern’s travel narratives also represented a period of South African internationalism that began to decline with apartheid’s introduction in 1948.

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The South African audience was curious and interested in other African cultures, perhaps as confirmation that white supremacy was an effective way to maintain their high standard of living. Both Congo and Zanzibar describe the tensions between urban and rural and “civilized” and “uncivilized” cultures in a manner that would appeal to white South Africans who were aware that they were outnumbered on the continent. To further complicate our contemporary discourse about Stern’s life and legacy, Stern made statements in the press that indicated her awareness of the political climate in the countries she visited, as well as how the idea of Black people living separately would appeal to her South African audience: “I traveled a lot, went into districts where natives live away from European audiences,” she told the Rand Daily Mail in 1942.1

Mixing Art and Politics: Stern’s “Pre-Departure Orientation” Beginning in the late 1930s, Stern laid the foundations for her work in the Belgian Congo and Zanzibar by affiliating herself with the South African political elite. These connections would help increase Stern’s visibility in South Africa through high-profile exhibitions and secure political support to assist her travels around the continent. At this time, South Africa began to reexamine its political position in Africa as a predominantly Black nation with a white-controlled government. As white politicians were determined to ensure permanent political dominance, the country became more isolated from its African neighbors and the international community. Women, for instance, were enfranchised in 1930, but only to increase the white electorate and not necessarily as a move toward gender equality.2 Through the nation’s mineral riches and the establishment of the civil service, the white urban population, spurred by Afrikaners, grew in both demographic size and material wealth.3 In contrast, Black people were pushed into large urban shantytowns and townships while pristine and genteel all-white neighborhoods blossomed near the city centers. Although government officials had actively denounced Stern’s paintings in the 1920s, just a decade later, they lauded Stern as a homegrown artist who would make an ideal “representative” of the nation’s diversity. As Afrikaners gained influence in South African politics, party leaders viewed the arts as a platform for their political agenda. For example, in 1938, Dr. H. D. J. Bodenstein, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs purchased some of Stern’s paintings for foreign legations (diplomatic offices lower than embassies).4 In 1939, Jan Smuts became prime minister of South Africa. After Smut and Stern

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became friends, Stern developed a closer relationship with the South African government.5 Local politicians regularly attended her exhibitions, and her work hung in South African foreign offices to highlight the nation’s cultural diversity.6 Stern’s paintings of Black, Coloured, and Jewish subjects helped to calibrate a race-based notion of modern art in South Africa as her work simultaneously became more popular with a mainstream audience. For instance, at an exhibition and fundraiser for the South African Native Corps, the regiment of Black and Coloured soldiers who participated in overseas military operations, visitors donated £10 for the opportunity to purchase Stern’s paintings that featured South African themes, including landscapes and studies of Black and Coloured individuals.7 Members of the South African elite eagerly volunteered to preside over the official opening of Stern’s exhibitions, which allowed them to rub shoulders with influential South Africans.8 Stern’s efforts to market herself as an African artist through her paintings and travel narratives dovetailed with the government’s interest in creating a racially segregated society that emphasized cultural difference through separation. In other words, her work became more acceptable to the South African government because it complemented its ethnic separatist agenda, which formed the basis of apartheid. With titles such as Swazi Girls, Pondo Woman, or Young Zulu Girl, Stern’s paintings drew attention to distinct Black ethnic identities. Her portraits of Jewish South Africans also revealed a community that was both physically and culturally distinct from other white South Africans of northern European heritage; in the eyes of the apartheid government, moreover, such differences were enough to justify separation. Stern’s visual renderings of these differences allowed the government to acknowledge each of South Africa’s ethnic groups while also building the case that each should live separately to preserve their unique qualities. In October 1941, Stern held an exhibition of paintings of Cape Malays (Muslim and Coloured South Africans) and the Cape Town neighborhood called District Six at the Gainsborough Galleries in Cape Town.9 As Cape Town’s most integrated and multicultural district, District Six residents strongly resisted government efforts to segregate the community. Many were of the creative class and held subversive attitudes that helped to nurture the careers of some of South Africa’s cultural icons and later its most vocal anti-apartheid activists. Furthermore, because District Six was one of only a handful of interracial communities in the entire country, these paintings referenced specific South African subjects that continue to elicit emotional responses from South African audiences, but perhaps mean little to viewers unfamiliar with the nation’s history.

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To conservative white South Africans, particularly religious Afrikaners, District Six’s existence represented everything that was wrong with the country: racial mixing, activities such as dancing and playing music, and, most importantly, Black and Coloured Capetonians occupying prime real estate in a major city. To the District Six residents, though, the neighborhood represented the real South Africa and proved that racially integrated communities could thrive and prosper. Stern had several supporters who lived in District Six, which was also known for its liberal politics and cultural values, including members of the prominent Indian Gool family, many of whom were leaders in Coloured and communist politics. Stern’s friends Rosa Van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitsky also taught at Girls Central High School in District Six, and frequently invited Stern as a guest to open student art exhibitions.10 Nevertheless, Stern’s own exhibition on District Six came only three years after her trip to Dakar, where she was disturbed by the “absence of a colour bar.”11 Despite receiving support from progressive circles in Cape Town, Stern espoused an essentialist view of Black culture in Africa. Multicultural and integrated areas such as District Six were urban and densely populated, demonstrating that Black and Coloured people could peacefully coexist in these environments, a reality that Stern tried to avoid. Referring to her upcoming visit to the Congo, she wrote to Richard Feldman in 1942, “There I can at least enjoy adventure of a more primitive nature—cannibals, or lions, or such things.”12 Her trip to the Congo provided Stern with the opportunity to leave urbanizing South Africa behind and explore her fascination with an “untainted” version Africa that her European predecessors had described.

Congo (1942) As an illustrated book, Congo is a combination of art and text, representing a different medium through which Stern communicated with her South African audience. Published in a limited edition of 300 copies by the Dutch and Afrikaans press, J. L. van Schaik, Ltd., the fifty-page narrative is heavily illustrated with painting reproductions and drawings, some of which are mounted on Kuba textiles or raffia cloth. Although Stern had experimented with the travel narrative genre early in her career through the unpublished manuscript Das Umgababa Buch, Congo was her first serious contribution to the travel narrative genre. The book’s value lies not in Stern’s prose, but rather in how she combines images and text to capture the ways in which the region’s colonial past led to contemporary

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ethnic tensions, specifically in her description of the tensions between the Hutus (referenced in the text as “Bahutus”) and the Tutsis (“Watussis”). Stern visited two central African regions during her journey: the Belgian Congo (present-day the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the Belgian colonial region in Central Africa that today encompasses the modern nations of Rwanda and Burundi. She traveled by train to Elisabethville, the Belgian Congo’s capital and site of one of her exhibits, and even had her own car brought by train separately to the region.13 Stern hired a local driver and bartered for supplies and souvenirs along the way. Overall, Stern spent the majority of her time with four ethnic groups: the Mangbetu and the Kuba in the northeastern region of the Congo, and the Tutsi and Hutus in Rwanda. In each chapter of Congo, Stern presents her essentialized expectations based primarily on European accounts. In her description of an encounter with the “Leopard Man,” for example, a so-called man eater, Stern describes what she knows of the men through a visit to an ethnographic museum in Belgium: At Tervuren, the immense museum which houses anthropological collections from the Belgian Congo, I had seen the Leopard Man, the figure of a native turned into a leopard, covering his face and body with a leopard skin, wearing the wrought-iron claws on his hands with which he slits his victim’s breast and throat open, like a leopard. “What is the explanation of this?” I ask. “Purely a secret society of vengeance,” I was told. But to my mind come thought [sic] of the werewolf, Isis and Osiris and the sacrifice of the body of a king, the animal sacrifice, the corn harvest; I feel all these must be related.14

Although Stern was correct that the Leopard Men were a secret society known as Anyoto, the function of the group was not to commit indiscriminate violence; in fact, part of the group’s function was to help the community maintain social order amid the repressive Belgian colonial presence. Despite being immersed in the local culture and led by local guides, Stern still relied on outdated and Eurocentric tropes about the Congo that characterized its people as violent savages.15 Illustrated travel narratives played a vital role in developing European colonialist views of Africa. Stern’s narrative helped white South Africans confirm their view that they were indeed surrounded by savages on the African continent. Most travel narratives about Africa have been written from the perspective of the explorer and positioned the writer as a superior observer who provides insights into the relationship between colonizer and colonized, visitor and host. Stern’s publication adopts a similar Eurocentric worldview, supplying

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her white South African audience with stories and anecdotes about alleged Black African savagery—exaggerated tales of cannibalism and more—that helped whites confirm their sense of racial superiority. Congo was timely because, as Sara Steinert Borella writes, “the period [1930s and 1940s] was ripe for travel writing. The average citizen could not travel easily to the four corners of the globe but was eager to read about those who did.”16 In addition to the racial dimension of her project, Stern’s status as a single female traveler also had consequences. European audiences generally viewed female travelers as promiscuous risk takers, which was frowned upon but also part of their appeal. “To get an audience, a woman needed to provide material that was reasonably exciting; to keep an audience, she needed to remain a lady,” writes literary scholar Kristi Siegel.17 From Herodotus to Pliny, some of the earliest recorded travel narratives were written by men who established the genre as a narrative description of conquest and subjugation. This template was easily adapted to African travel, where, according to writer Tim Youngs, “Difficult terrain, illness, and native resistance created an image of heroic—usually masculine—and sometimes tragic endeavor to penetrate Africa’s interior.”18 Therefore, to be successful in South Africa, Stern’s Congo needed to overcome gender stereotypes about the travel narrative medium while confirming white South Africans’ conclusion that racial difference mandated racial separation.19 Similarly, Stern was heavily influenced by nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury German explorers, including Georg Schweinfurth and ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who opened to Europeans the travel route that Stern followed.20 Germany acquired colonial possessions in East Africa, known as German East Africa, during the Conference of Berlin in 1885, and then held this territory until the end of the First World War when it was ceded to Belgium and became the Belgian Congo. Using an established East African trade route, most explorers who reached the Mangbetu region before 1890 began their journey in Khartoum and traveled south on the Nile river. One of the earliest German travelers to Central Africa, Georg Schweinfurth (1836–1925), a botanist, published the first detailed visual account of the Mangbetu in his international best-selling book, The Heart of Africa (1874). Stern most likely selected the Kuba (also known as the Bakuba) because of her interest in German ethnologist Leo Frobenius’ work.21 Frobenius traveled to German East Africa to collect objects for Germany’s ethnographic museums and recorded his experiences in the chapter “Once Again to the Bakuba Peoples” in his book In the Shadow of the Congo State. In their brief correspondence in the 1930s, Stern and Frobenius mostly discussed exhibitions of rock art paintings,

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and she was familiar with his studies of the Kuba, which likely influenced her decision to visit the region.22 As Stern’s expressionist training influenced her artistic outlook, her understanding of German illustrated travel narratives affected her approach to authoring Congo. Building on the scientific approach to using images to illustrate observed behavior, Stern took the genre in a more artistic direction. The images are not intended to be visual representations of the textual descriptions. Rather, they evoke the spirit of the moment and the types of people she encountered. Stern jumps between regions and includes short, poetic meditations in between major storylines. The book is roughly divided into three main “stories” that are separated by brief anecdotes, drawings, and illustrations, namely Stern’s encounter with the Mangbetu; her sojourn with the Kuba; and her attendance at the coronation of a Tutsi queen. Each story illustrates a different facet of her overall argument: Black culture is fascinating, but ultimately inferior—as in Stern’s description of her encounter with the Leopard Man—which is why racial segregation is justified in modern Africa. “Of course it is exciting being in the region of the Leopard Men,” she writes.23

Stern’s Congo: Introduction “I am on the road to the interior of the Belgian Congo,” writes Stern on the first page of Congo. “The Congo has always been for me the symbol of Africa, the very heart of Africa. The sound ‘Congo’ makes my blood dance, with the thrill of exotic excitement; it sounds to me like the distant native drums and a heavy tropical river flowing, its water gurgling in mystic depths.”24 Stern opens Congo with this description of what the Congo means to her, as her driver takes her through the lush green forests on their way to visit their first village. So far the natives passing are clothed; they are wood-choppers for the Government, as both trains and the river-boats in the Congo are wood-burners. How beautiful this wood smells! It is all like prehistoric days when man was still in his childhood. It is here in the jungle that I meet man completely nude, man living in the forest, in no way divorced by clothes or huts from nature.25

In her first encounter, Stern is already confused by Congo’s modernity. Her first illustration, Congo: Woman with Bananas, is a charcoal drawing of a halfnaked woman carrying a bundle of bananas on her head (Figure 3.1). With no background for geographic or cultural context, the drawing appears to be

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Figure 3.1  Irma Stern, Congo: Woman with Bananas. Drawing, 1942. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

sexualized. The woman’s muscular arm is raised to balance the bananas on her head; her gaze is almost sultry. To her audience, this drawing invites the reader to join Stern’s exotic and sexually alluring Congo adventure. Congo’s first story, “The Village of the Chief Ekibondo,” follows Stern on a visit to a famous Mangbetu village. Known for their distinctive, elongated head shape and intricately braided hairstyles, the Mangbetu were attractive subjects for modern European artists both for their stylized appearance and for seeming to be disconnected from modern life. Chief Ekibondo, however, was an established feature of the European artistic route. By the time Stern arrived at his village, he was well known for his hospitality to European travelers. For example, Russian painter Alexander Jacovleff had visited his village in 1926, painting Chief Ekibondo’s daughters Titi and Naranghe.26 Europe’s cultural embrace of the Congo and the Mangbetu began in the late nineteenth century. The architectural style known as art nouveau, for example, was also referred to as Le Style Congo because its organic shapes and stylized patterns were reminiscent of forms found in the region.27 By the 1920s, enthusiasm for the Congo had spread to other European countries and the United States. In photographs of his automobile tour through the region sponsored by automaker Citröen, George Sprecht photographed the Mangbetu, specifically a woman named Nobosodrou. These photos later inspired artists in the United States, such as African American artists Aaron Douglas and Malvina Hoffman who incorporated the Mangbetu women’s distinctive head shape and sculpted hairstyle as a symbol of African cultural pride.28 Additionally, because of the intense interest in their culture, the Mangbetu had developed savvy ways to manage their visitors and keep tourists entertained while protecting their own cultural traditions. Stern wrote as if she believes that

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she has discovered an “authentic,” charming Mangbetu village. “In a clearing of the jungle a circle of native huts is seen,” she writes at the beginning of the chapter, “I went out to meet the Sultan and asked his permission to stay. The chief is abundantly full of life; he does everything with an absolutely devastating overflow of vitality.”29 Ironically, though, Stern has actually encountered a village that had been rebuilt as a tourist site to appeal to the interests of European visitors.30 As a Mangbetu chief, the leader of the Ekibondo village hosted many artists, writers, and photographers.31 The villagers, particularly the women, were accustomed to being photographed, and the chief was a shrewd political leader with sharp business skills. Chief Ekibondo encouraged the village residents to cater to tourists’ desires. In 1939, the writer Martin Birnbaum described how “the Mangbetu actively [collaborated] in the construction of images of themselves”: But when I met Chief Ekibondo, dressed in White duck and wearing a wristwatch, I began to suspect that all this charming grouping of forest giants and ornamental huts was done with a keen eye for business. He encourages women to show how they dress their hair, to pound manioc and other foodstuffs in the open, to pose for photographs. . . . I felt that Ekibondo was as enthusiastic about “tourisme” as Mussolini himself . . . At any rate, he has not yet built a hotel or rest house for Whites.32

If Stern suspected that the Mangbetu were constructing a different image of themselves for tourists, she made no indication of this knowledge in her narrative. During her visit to the village, the chief (referred to incongruously as the “Sultan”) sends a painter to meet with Stern to describe his fresco painting process. Despite her astonishment at the technique and skill employed to paint the fresco decorations, Stern equates the painter’s work with that of “primitive Italians,” even as she proceeds to use the Mangbetu villagers as models and subjects for her modern paintings.33 Under the direction of the chief, the Ekibondo villagers profited from successfully marketing their culture to Western tourists and opted to turn their ethnicity into a commodity.34 Rather than playing into European desires by subserviently accepting their intrusion, the savvy Mangbetu reflected these fantasies back onto their visitors, packaging themselves for consumption. Stern describes the commercial activities occurring in the village: “A group of women who had brewed the beer and banana wine were busy ladling it out from the huge black earthenware pots into drinking vessels, amidst the chatter and laughter about price. Amongst this roaring trade babies were being suckled.”35 A rough sketch of the nursing child precedes the description of the market in Congo: Mother and

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Young Child (Figure 3.2). Stern’s charcoal drawing does not show the mother’s face, shifting the focus to her bare breast and her young child, whose elongated head is wrapped in the traditional Mangbetu style. Europeans often referred to the Mangbetu as “The Parisians of Africa” because they were considered to be more culturally advanced than other Black Africans.36 Through her illustrations in Congo, Stern seems to have bought into this racial hierarchy as well. An unlabeled depiction of a woman, for example, illustrates how Stern’s modern artistic style adds a sense of flair to her Mangbetu subjects. In the aptly named Congo: Woman Sitting on Stool, the woman sits on a stool, her breasts bared, with her legs crossed and her hand on her hip (Figure 3.3). The drawing emphasizes the ethnic features that are often attributed to the Mangbetu: elongated heads, full lips, and defined eyebrows. Her pensive expression and penetrating gaze reveal a deeply complex person even though her lack of clothing exposes her dark skin, a reminder of both her availability for sexual exploitation and her savagery. What is unique about Stern’s perspective is that the audience is presented with these images from the perspective of the female gaze as opposed to the Western male gaze through which female nudes are usually portrayed. Even with her female perspective, though, Stern cannot manage to escape the prevailing European colonial stereotypes of the sexualized Black female body. Next, Stern heads to visit the Kuba. After describing a brief trip to Lake Kivu, a deep, freshwater lake that forms the border between the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, Stern includes an interlude of unlabeled drawings of Black Africans she encountered presumably on her way to the Kuba region in the northeastern Congo. One striking drawing, Congo: Man with Spear, depicts a man in profile holding a spear in his hand (Figure 3.4). His

Figure 3.2  Irma Stern, Congo: Mother and Young Child. Drawing, 1942. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

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Figure 3.3  Irma Stern, Congo: Woman Sitting on Stool. Drawing, 1942. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

Figure 3.4  Irma Stern, Congo: Man with Spear. Drawing, 1942. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

head is elongated in the Mangbetu shape, and he has a long, thin nose, full lips, and a pointed chin. The image is pasted on top of a reproduction of textile fabric, juxtaposing Stern’s expressionist drawing style with the geometric patterns in the textile. In her next story, “Treasure Hunt,” she spends more time contemplating the relationship between African forms and modern European art.

“Treasure Hunt” Stern’s next stop is to visit the Kuba region. Her second story, “Treasure Hunt,” affirms Frobenius’ influence on Stern’s perceptions of the Bakuba (Kuba) as a culture ripe for plunder. The title alone indicates her familiarity with Frobenius’ voracious approach toward collecting objects in the region. Moreover, in the

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story’s opening paragraph, Stern reiterates the myths produced in Frobenius’ and Schweinfurth’s travel accounts of cannibalism. Here I was in the region of the Bakuba, the most artistically creative race in the Congo, who only one generation back had been man-eaters. It was strange to plunge right among so savage a tribe, and yet only to be aware of a rare artistic taste which had for years been exciting and stimulating the art world of Europe.37

Upon arrival in the Kuba region, Stern uses terms to describe Kuba architecture that widens the chasm between her Black artistic subjects and her white readers. “To return to the country of the Bakuba,” she wrote, “I noticed the bridge supports carved with lovely two-faced idols. The sticks in front of the huts are decorated with fetishes; the people are alive with creative art.”38 After observing the buildings, Stern declares her reason for visiting the village: “I am a painter, and I am going to show all the pictures I paint in the Congo in my country, and after the war in Europe, so that people may learn to love the natives of the Congo as much as I do.”39 She aims to collect objects from the Bakuba “so that White people in [her] country may learn what beautiful things the black man in the Congo creates.”40 Following one of Frobenius’ suggestions that “one should give a nice present” to increase trading possibilities, Stern arrives at the village with a truck filled with gifts, including “a bottle of whisky, a tin of pâté de fois gras, and various sweets and delicacies.”41 In deciding what is worth collecting from the Kuba, Stern solicits the craftsmen and sellers to determine the range of goods that were available. Her first purchase is a velours de Kassai, a dyed raffia mat that had been popular in Europe. After announcing that she would like to buy other objects, Stern is bombarded by people trying to sell goods including mats, figurines, and silver filigreed swords. At the end of her visit, Stern receives a final request from the king: “On leaving, the clerk asked me: ‘The King of the Bakubas wants a favour from you. We hear that you are going to Johannesburg. Will you please send him a small portable Remington.’ I was breathless with astonishment. This king, only one generation removed from man-eating, the King of the Bakubas with six hundred and eight wives—a typewriter!! It does look as though centuries are easily leaped over.”42 In this passage, Stern offers an image of possibility— Black people are savages, but they can become civilized with time. That Stern is astonished by the request speaks to her simplistic colonialist views toward Black Africans, despite her extensive travel throughout the region. Interspersed between the narrative stories are inserted swatches of textiles, adding a rich texture to the publication. The Kuba are known for their patterned

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textiles, which indicated social hierarchies within the community and were intricately woven with specific designs.43 The patterned cloths enhanced the experience of reading Congo by allowing primarily white audiences to touch real textiles from Stern’s adventures in the Belgian Congo. The raised jagged geometric patterns contrast to the feel of the smooth, flat cloth. For the privileged reader who had access to the limited-edition narrative, Congo provided an opportunity for a tactile and visually stimulating experience without having to interact directly with Black people themselves. Consistent with the prose that jumps between discussions of the Mangbetu and the Kuba, Stern’s portrait Mangbetu Chief ’s Daughter is reproduced in black and white at the end of a discussion of the Bakuba. Painted against an ochre background, the chief ’s daughter bares her breasts as she sits in profile with a large red and white flower adorning her ear. Her signature Mangbetu coiffure is held together with a long gold pin. Although this painting is a portrait, its erotic overtones suggest that its main intent is to titillate Stern’s South African audience rather than portray a member of the Mangbetu royal family. The young woman’s breasts are painted unnaturally high on her chest as if to ensure that they are visible. In combination with her bare chest, the large flower alludes to fertility. Throughout Congo, Stern’s illustrations draw attention to Black female sexuality. Although Stern’s own sexual orientation is unclear, there is a strong sense of magnetism between Stern and her Black female artistic subjects. That said, an artist’s perceived sexuality will shape the audience’s perceptions of sexuality in their work. The Mangbetu Chief ’s Daughter has both homoerotic and heterosexual appeal. The young woman’s smooth brown skin, exposed breasts, and full lips would be appealing to South Africa’s white male and, arguably, its lesbian audience. The Mangbetu Chief ’s Daughter is loaded with sexual signals. Details such as the woman’s sultry gaze and the phallic wooden stick under the subject’s coiffure, positioned slightly above the pink flower in full bloom, draw the viewer into the painting. Despite the fact that she was briefly married, Stern’s most influential and emotionally intense relationships were with women. Her exploration of the Congo may have also been an opportunity to explore her own sexual identity outside of South African society’s rigid social conventions. In addition to her own lifelong devotion to painting the Black female body, Stern’s failed marriage and her friendships with progressive lesbian feminists such as Van Gelderen and Purwitsky may have also heightened her physical and emotional attraction to Black female subjects.

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Féte Nationale Congo’s third and final story takes place in what is now Rwanda and describes the coronation of a new Tutsi queen at the Féte Nationale in Kigali. Because it addresses underlying ethnic tensions between Tutsis and “Bahutos” (Hutus) and endorses Tutsi minority rule, the story comes closest to a prophetic statement on both the 1994 Rwandan genocide and South Africa’s deadly pivot toward apartheid. In this story, Stern does not play the explorer’s role in that she does not claim to have discovered a previously unknown village. Rather, she is an invited guest for the royal coronation. On the surface, a coronation sounds like a joyous occasion, but in the context of ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis, the coronation of a Tutsi queen solidified the minority Tutsis’ political dominance over the majority Hutus. The evolution of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis dates back to the fourteenth century, when Tutsis migrated to the area from East Africa, bringing advanced farming techniques to the region.44 The Tutsis quickly dominated the Hutus economically and politically, establishing contractual work relationships called “ubuhake,” which resembled indentured servitude.45 After the Conference of Berlin, Rwanda became a German colony, and the Tutsi king, or Mwami, became the regional administrator. The Europeans revered the Tutsis’ tall, lean physical stature, strong facial structure, and deep skin tone, believing that they were descendants of ancient Egyptians. Compared with the Hutus, who were much shorter, the Tutsis’ attenuated physiques conformed to Europeans’ conceptions beauty and African royalty. As a result, the economic and political divide between the groups only widened over time, with Hutus occupying mostly subservient roles in society.46 Stern’s reverence for the Tutsis is apparent from the story’s beginning. When the new queen enters, Stern comments on her “Egyptian” features: “She purses her lips as the Egyptians did. From beneath her long, flowing robe her bare foot emerges. Never have I seen such beauty; it is like the black basalt foot of an Egyptian statue. It is expressive of a highly bred cultured ancient race. My chief desire is to paint the Queen.”47 Notably, Stern does not include a portrait of the Tutsi queen in Congo despite declaring that painting the queen was one of her objectives. She does, however, include a drawing of a Tutsi woman, Congo: Tutsi Woman, with a long neck, delicate facial features, and whose hair is wrapped elegantly in a scarf (Figure 3.5). Her dark skin contrasts with the lighter areas of her headscarf and clothing, and her long eyelashes bring attention to her almond-shaped eyes and long, thin nose. Although the drawing is very basic,

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its simplistic elegance belies the complex and fraught relationship between the Hutus and the Tutsis that Stern is observing herself. As the coronation proceeds, a group of Hutu musicians enters the stadium. The musicians then enter, crouching low. They are the Bahutos [Hutus], a conquered race in servitude to the Watussi [Tutsi], who tend their fields and produce their food; they even carry their masters’ litters. The Watussi neither works nor walks. The relationship between them reminds one of the giant ant and its slaves. The Bahutos enter, their stooping bodies bared to the waist, their loins covered with banana leaves. They play a strange music, with huge drums, blowing a multitude of cruelly-bellowing cow horns, as though in accusation of their lot.48

This description is accompanied by a painting, Bahutu Musicians, which visually depicts the chaotic and sonorous scene (Figure 3.6). “The rhythm of the dance goes faster,” Stern continues, “until it ends in a frenzy.”49 She describes the dancers’ “whirling yellow loin-cloths” that are also depicted in the painting. The Hutu men are stocky and muscular with dark skin and narrow, yellow eyes. Compared with the Tutsis, Stern depicts the Hutus as subhuman and animalistic. One figure on the bottom left even appears to have an animal head. A group of men blow into their long cow horns while another man in the foreground beats a drum, creating a frenetic, sexually suggestive scene. As the concluding major story in her Congo narrative, Stern’s account of the Féte Nationale in Kigali reinforces the ways in which racial divisions can help a minority group achieve political dominance. Her observations communicated critical lessons for South African audiences and, in hindsight, foreshadowed the horrific events of April 1994, when Hutu rebels sought revenge against the Tutsi

Figure 3.5  Irma Stern, Congo: Tutsi Woman. Drawing, 1942. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

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Figure 3.6 Irma Stern, Bahutu Musicians. Oil on canvas, 1942, 135 × 145 cm. © Johannesburg Art Gallery. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. (See Plate 9.)

minority in a killing spree that resulted in civil war. In fact, the queen Stern depicted in other drawings from her visit, Rosalie Jicanda, was one of the first members of Tutsi royalty to be executed in the genocide.50 As the social climate in South African became increasingly racially charged, Stern’s celebration of royalty in Congo, particularly in the case of the Tutsi minority, could have been interpreted as an argument in support of minority rule in South Africa. In her construction of ethnic hierarchies throughout Congo, Stern presents a snapshot of a culturally and ethnically diverse region— not unlike South Africa, in fact—trying to overcome its colonial past. The travel narrative format allowed Stern to introduce politically charged themes such as ethnic divisions, slavery, and sexuality to an educated but culturally repressed South African audience through an artistic medium.

Congo’s Reception Overall, critics responded favorably to Congo—some viewed it as an ethnographic study, others as a pure piece of art or travel literature. “For here is the most pleasurable kind of book in the world,” wrote a critic in Track magazine, “a book written, drawn, and painted by an artist. It is a book whose text and drawings are not separate, but one, thus forming a satisfying integer of the Congo as conceived wholly by Irma Stern, exuberant artist and indefatigable traveller.”51 Because few South Africans had visited the Belgian Congo, they accepted Stern’s account as academic knowledge even though she had no formal training in ethnography. A French critic noted that Stern’s Congo offered “une interresante causeire sur l’histoire et l’ethnographique du Congo Belge [an interesting review of the

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history and ethnography of the Belgian Congo].”52 The South African Jewish Times reported that “Stern saw the imprint of [the] Egyptian foot in Berlin [the Nefertiti bust at the Egyptian Museum], [and] compared it to the Watussi.”53 The critics’ positive reviews of Congo emboldened Stern to make strong political statements to the press. Upon her return to South Africa, for example, Stern declared that “the Watussi were probably the most aristocratic and cultured race on earth,” adding that “luxury” items, such as milk, honey, and banana juice, were dietary staples.54 Stern’s pronouncements and analysis in Congo, therefore, provided a degree of authority to her audience that enabled viewers and critics alike to accept the text as an accurate description of life in the Belgian Congo. Congo’s publication coincided with another political controversy that blurred the line between art and politics. In December 1942, after Stern’s return from the Congo, French archaeologist and Catholic priest Abbé Henri Breuil opened an exhibition of Congolese sculpture at the South African Museum in Cape Town, where he called on South Africa to establish a “Pan-African” museum of indigenous African art. Breuil was a well-known archaeologist who specialized in prehistoric rock art and became known for his “White Lady of Brandberg” thesis that suggested that Black people were not responsible for creating the ancient rock paintings found in South African caves.55 To contradict the large amount of evidence confirming Black artists as the original creators of prehistoric rock art, Breuil’s thesis suggested that the presence of white painted figures in the cave indicated that the Black people who made the cave paintings must have been in contact with Mediterranean (white) societies.56 Despite the controversy surrounding Breuil’s academic research, his conception of “Pan-Africanism” took hold among white South Africans. Breuil even referred to Stern as a “Pan-African artist,” or a white artist who seeks to paint diverse African subjects.57 Breuil commended Stern for “the energy displayed and risks taken in gathering such material” in the Belgian Congo.58 Both Breuil and Stern were scheduled to be subjects of a series of films produced by the South African Bureau of Information. Breuil would discuss prehistoric art, and Stern’s work would serve as an “example of Pan-Africanism” through her travels to the Congo, Lake Kivu, and Zanzibar.59 Congo’s critical acclaim showed Stern that the travel narrative was a successful medium for discussing politics outside of a strictly South African context. With her reputation as South Africa’s premier artist and an audience eager to follow her adventures, Stern sought to capitalize on Congo’s success and follow up on the slavery and colonialism themes by traveling to the island of Zanzibar to write her second travel narrative.

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Zanzibar (1948) On July 20, 1945, Stern left South Africa for her second trip to Zanzibar. After her first visit to Zanzibar six years prior, Stern was so intrigued that she committed to return. Writing to her friends Richard and Freda Feldman in 1939, Stern noted that she socialized in mixed-race circles in Zanzibar and enjoyed it: “Had the most fantastic time in Zanzibar—a heap of new friends—partly white—partly brown. A life so full of interest in fun—I am sorry I am back—as I find it more than dull and uncultured.”60 Stern carried this sentiment with her for the next six years, choosing to return to Zanzibar to complete her second travel narrative, Zanzibar, another limited-edition book published by J. L. Van Schaik press in 1948. Heavily illustrated with black and white photo reproductions of paintings, Zanzibar contains more than 100 pages of text and images. Many of the paintings are also framed with pieces of intricately carved wood from Zanzibar.61 The paintings are rich enough to deserve a separate scholarly study; this section focuses primarily on Stern’s illustrated text and how it expresses her evolving views on race and African identity. With Zanzibar, Stern was building on her experience writing the illustrated travel narrative Congo. As apartheid approached in South Africa, Zanzibar provides extraordinary insight into Stern’s thought patterns and political ideas. By her departure date in 1945, the world was a different place than during her first trip to the Congo in 1942— the Second World War had left Europe in ruins, the extent of the genocide of Jews had only begun to emerge, and in Africa, decimated European nations seemed unable to govern colonial territories as Africans prepared to gain independence. Culturally, American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were using abstraction to establish the United States as the new artistic center for avant-garde art. Amid this backdrop, Zanzibar appealed to Stern as yet another escape from Cape Town, as well as a place to work through her own transition as an artist. After settling into her temporary quarters in Zanzibar, Stern wrote to Richard and Freda Feldman, I have at last after a few weeks struggle surmounted the awful heat and noise and all the reflectings which the war has cast on to this island. Now I am back and not back—but here and am conquering new ground for my work and development. I am painting dramatic pictures, compositions, and faces—not just types and races.62

This statement marks a significant shift in Stern’s thinking and her approach to her work. Painting in Zanzibar challenged both Stern’s artistic practice and her

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prejudices. Her journey to a predominantly Muslim, Arabic-speaking African country just a few years after venturing into the center of Black Africa gave her a more complex perspective of the meaning of African identity both for other Africans and for herself as an artist. During this trip, Stern became even more interested in exploring individuals rather than “types” through her work, going against the prevailing sentiment in her native South Africa to separate and generalize people into racial categories. In Zanzibar, Stern observed Arab, Black, and white people coexisting on a small island and headed toward independence from white colonial rule. The island juxtaposed significantly from South Africa, which was becoming more segregated and dominated by white rule. Stern’s Zanzibar hints at her recognition of this distinction. As with Congo, Zanzibar’s value lies in its combination of image and text. With more than sixty illustrations, the narrative provides a rich visual depiction of Stern’s trip. The images articulate her knowledge of Zanzibar in ways that her simplistic and melodramatic prose cannot. Also noteworthy are her observations of life in Zanzibar and how it compares, in her view, to life in South Africa. At the beginning, for example, Stern discusses slavery on the island, making the following observation: “Even after slavery was officially abolished the people were so used to their position that they remained part of the Arab household. Call them what you will, every family still has its domestics who belong to the master and to the household.”63 Undoubtedly, this statement would have resonated with a white South African audience in 1948. With the Afrikaner-led National Party gaining control of the South African Parliament that year, the idea of maintaining white supremacy outside of legalized slavery had been an Afrikaner goal for more than a century. Stern’s observations in Zanzibar confirmed that racial supremacy was still attainable in the postwar, postcolonial era. What is interesting about Zanzibar is how Stern discusses the difference in the racial and social hierarchy from South Africa. Although white British colonial officers were still in charge, Muslim Arabs were next in the social order, followed by Indians and Black Africans, often referred to as “Swahilis.” As in South Africa, the Indian community was crucial in establishing Zanzibar as a major trade and commercial center. Similarly, in the narrative, Stern delves into the details of the status of Indians on the island. “The Indians have the trade in hand,” she writes, “they deal with ivory in a big way, with jewels and silk; in fact, most of the shops are run by Indians.”64 In comparison to the Arabs and the Black Africans on the island, Stern observes, “How differently live the Indians. . . . Modernly furnished rooms, pale blue walls, very shiny brass beds

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with huge mosquito nets over them.” During her visit, Stern became friendly with a young Indian woman who had, as she describes, “the gentle movements of a well-bred race.”65 As she marveled over how well the Indians lived in Zanzibar, Stern could not help but situate their success in a racial context for her South African audience that was familiar with the substantial Indian population that was concentrated in the Natal and its largest city, Durban. In 1947, a year before Zanzibar’s publication, India gained independence from Great Britain, even as contemporary laws enacted by the South African government deemed their social standing below white South Africans.66 In the section called “The Bazaar,” Stern travels by rickshaw through the streets of Zanzibar to learn more about how its poor citizens live. Stern uses this section to reinforce the cultural divide between reader and subject; she observes how poverty and disease have taken a toll on Zanzibar’s poor. She also dramatizes the island climate: “The tropical heat [brings] this smell [of decay] into a stench, a mixture of copra, cloves, and shark, with a virile smell of dorian [sic], an Indian fruit which has the odour of decomposing meat—a smell of all the garbage swimming round on the stone-paved lanes.”67 In the mind of a white South African reader, this description could also resemble their perceptions of life in a Black township—dirty, decaying, and filled with garbage. Then in a later section, Stern again addresses the issue of racial stratification in Zanzibar. She describes an encounter with “a fat, comfortable-looking negress, her dark skin shining in the sun.”68 Her comments reveal acute discomfort with seeing a nude Black woman in a predominantly Arab city where public nudity is strictly forbidden. Whereas she did not question nudity among Black women in the Congo or during her travels throughout southern Africa (in fact, she frequently painted Black women nude), Stern is deeply troubled by both nudity and Blackness in Zanzibar. “Her back was well formed, a black shiny back; her back was naked, her head was naked like an ebony ball,” asking, “Why was she naked? No woman was unclad.”69 At the conclusion of this section, Stern reveals that the woman has “enormously ill-formed stumps of ‘human legs,’” and suffers from elephantiasis, a disease that causes swelling in the legs and feet.70 As one of only a few discussions of Black individuals in the text, Stern’s language describes a horrifying image of the woman’s disfiguring condition, which would have confirmed her audience’s stereotypical view of Black people generally as immodest and diseased. Remarkably, Stern did not include an illustration of this woman in the travel narrative. Although Stern’s portrayal of the naked Black woman was racist and insensitive, she was also critical of how Arab women were treated in Zanzibar. Adjacent to a rough profile sketch, Zanzibar: Arab Man with Pipe, Stern describes Arab

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women’s positions in Zanzibari society (Figure 3.7): “The Arab may marry two or more wives,” Stern writes, continuing, “The women do not count, they have no say in the men’s lives. They bring the children into the world, they cook, they direct the servants, but they are of no consequence, as the Arab [sic] believe that women have no souls.”71 For Stern, women play subservient household roles or are sexually available as prostitutes in Zanzibar. In another section, Stern attends a wedding and views a performance of a traditional dance, the “Lelemama,” which Stern dismisses as “performed today mostly by prostitutes.”72 She adds, “Their dance is replete with highly suggestive sexual movement.”73 Unlike Black people in the Congo, at whom Stern marvels for being one generation removed from cannibalism, she seems to lament the social change that is occurring in Zanzibar with the often-cited refrain that women who evolve from rural to urban dwellers must resort to prostitution to survive. Stern would later increasingly rely on this simplistic stereotype of urban migration as she struggled to find her conception of “authentic” Black people in apartheid South Africa. As she absorbs her last moments in Zanzibar at the wedding, which includes dancing, drumming, and singing while guests feast on traditional food and spiced coffee, it is apparent that Stern’s search for ahistorical African subjects untainted by modernization and outside cultural influences has been futile. During the wedding, she is frustrated by the bride’s treatment as an object, “led in [to the ceremony] like a mummy, lifeless.”74 At the same time, Stern’s illustrations and cultural commentary in Zanzibar reaffirmed what white South Africans may have already assumed about other African nations, namely that colonialism was the best form of government for people of color. Zanzibar signified an escape from reality to an exotic locale, but its focus on Indian and Muslim culture alluded to the political implications of legal

Figure 3.7  Irma Stern, Zanzibar: Arab Man with Pipe. Drawing, 1948. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

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segregation in a multiracial and multilingual nation like South Africa. Stern’s description of clear blue seas, spices, and rickshaws was not entirely distinct from the British colonial experience in other countries, South Africa included. In turn, Stern’s portrayal secured the racial hierarchies that placed white people at the top, Black people at the bottom (as described in Stern’s anecdote about the “negress”), and Indian and Arab people somewhere in between. With their short and simplistic vignettes, Stern used Congo and Zanzibar to connect the Eurocentric discourse on Black people in Central Africa and Arabs in East Africa by drawing conclusions about history and culture from her brief encounters in the two regions. In essence, Congo and Zanzibar convey the complexity and diversity of artistic expression on the African continent, but Stern’s texts place these rich cultures into simple racial and social categories that were easily digestible for a white South African audience. The type of writing in Congo and Zanzibar illustrates the pitfalls in mining terms such as “Pan-African” for political purposes. Even Schweinfurth acknowledged the multiracial nature of African national identity in 1874: “It cannot fail to strike the traveler as remarkable that in all African nations he meets with individuals with black, red, and yellow complexions.”75 As Stern reached the apex of her career, the artistic and social conditions that had made Stern’s work so popular began to crumble. Stern could no longer visit Black areas in South Africa or other African countries without encountering vocal criticism of white regimes. In Europe, contemporary artists were using abstraction to find new methods for artistic expression. In South Africa, apartheid’s suppression of political freedoms sparked violent protests and new restrictions on artistic expression. Rising anti-apartheid sentiments in Black communities made it difficult for Stern to travel to rural areas. In her last two decades of life, Stern reached a crossroads. She could use her celebrity to raise critical awareness of how apartheid policies were destroying Black life and culture in South Africa. Or, she could cement her own artistic reputation and financial success in South Africa by quietly accepting the hypocrisy of the government’s enthusiastic support of her work and the fate of the Black and Coloured communities she loved to paint.

Notes 1 “Irma Stern’s Congo Show,” Rand Daily Mail, November 20, 1942. 2 Liese Van der Watt, “Art, Gender, and Afrikaner Nationalism,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910–1994, ed. Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 99.

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3 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 160. 4 “The Wanderer,” Cape Argus, March 25, 1939. Bodenstein was of German origin but was not Jewish. 5 Ibid. 6 “Two Pictures . . . Being Sent to Washington,” Cape Times, November 24, 1936. 7 “For Native Corps,” Cape Argus, January 20, 1942. 8 “Irma Stern Exhibition: Opening by High Commissioner,” Cape Times, March 23, 1938. 9 “Irma Stern’s New Show,” Rand Daily Mail, October 17, 1941. The current status of these paintings is unknown. There are no reproductions of these works available in historical or current texts. 10 “Young Painters of Cape Town,” Cape Argus, March 20, 1939. 11 “Stern Words on Dakar,” Johannesburg Sunday Times, 1938. 12 Berman, Remembering Irma, 84. 13 “Irma Stern’s Congo Show,” Rand Daily Mail, November 20, 1942. 14 Irma Stern, Congo (Pretoria: J. L. Van Schaik LTD, 1942), 11. 15 The Leopard Men acquired a special place in European popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s as an example of so-called Black savagery and propensity for violence. The comic book Tintin in the Congo, for example, uses the Leopard Men as the story’s villains. Vicky Van Bockhaven has written a detailed and fascinating article about the Leopard Men and their representations in European popular culture, as well as their anti-colonial resistance efforts. See Vicky Van Bockhaven, “LeopardMen of the Congo in Literature and Popular Imagination,” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde 46, no. 1 (2009): 79–94. 16 Sara Steinert Borella, The Travel Narratives of Ella Maillart (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 6. 17 Kristi Siegel, ed., Gender, Genre, and the Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 2. Women writers such as Danish author and selfdescribed “storyteller” Karen Blixen (a.k.a., Isak Dinesen) fit Siegel’s description well. Blixen’s 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, captivated audiences internationally with the story of her bucolic life on a coffee farm in colonial Kenya. The memoir’s success came from its gripping description of how Blixen managed the farm while searching for true love among the transplanted European aristocracy. Like Stern, Blixen traveled frequently between Europe and Africa, developing an understanding of how Europeans expected Africa to be portrayed in the arts. Both women were strong, independent, and had tortured relationships with men. Blixen was drawn to write about Africans and African culture in a similar way that Stern was motivated to paint African women. Both women were captivated by the vast cultural divide between Africa and Europe, but both adhered strictly to the belief that this divide created a necessary separation between the races. Despite forming emotional connections with Black African individuals, race proved to be

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19

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21 22

Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art an insurmountable social barrier for Stern and Blixen. See Simon Lewis, “Culture, Cultivation, and Colonialism in ‘Out of Africa’ and Beyond,” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 1 (2000): 63–79. See also Lynn R. Wilkinson, “Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory,” Comparative Literature 56, no. 1 (2004): 77–98. And Tim Youngs, “‘Why Is That White Man Pointing That Thing at Me?’ Representing the Maasai,” History in Africa 26 (1999): 427–47. Tim Youngs, “Africa/the Congo: The Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157. Stern’s white female predecessors had faced similar challenges in representing Africa to a Western audience. Danish writer and novelist Karen Blixen (a.k.a., Isak Dinesen), for example, described her experiences managing a farm in colonial Kenya in her 1937 book, Out of Africa. Comparisons between the Blixen’s descriptions of colonial Kenya in Out of Africa have been compared with texts written by South Africans such as Olive Schreiner. See Christraud Geary, “Nineteenth Century Images of the Mangbetu in Explorer Accounts,” in The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, ed. Enid Schildkrout (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire (Seattle and Cambridge, UK: University of Washington Press and the American Museum of Natural History, 1990). Geary argues compellingly that Schweinfurth’s pencil sketch illustrations of the Mangbetu created iconographic conventions that European artists and engravers used to reproduce Mangbetu imagery in popular and scholarly publications. Notably, Stern shared a brief letter correspondence in the 1920s with Leo Frobenius, who, as mentioned in Chapter 2, was a pioneer in the field of ethnology. His skill in collecting and trading objects on his expeditions gave him an edge among the international group of explorers in the region to garner material for museums in their respective countries. According to scholar Johannes Fabian, “traveling ethnographers operated in economic and political situations in which contact with other cultures was crucially linked to the trade of goods.” Fabian goes on to note, “Collecting objects demonstrated to rulers, investors, and the European public at large the potential of Central Africa as a target of imperialism.” See Johannes Fabian. “Curios and Curiosity: Notes on Reading Torday and Frobenius,” in The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, eds. Curtis A. Keim and Enid Schildkrout (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83. National Library of South Africa, Irma Stern Collection MSC Box 2(7). Ibid. In her essay, “Between Africa and Europe,” Dr. Irene Below discusses the relationship between Stern and Frobenius, suggesting that Stern’s interest in the quotidian in rural Black areas differed from Frobenius’ “cultural history approach” and thus serves as a departure point from primitivism. Although Stern clearly

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respected Frobenius’ work, Below is correct in asserting that Stern used his writings as a basis for study of the region but sought to connect with her subjects on a deeper level. Irene Below, “Between Africa and Europe,” in Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2003) exhibition catalogue, 35. 23 Stern, Congo, 10. 24 Ibid., 1. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Alain Locke also names Jacovleff as an inspiration for Black artists for his portrayal of Africans in his work. See Locke, “The American Negro as Artist,” The American Magazine of Art 23, no. 3 (September 1931): 210–20. 27 Paul Greenhalgh, ed. Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 (Washington, DC: Harry Abrams Press, 2000). 28 These photos later inspired artists in the United States, such as African American artist Aaron Douglas, who drew an illustration of Nobosodrou for the cover of Opportunity magazine in May 1927 and Malvina Hoffman, who created a sculpture of a Mangbetu woman in 1930. See Richard J. Powell, “Re/Birth of a Nation,” in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. David A. Bailey and Richard J. Powell (London and Berkeley: Hayward Galleries/Institute of International Visual Arts and University of California Press, 1998), 26–7. 29 Stern, Congo, 5. 30 The village name is Ekibondo, but both Stern and other writers refer to the king as Chief Ekibondo. 31 Enid Schildkrout, “Gender and Sexuality in Mangbetu Art,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, eds., Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 198. 32 Ibid., 207. 33 Stern, Congo, 6. 34 Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 89. 35 Stern, Congo, 18. 36 Schildkrout, “Gender and Sexuality in Mangbetu Art,” 198. 37 Stern, Congo, 23. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, eds., The Scramble for Art in Central Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104. And Stern, Congo, 25. 42 Stern, Congo, 25. 43 Suzanne Preston Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 245–6.

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44 University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, “Rwanda—History,” http:​//www​ .afri​ca.up​enn.e​du/NE​H/rwh​istor​y.htm​ (last accessed June 22, 2015). 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. For more information about the history of the Rwanda-Burundi region, see Jean-Pierre Chretien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Strauss (New York: Zone Books, 2003). 47 Ibid. 48 Stern, Congo, 43. 49 Ibid. 50 Scholar Carol H. Kaufmann, curator of African Art at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town, has done extensive and groundbreaking research on Stern’s Congo travels. Her research confirmed Queen Rosalie Jicanda’s identity in a Stern’s work Rwandan Queen (1942) owned by the Iziko National Gallery, and that she was murdered in the 1994 genocide. For more information on Kaufmann’s research, see her description of the works in the brochure, “Imagining Beauty: Body Adornment Including Young SA Designers” (Cape Town: Iziko Museums, 2010), 17. Many thanks to Carol for sharing her knowledge about this subject. 51 “Congo” review page, “Track,” November 1943. 52 “Propagande Coloniale Belge,” Le Courrier d’Afrique, March 20, 1942. 53 “Irma Stern to Visit Central Africa,” South Africa Jewish Times, October 30, 1942. 54 Ibid. 55 See Abbe Henri Breuil, “The White Lady of Brandberg, South-West Africa, Her Companions and Her Guards,” The South African Archaeological Bulletin 3, no. 9 (1948): 2–21. And Abbe Henri Breuil, “The So-Called Bushman Art: Paintings and Engravings on Rock in South Africa and the Problems They Suggest,” Man 46 (July–August 1946). Breuil’s thesis asserted that a white painted figure in a South African rock painting from the Tsiab region was actually a Cretan or a Sumerian, which proved that these civilizations had contact with the Bushmen. Breuil was part of a school of archaeologists who believed that there was a historical or cultural connection between rock paintings around the world. 56 After he discussed his “White Lady” thesis with Smuts, Breuil claimed that Smuts stated, “You have upset all of my history. . . . When you publish these paintings, you will set the world on fire and nobody will believe you.” Breuil’s thesis was accepted as fact for years until scholars demonstrated that the white figure in the painting had a penis and that Greek explorers had not visited the area. For more information on Breuil’s role in shaping the political dimensions of South African archaeology, see J. D. Lewis-Williams, “Image and Counter-Image: The Work of the Rock Art Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand,” African Arts 29, no. 4 (1996): 34–41, 93. See also Nick Shepherd, “State of the Discipline: Science, Culture, and Identity in South African Archaeology, 1870-2003,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 4 (2003): 823–44. Breuil emerged as a popular figure in South

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African academic and political circles for advancing his thesis, helping whites build their case for minority rule. In fact, Prime Minister Smuts befriended him and provided him with an academic appointment at the University of Witwatersrand when Breuil fled Nazi-occupied France. Because Smuts was politically invested in connecting white South African identity to the rock paintings, Breuil became a respected academic authority, and his thesis remained part of white South African folklore even after it was disproved. 57 “Exhibition of Congo Sculpture,” Rand Daily Mail, December 5, 1942. 58 Colin Legum, “She Speaks for Africa,” The Forum, vol. 10, December 20, 1947. 59 D. F. Cambell, “Pan-African Artist,” 1946 newspaper clipping, Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa. It is unclear if the films were completed and released. 60 Berman, Remembering Irma, 82. 61 Alan Crump, “Irma Stern: The Determined Search for the Exotic,” in Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey, ed. Wilhelm van Rensburg, ed. Exh. Cat. (Johannesburg: Standard Bank, 2003), 27. Stern removed so much carved wood from Zanzibar for her paintings, as well as a set of wooden doors for her house, that the Tanzanian government passed a law declared carved wood as cultural property and banned its export. 62 Berman, Remembering Irma, 97. 63 Irma Stern, Zanzibar (Pretoria, J. L. Van Schaik, Ltd., 1948), 6. 64 Ibid., 33. 65 Ibid., 32. 66 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 194. 67 Stern, Zanzibar, 18. 68 Ibid., 30. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 12. 72 Ibid., 94. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 96. 75 Georg Schweinfurth, In the Heart of Africa, trans. Ellen E. Frewer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874), 100.

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Modernism under Apartheid Art and Social Context

“The 1948 parliamentary session will be electric,” wrote a columnist for the South African magazine Trek in January of that year. They continued, “and issues which are undreamed of to-day [sic], will be created and will become issues of burning political controversy before Parliament is prorogued.”1 This statement presciently predicted the tremendous political and social changes that apartheid would bring to South Africa after the Second World War. During the early apartheid years, South Africa’s relationship with the international community was one of heightened global engagement, with government officials mounting a campaign to reconnect white South Africa to its European heritage and assert the country’s status as a regional power on the African continent. In apartheid’s later years, this approach would change to an isolationist strategy— the government focused on suppressing political protest by restricting travel and silencing opposing viewpoints. The statement also had prophetic meaning for the direction of modern art in South Africa during apartheid. Racial segregation, massive shifts in urban and rural migration patterns, and the violent repression of dissenting voices severely impacted the arts in South Africa. Artists, many of whom were Black, were forced into exile, jailed, or otherwise silenced. Arts officials, however, viewed certain white artists, such as Stern, as potential assets in their effort to define South Africa as a modern nation predicated on Eurocentric values. In 1951, for example, the South African Association of Artists (SAAA) held an exhibition of graphic art that included works by Germans Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach and Frenchman Camille Pissaro; Stern was the only South African included.2 Amid this “electric” milieu, Irma Stern resumed her travels to Europe in 1947 after a ten-year hiatus during the Second World War. In the same issue of Trek that predicted unprecedented political change in South Africa, Stern recalled her visit to war-ravaged Europe, attempting to remind viewers that its

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artistic preeminence had not been lost: “It was with doubt in my heart that I set forth on my journey. These doubts have been dispelled and I know once and for all that Europe remains that art centre of the world.”3 That Stern would turn her South African audience’s attention back to Europe after focusing on Africa for more than a decade signaled yet another shift in her thinking about how to maintain her status as South Africa’s most respected modern artist both at home and abroad. She used the work she produced during her trips to the Belgian Congo and Zanzibar to bolster her credentials in postwar Europe, thereby reconnecting South Africa culturally to its Western artistic heritage. From 1948 to 1966, the final decades of her life, Stern achieved the status she had long sought as a nationally and internationally recognized artist. Her work depicting a multiracial South Africa became a crucial element of the Afrikanerled National Party’s propaganda efforts to promote segregation but downplay apartheid’s insidious effects. Although her political views were not always aligned with the National Party’s, government officials routinely selected Stern’s paintings of Black and Coloured South Africans for exhibition and purchase to emphasize racial differences and justify their separation through apartheid. In addition to reaching the pinnacle of her career in South Africa during apartheid’s rise, Stern also sought to maintain a high profile in Europe even as artistic trends pointed toward abstraction. Her meteoric rise in popularity during this period illustrates that art and politics must be viewed as inextricable in modern South Africa.

Apartheid’s Beginnings In the late 1940s, South Africa was undergoing major demographic and social changes, which disturbed the balance that agrarian life had fostered for nearly three centuries. More citizens, for example, were moving into cities where higher population densities meant more interracial contact.4 Most importantly, an increasing number of Black South Africans were pursuing work in the booming mining industry, competing with lower-class Afrikaners for jobs.5 Black people flowed into major cities, such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban, to whites’ dismay. Fears of racial mixing in cities prompted whites, led by Afrikaners, to call for new government regulations to promote racial segregation. Economic isolation during the Great Depression and the Second World War exacerbated the divisions in South African society that ultimately culminated in the Afrikaner-led National Party’s victory in elections in 1948 and the

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subsequent implementation of apartheid. During the conflict, South Africa officially sided with the Allies, but many Afrikaners supported the Nazis and their anti-Semitic racial purity policies.6 After the war, many countries chose to participate in international organizations including the United Nations to prevent future conflicts. According to South African journalist Allister Sparks, however, “Afrikanerdom chose to intensify and codify the segregationist system and to articulate racism as a national policy at precisely the moment the rest of the world began moving in the opposite direction.”7 Tension between the English and Afrikaners had been worsening for decades. By almost every indicator—education, wealth, and more—Afrikaners lagged behind English-speaking South Africans, which meant that sweeping changes were necessary to improve their social standing.8 To accomplish this objective, they sought to gain control of South Africa’s government and its economy. English-speaking South Africans dominated the most significant sectors of the nation’s economy, including the mining and banking industries. The Afrikaners, led by the Broederbond, sought a political solution to their economic inferiority by gaining control of Parliament and passing apartheid legislation. In addition to wresting political and economic control from English-speaking white counterparts, Afrikaners were deeply troubled by what they perceived to be a liberalization of racial policies by Prime Minister Jan C. Smuts’ administration. Smuts did have some liberal views, but he still presided over a segregationist legislative body. J. H. Hofmeyr, Smuts’ deputy prime minister, once stated in Parliament, “I take my stand on the ultimate removal of the colour bar from our constitution.”9 Referring to racial segregation, Smuts and Hofmeyr wanted to maintain the status quo while elevating South Africa’s position in international affairs and appearing to support human rights. Nevertheless, Afrikaners believed that their culture would become diluted in an integrated society. In May 1948, after decades of planning, political maneuvering, and disenfranchisement of the Black majority, the Afrikaner-led National Party won the largest number of seats in Parliament, defeating Smuts’ United Party by a slim margin.10 The new prime minister, Dr. Daniel Francois (D.F.) Malan, an academic and ordained minister in the Afrikaner-led Dutch Reformed Church, worked with Parliament to enact three pieces of legislation in 1950 that would form apartheid’s core: the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Immorality Act. The Population Registration Act created numerous racial categories that classified people. The Group Areas Act mandated that citizens were required to live only with their assigned racial group. Finally, the Immorality Act criminalized interracial sexual relations. Enforcing these three

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pieces of legislation served as the cornerstone of apartheid policy, which was effective in securing white supremacy in South Africa until 1994. Apartheid policies affected Stern in important ways: restrictions on movement throughout the country limited Stern’s ability to travel to Black areas to paint. The creation of Black townships in the cities also affected rural life, as men who found work in cities were separated from their families. Additionally, resentment of apartheid policies created a stronger current of anger and skepticism toward whites, making it more difficult for Stern to feel welcomed in Black communities. These reasons, among others, motivated Stern to rebuild her artistic reputation elsewhere.

Stern in Postwar Europe Stern’s first significant trip to Europe in 1947 helped her to reestablish her relationships with galleries and museums, where her paintings from the Belgian Congo and Zanzibar cultivated a renewed interest in her work. In 1947, for example, Stern exhibited at the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris, which resulted in the Modern Art Museum’s (also in Paris) purchase of her painting, In the Harem, a work that was reproduced with a woven textile frame in her travel narrative Zanzibar. In his introductory essay for the Galerie des Beaux Arts catalog, chief curator Jean Cassou described Stern as “une africaine [an African],” citing her birth “dans une ferme [on a farm]” in the Transvaal.11 According to Cassou, whose remarks were based on Stern’s recent work in the Congo and Zanzibar, Stern’s role as an artist was to interpret Africa through her art: Her [Stern’s] calling was to speak of Africa. It is with the faces of Africans that Ms. Irma Stern is familiar. Her universe is the African continent. That is her native land. In her country, South Africa, as well as in Rhodesia, Mozambique, in Dakar, Madeira, and Zanzibar, in the land of the Zulus and in that of the Basutos that she pursues the face of humanity, and it was in the tribe of giants of the Congo River that she was assured to have found a pure and perfect form of culture.12

Cassou endorsed Stern on behalf of a major European museum but also made a statement on her new role in postwar Europe. In her early career, Stern’s paintings and drawings represented her country of birth, South Africa, referencing a place with which European audiences were unfamiliar. By the late 1940s, Stern was

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viewed as “an African” in Europe and was expected to interpret “the meaning of Africa,” which was changing rapidly as a wave of decolonization began to roll over the continent.13 In addition to the Modern Art Museum’s purchase, the Roland, Browse, and Delbanco Gallery in London exhibited paintings from Stern’s Zanzibar trip. Her 1945 painting Arab Priest, for example, was on display at the London gallery (Figure 4.1). The oil painting has thick, impasto brush strokes and depicts an Arab priest dressed in a white tunic seated in a chair with his head tilted and resting in his hand. The color palette for the painting is limited to whites and shades of brown. In response to the exhibition, however, a reviewer for the Glasgow Herald criticized Stern’s work for being “concerned more with color than character.”14 Although perhaps unintentional, the reviewer identified a key trend in Stern’s work during the apartheid era: growing social tensions prohibited her from connecting with her subjects as she had done earlier in her career. Black South Africans in rural areas were facing apartheid’s acute effects, such as land dispossession, economic hardship, and broken communities impacted by massive urban migration. These factors made them less willing to accept white visitors with open arms. In 1948, the SAAA, a small arts organization based in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, organized an exhibition of South African artists at the Tate Gallery in London. The event was a major undertaking for the association, and it produced large dividends by introducing a predominantly white group of South African artists to a postwar European audience. Unlike the Cape Town-based South African Society of Artists, which encouraged its members to

Figure 4.1  Irma Stern, Arab Priest. Oil on canvas, 1945, 96.5 × 85 cm. OM.831, National Collection of Qatar. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Photography © National Collection of Qatar. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 10.)

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explore their national identity through their art, the SAAA was quick to declare South African art as nonexistent, placing it instead within the European artistic tradition. “There is no reason to speak of a South African school of painting,” the SAAA states in the exhibition catalog, “In the past 30 years, the main influences have come from European Art.”15 This statement was consistent with an overall Afrikaner interest in making Pretoria and its surrounding areas a political and cultural center for Dutch-heritage Afrikaners, rather than Black African ideas.16 For Stern to be accepted by the SAAA, her work had to fit within European modernism rather than point to specifically ethnic South African themes, such as her paintings of Black and Coloured South Africans. The SAAA’s exhibition traveled to the Tate Gallery in London, where it was designed to communicate the organization’s view that whites brought the idea of “being civilized” to the African continent, which the catalog describes as “so dear an ambition for the white man.”17 Works selected for the exhibition misrepresented Black people as animalistic or primitive. Jewish South African Moses Kottler’s wooden sculpture Mother and Child, for example, depicts a Black woman nursing a child with simian-like qualities. Stern’s 1942 charcoal drawing Asande Girl is a profile study of a nude Black woman bearing traditional facial scarification marks, full lips, and an elongated head that is characteristic of women in the region. Just as French curator Jean Cassou declared Stern an interpreter of African culture, so too does catalog author Geoffrey Long. “If Pierneef shows the winter of Africa [in the form of winter landscapes], then Irma Stern is high summer,” writes Long, before adding, “A most prolific and vigorous painter, her work has an almost sumptuous decorativeness. An exoticism in which are sensed the ferment and heat of the tropics. Her style has flowered in the hot-houses of the Congo and Zanzibar.”18 In contrast, painter Gerard Sekoto, the lone Black artist represented in the exhibition, is described as being disconnected from Europe even though he spent most of his life in Paris as an expatriate: “The position of Gerard Sekoto, a Bantu artist, is difficult to assess as he is divorced by race and environment from the European artists of the country—the most important problem in the subcontinent today.”19 Sekoto’s painting Sixpence a Door depicted a more realistic, although slightly sterilized view of township life (Figure 4.2). In the painting, Black South Africans crowd around a building in a shantytown. Barefoot children run in the streets while crowds of people clog the alleys. The painting portrays a township conveniently without the squalor—some of the main reasons Black people had objected to living in them—which may explain why the painting was selected for the exhibition.

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Figure 4.2  Gerard Sekoto, Sixpence a Door. Oil on canvas, 1947. © 2019 Gerard Sekoto Foundation / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. (See Plate 11.)

The SAAA exhibition marked the beginning of a new era of South African modern art heavily influenced by politics. The more bucolic depictions of Black life by white artists such as Stern and Kottler were privileged over Sekoto’s more pragmatic but bleaker interpretation of urban life for Black people. The catalog essay sought to erase the artistic boundaries between South Africa and Europe, thus minimizing race’s role in and Black artists’ contributions to modern South African art.

Art and Apartheid Abroad The South African government invested heavily in Stern during apartheid, providing her with everything from letters of support for international travel to purchasing her work for overseas display. Prior to the National Party’s election, Stern had received support from South African prime minister Jan Smuts and his administration. Smuts was a Cambridge-educated Afrikaner, which helped him understand British politics and culture and gave him a broader international worldview than many of his Afrikaner compatriots. His command of international affairs led him to serve in the British Imperial War Cabinet, and he was an influential voice in the founding of the League of Nations. Both actions raised skepticism of his loyalty among Afrikaners.20 In 1947, Stern wrote to her close friends in Johannesburg, Richard and Freda Feldman, just before departing for a Paris exhibition: “I am having a Government sponsored Exhibition in Paris and also maybe Rotterdam. . . . I am traveling with letters from the Information Officers—Education Officers—the External Affairs and Finance Minister—in short a little suitcase full of script.”21

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Although Smuts firmly supported Afrikaner causes and believed that Black and Coloured people were inherently inferior, he advocated for South Africa’s involvement in international affairs, supported Stern’s work, and encouraged her to travel and exhibit abroad.22 Stern received letters of introduction for travel and personal letters from the prime minister himself. On May 15, 1950, Smuts wrote a letter of introduction for Stern: This serves to state that Miss Irma Stern, a distinguished South African Artist [sic], is proceeding to France and Spain, and other Continental [sic] countries, where she intends spending some time. Any help given her, or courtesies extended to her on her travels will be much appreciated by me. (J.C. Smuts), Field Marshal.23

Nationwide, white South Africans mourned Smuts’ death four months later in September 1950. Stern was given an opportunity to express her opinion on the value of his contributions to South African history. In an article “Smuts Memorial Should Be,” South Africans were asked how Smuts’ memory should be preserved and honored. Stern responded with, “A monument of his birthplace. Perhaps there should be a memorial at his birthplace and at Table mountain [sic] and also a bursary [scholarship] for the study of race relations—of all races.”24 Stern notably appears to call for funds to support the academic study of race relations at the university level. Her suggestion seems contradictory to many of her previous statements on race in support of the segregation and the “colour line.” Smuts and Stern shared a similar problem: they both lived deep within their own internal struggles between beliefs and practice. In government, Smuts’ work as a political leader centered around bringing South Africa onto the international stage even as he worked with fellow Afrikaners to establish protectionist segregation policies. In a similar vein, Stern used her work to bring international attention to South Africa’s racial and ethnic diversity even as she rejected the idea of interracial contact. Perhaps their education abroad and extensive overseas travel made it difficult to accept the racist and xenophobic rhetoric at home as universal truth. Both Smuts and Stern, unfortunately, were never able to resolve their internal struggles and took them to their graves.

“Perhaps the Change Lay in the Natives, Perhaps in Myself ” Apartheid’s rigid laws enforcing racial segregation significantly impacted Stern’s ability to paint in Black areas, altering the trajectory of her career at the end of

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her life. Although Stern claimed that she was primarily interested in “all tribes, their cultures, and their social significance,” she became frustrated as more Black South Africans moved into cities and adopted urban lifestyles.25 For example, despite her interest in Black artistic subjects, Stern ignored the insidious effects of urbanization on Black communities—dense living conditions, poverty, and the adoption of Western clothing styles—particularly in the townships. After a 1951 visit to the Ciskei region of the Eastern Cape, Stern began to acknowledge— albeit in a patronizing and paternalistic way—apartheid’s social and economic impact on Black populations. “Now I no longer feel at ease among primitive people,” she told a reporter for the Cape Argus, before adding, “On my painting tour in the Transkei a few months ago I found things had changed since my earlier visits—perhaps the change lay in the natives, perhaps in myself. But the old ease of communication had gone.”26 Indeed, things were changing for the worse in Black communities throughout South Africa, and government policies were to blame for the changes Stern observed in the Transkei. Apartheid usurped nearly all of Black peoples’ political rights. In 1951, the government dissolved the Natives Representative Council, which was the only means of Black political participation.27 Additionally, the Transkei region (home to Black activists Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela) was at the center of the apartheid regime’s controversial plans to dilute the Black vote by dividing Black areas into “homelands,” or ethnically separate, self-governing nations. Black people were fed up with white South Africans, and organized resistance movements were spreading throughout both urban and rural areas. To note, Stern was not the only white female artist who witnessed apartheid’s pernicious effects on Black people. Constance Stuart Larrabee, an Englishspeaking, Pretoria-based artist, spent much of her time photographing the Ndebele, an ethnic group from the central and northeastern regions of South Africa, as well as Black communities in the Transkei, Natal, and Zululand. Larrabee, like Stern, trained in Germany, studying at the Bavarian State School of Photography in Munich from 1936 to 1937.28 Unlike Stern, however, Larrabee photographed Black life in the townships. Her 1948 black and white photograph Young Gold Miner Watching Sunday Mine Dance (Figure 4.3) depicts the profile of a shirtless young boy gazing through a fence, which is reflected on his face and body. The photo captures the young boy’s malaise in his downcast facial expression, but the rest of the photograph is more abstract; the viewer cannot see the dance being performed, and the boy’s body is covered with the geometric pattern of the fence shadow. As fiercely independent artists,

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Figure 4.3 Constance Stuart Larrabee, Young Gold Miner Watching Sunday Mine Dance, Witwatersrand, South Africa, Photograph, 1948. Photograph by Constance Stuart Larrabee. Constance Stuart Larrabee Collection, EEPA 1998-061789, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

both women challenged gender, racial, and artistic boundaries by venturing into Black areas. For Larrabee, racially condescending reasons made Black people ideal subjects for photography: “Natives are the most photogenic people. They are a really marvelous medium for photography. Their skin reflects the light so well.”29 Despite having significantly more contact with Black people in their own cultural, social, and personal spaces, neither Larrabee nor Stern could step out of their privilege as white female artists to empathize with their subjects’ plights under apartheid.

The Van Riebeeck Tercentenary In 1952, South Africa celebrated the 300th anniversary of Dutch explorer Jan Van Riebeeck’s arrival to the Cape peninsula. Van Riebeeck was a revered historical figure among Afrikaners, who considered him a proverbial “father” for his work in establishing the Cape Colony on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, as well as for acquiring land and slaves from the indigenous Black population. The tercentenary celebration was not only a historical milestone, it was also integral in consolidating political power around Afrikaner cultural values under apartheid. As apartheid leaders struggled to unify whites across linguistic and class boundaries against the Black majority, they seized the opportunity to commemorate Van Riebeeck as a national hero who subjugated the indigenous population and made it possible for whites to settle the land.

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South Africa, however, was anything but united around the tercentenary celebrations. Black and Coloured communities organized boycotts in protest of the events.30 As Black South Africans endured squalid conditions in the townships and dwindling political rights, there was little to celebrate about life under Afrikaner rule, past or present. The African National Congress (ANC) national treasurer S. M. Molema called the tercentenary a “frenzy of self adulation,” during which whites would “embrace each other and shake their bloody hands in commemoration of their three hundred years of rapine and bloodshed.”31 The ANC, South Africa’s largest resistance organization for Black people, used its members’ outrage over the celebration to launch its Defiance Campaign, which challenged segregation laws by breaking them peacefully. There were many types of events planned to celebrate Van Riebeeck during the tercentenary, including several parades, symbolic processions through Cape Town, and a pavilion that showcased aspects of South African culture. The costs and scale of the festivities were intended to rival a European colonial exposition or world’s fair, and the event reflected this nineteenth-century mode of display. A history pageant contained a procession of floats that progressed from “Darkest Africa” to “We Build a Nation,” a float led by Prime Minister Malan’s wife, Maria, and flanked by white horses and the Union flag.32 Stern was invited to participate in the art exhibition portion of the tercentenary, where she showed the painting Transkei Native. Sir Alfred Lane Beit, nephew of the wealthy De Beers Consolidated Mines executive Alfred Beit, had recently purchased the painting. Sir Beit lent the work to the exhibition, which also showcased works by other nationally recognized artists, including Cecil Skotnes and Gerard Sekoto.33 Stern’s Transkei Native may have resembled her 1941 painting Xhosa Woman, which depicts a Black woman in traditional Xhosa dress, including a blue headscarf and signature white chalk around her eyes (Figure 4.4). This work, in particular, would have been consistent with the triumphant, domineering tone of the tercentenary celebrations since the Transkei region was the crucible for the Black resistance movement. Stern’s choice to show her painting of traditional life in the Transkei was more than anachronistic. Indeed, it was a tacit statement of the apartheid government’s overall plan to confront the Black resistance movement by separating Blacks into ethnic homelands. While resistance organizations like the ANC raised awareness of the Black plight in the townships, white artists such as Stern, with an outdated vision of Black life, promoted the incorrect view that Blacks lived a peaceful and bucolic tribal existence. Stern’s participation in the tercentenary marked an important episode in her career, fully integrating her with the

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Figure 4.4  Irma Stern, Xhosa Woman. Oil on canvas, 1941, 75.5 × 75 cm. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum. (See Plate 12.)

apartheid establishment. At this moment, she faced critical decisions as an artist that would determine her legacy. Receiving government endorsements could jeopardize her ability to connect with the Black people on whom she relied for subjects. On the other hand, government support would give her greater opportunities to solidify her reputation as South Africa’s preeminent modernist in the white art historical canon.

The Battle with Abstraction The decision to embrace abstraction posed the next challenge to Stern’s international reputation. She resisted abstraction for most of her career. “People who really know about art in Europe are sick and tired of all the nonsense that is being exhibited under the guise of abstract art,” Stern remarked after returning from a trip to Europe in 1958.34 Despite her protests against abstraction, critics began to suggest that Stern’s work was moving in that direction.35 Her 1953 oil painting Malay Wedding, for example, supports this view. Compared with her 1939 painting Malay Girl (Figure 4.5), for instance, Malay Wedding appears to be more abstract. Although the subject was one of Stern’s favorites—she had completed several paintings of Coloured women throughout her career—her 1953 painting shifts the focus from the subjects to the formal elements and composition. In Malay Girl (1939), the young girl’s features under the pinkish glow of her floral-patterned headscarf are soft and realistic. The melancholic expression on the young girl’s face gives the viewer a way to connect emotionally to the subject.

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Figure 4.5  Irma Stern, Malay Girl. Oil on canvas, 1939, 61 × 51 cm. © Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. (See Plate 13.)

In contrast, in Malay Wedding, Stern seems more concerned with formalism than subject. The abstracted figures make an emotional connection more difficult. Sharp lines and geometric shapes form the women’s faces. They stand in rigid poses with long, black-outlined rectangular noses that extend upward to form perfectly curved eyebrows. At least two of the three have closed eyes, and the woman on the right had an implausibly long neck that is bent at an unnatural angle. The bright yellow background gives no indication of location or that the women are participating in a wedding. While Stern verbally disapproved of abstraction, her move toward abstraction only heightened her reputation with lucrative results. In the same year she painted Malay Wedding, 1953, the South African government purchased two Stern paintings, and the South African National Gallery purchased her 1927 painting Swazi Girls for the collection.36 Although her reputation as a painter of South African subjects was reaching its apex, Stern’s concern over gaining access to Black and Coloured areas due to apartheid restrictions caused her to search for places where she could paint.37 Meanwhile, for some Black South African artists, abstraction served as an entry point to explore modernism beyond the confines of traditional methods of representation that were taught in a select few colonial art schools. Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002), for example, was a Black South African artist who received an Anglican education in Pietersburg, South Africa, but obtained a scholarship and moved to Paris in 1939 to study.38 In Paris, Mancoba was interned by the Nazis during the Second World War, and afterward, moved to Denmark with his Danish wife, Sonia Ferlov. He eventually resettled in Paris in 1952 with his wife and son, Wonga, where he lived until his death in 2002.39 Whereas Stern often lamented the visible passage of time in Black communities through social change and urbanization, Mancoba embraced modernism

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and abstraction as a means to “appeal to all human beings in a universal way, timelessly.” As a Black artist who wanted to define himself independently of the intellectual and physical restrictions of his early life in colonial South Africa, Mancoba’s expatriatism helped him develop both his sense of African identity and his sense of modernism through abstraction. In his untitled oil dated between 1938 and 1942, Mancoba uses bright colors, geometric shapes, and long lines to convey a sense of introspection and possibility. Dark lines intersect with bright red and lime green circles. Rasheed Araeen establishes Mancoba as the central Black figure in South African modernism, naming him as the only Black artist to transcend the colonial mindset with his art, writing, What is extraordinary about Mancoba’s achievement is that he is very likely the first artist from the whole colonized world—Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific—to enter the central core of modernism at the time when this world, particularly his own country of South Africa, was still struggling under colonialism, and to challenge modernism’s historical paradigm on its own terms. The success of his entry not only challenges the Eurocentric notion of modernism’s historical agency, determined philosophically, ideologically, and culturally by the exclusivity of European subjectivity, but also demolishes the very discourse that racially separates the Self from the Other. And by this he places the creative role of free human imagination above all predeterminations.40

In contrast to Mancoba, Stern’s opposition to abstraction and her frustration with her limited access to the Black communities of her youth strikes a particularly condescending tone. Although she was an expatriate herself in Berlin, Stern was blinded by her racial and social privilege and missed a key moment in the development of Black approaches to modernism because she was unable to feel the pulse of Black artists who were dramatically liberated by the ability to live outside of South Africa to connect with modern artists globally.

Stern, Israel, and the Jewish Resistance to Apartheid Stern resented the growing resistance to apartheid in Black communities because the political tension limited her ability to find subjects in rural areas. In 1953, Stern decided to move away from Black subjects temporarily and explore her own heritage by visiting Israel. “I want to see how a persecuted race, which also happens to be my race, has rebuilt itself,” she told the South African Jewish Times.41 This statement was a rare occasion where Stern acknowledged her Jewish identity in connection

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with persecution, but since the Holocaust had ended less than ten years before her visit, this topic was still a gaping emotional wound for Jews throughout the diaspora. Stern’s reference to Jews as a “race” was also noteworthy since according to apartheid-era categories, Jews were considered racially white and received all of the political and social privileges associated with that racial status. Prior to her departure, Stern announced that she was traveling there in search of new subjects because she was “tired of painting people without religion, [the] whole of Africa outside of the Belgian Congo.”42 She seemed to lash out against the growing number of anti-colonial resistance movements occurring throughout the continent, including in South Africa. Stern’s visit to Israel placed her in the middle of even more complex discussions about nationhood and the Jewish state’s relationship with South Africa. As African countries were gaining independence in the 1950s, Jews throughout the diaspora were returning to the Middle East to build a new nation. Only five years old in 1953, Israel had already attracted thousands of Jews who sought a national identity that would allow them religious and political freedom. Many South African Jews supported Zionism and enthusiastically backed Israel.43 In fact, South African Jews provided the largest amount in financial contributions to Israel in its early years.44 Yet, relations between Israel and South African Jews were tense during apartheid. Some Israeli officials often spoke out against the apartheid government, condemning racism in all forms. But these strong statements clashed directly with the more neutral position that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) took on apartheid.45 When the National Party took control of Parliament in 1948, Jews across South Africa feared that a pogrom would ensue.46 Known for its pro-Nazi sentiments, the National Party had spoken out against Jewish immigration to South Africa before the Second World War. A meeting between Jewish community leaders and Prime Minister Malan did not assuage their fears. In the meeting, Malan was vague and elusive about questions regarding the National Party’s history of anti-Semitism.47 As a result, the Jewish community, governed by the Jewish Board of Deputies, had to proceed cautiously with regard to any objections to apartheid.48 Despite their fears of South Africa’s Jewish population, Afrikaners were interested in forging a stronger relationship with Israel. In 1953, Prime Minister Malan, an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, also visited Israel. Malan’s visit had religious overtones, but he was also keen to prevent Israel from developing political ties to newly independent African countries. To do so, he and other National Party politicians drew parallels between Israel’s status as a

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white nation among Arabs and their own situation on the African continent.49 As Israel faced challenges to its legitimacy from its Arab neighbors, it began to accept South African overtures to build ties. Stern’s visit to Israel took place in this politically charged context. Frustrated with Black African claims to self-determination and political autonomy, Stern sought fresh subjects in Israel who were untainted by nationalism’s political realities. Rather, she found herself in the middle of a budding and controversial political alliance between Israel and South Africa. Stern held an exhibition in Israel that was opened by Semah Cecil Hyman, Israel’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Union of South Africa.50 Not much is known about Stern’s itinerary or what paintings she exhibited, but the trip itself marks a shift in Stern’s attitude toward her Jewish identity. As she distanced herself from Black subjects for political reasons, she ventured into the uncomfortable relationship that many Jews had with the privileges of their “white” status in the apartheid era. During apartheid, the National Party welcomed Jews into the “white” racial category to strengthen their numbers.51 In the Holocaust’s wake, many Jews were relieved to become part of a privileged racial category. Others, however, believed that it was still their religious duty to oppose apartheid laws. In 1956, Rabbi Andre Ungar expressed his anger that a Black student was denied a passport to accept a scholarship in the United States. He called the architects of apartheid “arrogantly puffed up little men in heartless stupidity.”52 Ungar’s statement prompted some Jews to call for his resignation as the leader of the Port Elizabeth congregation. Not everyone agreed, choosing to defend Ungar’s statement. Ungar had recently arrived in South Africa from Hungary and did not yet have citizenship. After receiving a letter from the government stating that he was not welcome in South Africa, he left.53 The Ungar incident underscored the difficult position in which the Jewish community found itself. The tension between speaking out against social injustice and preserving the community’s safety put a strain on its leaders. In 1956, the Board of Deputies adopted an official statement explaining its policy of “political noninvolvement” in apartheid.54 The statement was intended to affirm the community’s neutrality while addressing the fact that members of the Jewish community were already criticizing apartheid: “The Jewish community does not seek, nor is it able, to control the political freedom of the individual Jew, but neither can it accept the responsibility as a community for the actions of individuals.”55 As much as possible, the official position of the Jewish Board of Deputies was to protect its members by remaining neutral to apartheid policies.

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Figure 4.6  Jewish Affairs, September 1957.

In its official magazine Jewish Affairs, issues related to promoting Zionism among youth and even Afrikaner poetry were covered in the 1950s, emphasizing the SAJBD’s policy of noninvolvement in apartheid politics.56 Stern’s paintings were frequently used to illustrate articles in Jewish Affairs. Stern became a source of pride for the Jewish community, but she was also a Jewish artist who the apartheid government officially supported. For example, her painting of a Black African woman was published on the cover of the September 1957 issue of Jewish Affairs (Figure 4.6). On the cover, the juxtaposition between Stern’s Black subject and an article on Yom Kippur written by German expressionist poet Elsa Lasker-Schuler brings Stern’s work full circle with her German beginnings, but it also supports the Board of Deputies’ interest in the publication focusing on religious rather than social issues.

Maid in Uniform: Stern’s Portrayal of Black Defiance Resistance to apartheid’s brutal system of racial oppression grew stronger every year. More Black people joined resistance organizations, and interracial tensions rose across the country. Commencing with the Defiance Campaign in 1952, Black South Africans had begun holding nonviolent yet vocal protests against apartheid policies. Organized by the ANC, the Defiance Campaign was a structured effort to demonstrate apartheid’s cruel and unjust absurdity by challenging its laws. Black demonstrators, for example, burned their passbooks in public or attempted to use public facilities reserved for whites. In most cases, they were arrested and jailed, but they were also beaten and suffered financial consequences.57 As a nonviolent social movement, the Defiance Campaign brought international attention to the white supremacy in South Africa, but

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it was unsuccessful in persuading the apartheid regime to abandon its racist policies. In 1954, the multiracial Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) drafted the Women’s Charter, which demanded equal rights for women of all races. Written by an interracial coalition of South African women, the Women’s Charter addressed some, but not all, of the political and social issues that limited women’s progress. Poor and Rich: These are evils that need not exist. They exist because the society in which we live is divided into poor and rich, into non-European and European. They exist because there are privileges for the few, discrimination and harsh treatment for the many. We women have stood and will stand shoulder to shoulder with our menfolk in a common struggle against poverty, race and class discrimination, and the evils of the colour bar.58

Members of FEDSAW included members of the women’s organizations connected to the ANC, the South African Indian Organization, the South African Coloured Peoples Organization, and the Trade Union Congress of South Africa. The founding members included Jewish activists Ray Alexander and Helen Bernstein, who were also members of the South African Communist Party, and Albertina Sisulu, wife of ANC leader Walter Sisulu. The women struggled against political suppression to promote racial and gender equality in South Africa, but many of the movement’s leaders were arrested and banned, meaning that they were prohibited from free movement and associating with organizations.59 Despite its strong and committed interracial coalition, the women’s movement struggled to achieve its goals during the anti-apartheid movement’s early years. As a divorcé and successful artist, Stern asserted herself as an independent and accomplished woman, refusing to fill the traditional roles of subservient wife or mother. Although her primary subjects were women, Stern mostly avoided addressing women’s roles in contemporary society in her work even as her friends, such as Freda Feldman, participated in political activism. Many of her paintings of white women portrayed the upper class, and her paintings of Black and Coloured South African women focused on the women and not the social context in which they lived. Because of her government support, she may not have wanted to wade into issues that had such overt racial and therefore political dimensions, which would have threatened her artistic success. These multiple and conflicting interests contributed to the ways in which she responded to South Africa’s rapidly devolving political situation

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in the last decades of her career, mostly by refocusing on Europe and other parts of the world. Stern was aware that the anti-apartheid resistance movement, like other decolonization movements in Africa, was gaining momentum. She understood the political consequences of racial oppression across Africa, but she continued to dwell selfishly on its implications for her work. In February of 1955, she wrote to Richard Feldman: The lovely fairytale outlook on Native life—which my early work had—can hardly continue—when I see the most lovely people acting not like children but like devils incarnate to the White people up in Kenya. Of course, I can understand their sudden awakening and finding their land full of White raced people—who have their foot on their necks—but still I cannot say I am looking happy and peacefully into the future of our South Africa. We are just passionately awaiting a huge blood bath. Stoking it on daily—hourly—giving with the left and taking with the right. Anyhow I am wondering where to go.60

While Stern was deciding where to turn next for subjects in anticipation of a “blood bath,” her dear friend Feldman was busy advocating for disenfranchised Black South Africans. Feldman, an elected member of the Provincial Council, gave a speech at one of its meetings in Pretoria, where he excoriated the government for its apartheid policies. “The country is so preoccupied with racial issues and Apartheid measures that there is not [sic] thought of doing anything to provide the welfare and health for the people. In the Government’s effort to go backward in the political sense, all else affecting the life of the common people is dragged along—backwards.”61 In sharp contrast to Feldman, Stern seemed politically aware but still out of touch compared with her more progressive friends. In 1955, though, Stern painted one of her most haunting and socially relevant works Maid in Uniform, a portrayal of a Black domestic worker (Figure I.3). Maid in Uniform is unique among Stern’s oeuvre because she rarely painted Black South Africans in work uniforms or contemporary clothing, preferring instead to depict them in traditional ethnic dress. While the image is colorful, the palette is limited to blues and grays, unlike her paintings of rural South Africa, which feature a variety of shades of yellow, red, blue, and green. Maid in Uniform’s darker blues and grays create a somber and depressing mood that emanates from the canvas. The woman’s blue uniform has clashing blue colors: a more greenish blue at the top and periwinkle blue sleeves. The walls in the background are a drab color, as is the window. The woman has a defiant expression and is intentionally looking away

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from the viewer as though she has been forced to sit for the painting. Although many of Stern’s sitters do not directly look at the viewer, no others are doing so in such an audacious manner while wearing a servant’s uniform. Maid in Uniform provides an opening to discuss Black domestic workers’ social status in South Africa. The maid’s expression draws the viewer into the complex social relationships between Black and white South African women and the challenges women faced in forming an interracial movement with mutual interests. In the domestic sphere, Black women maintained white households by cooking, cleaning, and raising the children, all while white women socialized and entertained thanks to a minimal role in child rearing. In contrast, Black women were often poorly compensated as domestics and had very little time for their own families. In her landmark 1978 study of Black domestic workers, sociologist Jacklyn Cock described domestic servitude in South Africa as the “oppression of women by women.”62 According to Cock, the paradox of South African feminism resulted in white women being freed from household responsibilities by oppressing Black female domestic workers.63 In other words, liberation for one group occurred through indentured servitude for the other. Black women often watched their own children fall into gang activity or early pregnancy while they cared for white families. The racial tension between women limited the amount of cooperation between the groups and is an issue that remains unresolved today. Whether Stern overtly stated it or not, the act of painting an angry Black female domestic worker in 1955 was political and social commentary. Economic and social inequality had reached a breaking point.64 By 1955, Black South Africans were frustrated with the failure of the ANC’s 1952 Defiance Campaign. In response, the apartheid government had introduced even more punitive legislation that further restricted their movements. Maid in Uniform illustrates Black peoples’ growing anger and resentment toward apartheid’s daily indignities that anti-apartheid leaders were harnessing into a strong resistance movement. The woman’s crossed arms and angry stare are arresting. She does not appear to be a willing sitter for the painting and is preoccupied with something greater. In 1955, the same year that Stern painted Maid in Uniform, the ANC introduced its Freedom Charter that called for a nonracial democracy and equality for all South African citizens. The Freedom Charter’s principles resonated particularly with Black and Coloured women, who were not only disenfranchised by whites but also marginalized within male-dominated resistance organizations like the ANC. Black women were expected to be subservient by all whites as well as by Black men. They had legitimate reasons to be angry and resentful. In 1956, 20,000

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African women delivered a petition to the prime minister’s office in Pretoria, protesting the government’s enforcement of pass laws on women.65 The women waited in silence for half an hour before chanting the phrase: “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo; uzokufa [You have tampered with women. You have struck a rock. You will be crushed].”66 Emboldened by their sheer numbers and simply fed up with low wages and subhuman treatment, Black women increasingly expressed their discontent through these types of protests and demonstrations. Maid in Uniform is one of only a few examples of Stern painting a contemporary social subject during the apartheid era. Although her white patrons at the time may not have detected much political significance in the painting, it is nearly impossible to view the painting today without recognizing the broader social context in which it was created. Stern had spent more time with Black women in rural Black communities than the average white South African, but she simultaneously did not speak out against their poor treatment. Stern’s use of Black female subjects to advance her career reflects some of the tensions between Black and white women that persist in the post-apartheid era. Beginning in the late 1950s, consistent with the political upheaval in South Africa, she ventured closer to European trends in art and away from African subjects. Despite her frustration with Black South Africans as subjects, Stern returned to Europe in 1955 to exhibit works with mostly African themes at Wolfgang Gurlitt’s new art gallery in Linz, Austria.67

Bringing South Africa to Europe: Stern and the Emergence of Global Modernism Maid in Uniform represented Stern’s traditional Black female subject at the center of apartheid’s political reality. Still, Stern avoided the overtly political message that Black urban subjects communicated in the wake of extreme racial injustice. At the same time, decolonization, ethnic nationalism, and race and gender pride nurtured new approaches to modern art in places like South America, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.68 In this new environment, Stern searched for ways to remain relevant both as an artist and as a South African envoy. Abroad, Stern was an ambassador for the arts in South Africa, exhibiting her work throughout Europe and in South America. Represented by Gurlitt, Stern held solo exhibitions and participated in major shows in Germany and Austria at least five times in the postwar period. Above all, her paintings of Blacks continued to make a strong impression on global audiences. In a review

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of Stern’s work, a German radio report referred to Stern as a Negerlieber (Negro lover) because of her African subject matter.69 In 1957, the South African government sent an official delegation of artists to São Paolo to exhibit in the Union’s section of the Biennale, and Stern was selected as one of the main South African participants. Since its inception in 1951, the São Paulo Biennale had become the second most important contemporary art event after the Venice Biennale, and Stern’s inclusion introduced her work to Brazilian and Latin American audiences that had more significant Afro-descendant populations. She sent at least ten paintings to Brazil, ranging in subjects from Turkish women to her more traditional paintings of African women. Day of Liberation was selected for exhibit in São Paulo. Painted during a visit to Turkey in 1955, the image depicts a veiled woman standing on a Turkish street, surrounded by tall buildings draped with large, red Turkish flags.70 A woman stands alone on the street among buildings that are smashed together and appear to be standing at different angles. The bright red Turkish flags dominate the painting and contrast strongly against the dark blue sky. The painting demonstrates how Stern contemplated abstraction even as she held fast to her German expressionist foundations. The swirls of colorful buildings and red flags bear more resemblance to the street scenes of artists such as Ernst Kirchner, and the lone female figure in the street conjures the melancholy mood set by many of Edvard Munch’s paintings than the abstract art of her contemporaries, underscoring Stern’s uncertainty in where to go next with her own work. Day of Liberation depicts an urban Turkish independence or liberation day celebration. The painting could refer to the Greek-Turkish conflict that resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of Greeks from Istanbul in 1955.71 The event was historically significant and controversial, yet Stern felt more comfortable painting this politically charged event in Turkey than protests in South Africa, where government support was contingent upon steering away from criticizing apartheid. The painting also captures an important theme in Stern’s life: the interplay between a woman and her country. Throughout her life, South Africa defined Stern’s personal and artistic identity. She also helped to define South Africa, since much of her work represents the nation’s diverse cultures in ways that few artists of her time could achieve. In addition to the Biennale, the South African government arranged for the works chosen for exhibition in São Paulo to be part of a traveling exhibition of South African art that would reach the United States.72 The SAAA received grant funds from the South African Department of External Affairs, the State

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Information Office, and the United States Information Service to send the Biennale works abroad two years later in 1959.73 There are, however, no records of the exhibition, so it is not clear that the paintings made it to the United States. With so much of her work traveling internationally, the government was grateful that Stern did not comment on South African politics. A South African official told the Cape Times: “We are thankful that in Irma Stern we still have an artist of repute who believes that basically humanity is not bad and that nature, the creation of our Lord, remains fantastically wonderful.”74

The Treason Trial In 1956, Stern was presented with another opportunity to use her art and social status to take a stand against racism. One of South Africa’s most controversial and politicized court trials, the Treason Trial, began that year. The Treason Trial was significant to the Jewish community because it exposed Jews’ wide-scale involvement in the anti-apartheid movement. In December 1956, police arrested 156 people and charged them with “high treason” against the government and conspiracy to use violence to impose a communist regime. If convicted, the defendants faced execution. Members of the ANC, including leaders Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, were among the accused. Of the whites arrested, nearly half were Jewish South Africans.75 Although they comprised less than 3 percent of the white population, Jews were overrepresented in the freedom movement. “In literally every aspect of the anti-apartheid struggle—political, military, legal, cultural,” writes Frank Hugh Adler, “Jews in substantial numbers were consciously present.”76 Because of its length and the government’s weak case against the accused, the Treason Trial included nearly two years of testimony that discussed irrelevant information and details and debated the nature of communism, producing over 36,000 pages of text and testimony.77 The defendants sat behind a wire fence during the trial and listened as the prosecution made their case. To raise money for the defense, an interdenominational group of citizens established the Treason Trial Defense Fund. The epic trial, one of the longest in South African history, lasted until 1961, when the jury ultimately acquitted the last defendants. Funds were badly needed to sustain the defense team’s legal efforts. Stern’s friend Freda Feldman helped raise funds for the Treason Trial Defense Fund, and she approached Stern in 1958 about donating some of her work. Stern donated one painting, but when asked for more, she wrote to Feldman: “As to the

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picture for the Treason Fund I have given them one here and don’t particularly want to be mixed up in more of this business. So I am sorry no.”78 By donating even one painting, Stern risked government retribution, for the Treason Trial drew the line in the sand between those who opposed apartheid and those who were willing to tolerate it. As a recipient of government support and the privilege of traveling and exhibiting abroad, Stern was unwilling to risk her artistic career for political reasons. By accepting government endorsements, however, she implicitly condoned its actions. Donating the painting allowed Stern to support her friend while minimizing her direct connection to the cause.

Stern’s Final Years Stern received widespread national and international recognition for her artistic achievements in the last decade of her life. In 1958, Stern received a Molteno Award from the Cape Tercentenary Foundation, and in 1960, she received the Peggy Guggenheim International Art Prize.79 Amid the flurry of exhibitions and accolades, critics seized upon the opportunity to discuss Stern’s work. Cape Times critic Matthys Bokhorst compared Stern to Picasso and contextualized Stern’s work within the social turmoil that plagued the nation. He observed that both Stern and Picasso depicted human unrest and struggle; both were the greatest painters in their respective countries; neither is “one of the greatest human beings”; and both painters had a “predilection for Native life.”80 Yet despite this “predilection,” Stern’s work did not deviate far from her original depictions of Black life in the 1920s. Although she complained about social changes in South Africa, her work did not reflect Black peoples’ migration to cities, their challenges with regard to township living, or their struggles against racism. In June 1960, journalist and critic Neville Dubow made an important observation about modern white South African painters. He described white artists’ failure to paint Black urban life as “at once the great weakness and the great potential of the South African artist; his place and function in our society.”81 Dubow understood that the period was pivotal not only for South African history but also for its art history. Major artists were painting in a vacuum, ignoring seminal events that were shaping South Africa’s future. Three months before Dubow’s article, Black demonstrators from the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) stood peacefully outside of the Sharpeville police station near Johannesburg to

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protest “pass laws” that regulated where Black people could travel and work. The police fired on the crowd, killing sixty-seven people, most of whom were running away. Known as the “Sharpeville Massacre,” the shooting sparked demonstrations across the country and led the government to make the first of many “state of emergency” declarations that allowed it to suspend citizens’ rights and freedoms. Most white artists remained eerily silent on the subject. Artists like Stern had an international stage and the world’s attention, yet they chose not to engage about events in South Africa. Stern, for example, received the regional award from the Guggenheim International Art Prize Foundation in 1960. Selected by a panel of judges that included modern art scholar Robert Goldwater, regional award winners were chosen for creating work that supported “art and education in art and the enlightenment of the public, especially in the field of art.”82 Stern was selected for her painting Intrigue that she painted in the Transkei in 1959. The painting was included in a special exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that included a cadre of internationally renowned modern, mostly male artists, including Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, Dutchman Karel Appel (who won the top prize of $10,000), and Americans Clifford Still, Nathan Oliveira, Stuart Davis, and Robert Mallory. Intrigue depicts two African women in one of Stern’s most bizarre paintings. The women have been nearly overtaken by their large headdresses adorned with birds, which crowd the canvas. Their necks are unnaturally long and thin while their profiles make their heads look disproportionately small. Wearing traditional Transkei clothing, the women appear to be locked in serious conversation. After winning the prize, Stern described her interpretation of the painting with disconcerting sexism: “It is symbolic of the unrest I sensed in the countryside. Trouble among the natives always seems to start among the women and in the atmosphere they create danger threatens.”83 With this statement, Stern confirmed her conservative views of Black people and the apartheid structure. In the 1920s, her paintings of Black women provoked the ire of her conservative South African audience. In 1960, however, Stern’s depictions of rural Black South Africans, specifically in the rebellious Transkei region, substantiated white beliefs that more regulations and restrictions on Black people would bring them under control. Now a member of the white cultural elite, Stern could only gain from criticizing Black protesters and waxing nostalgic for more halcyon days. For the remainder of her life, Stern continued to distance herself from her African subjects. In the 1960s, Stern shifted her focus from South Africa to Mediterranean Europe. She spent more time in southern France, Italy, and Spain

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with her friend Dudley Welch, an architect she met in Durban in 1935 who eventually became her live-in companion.84 Critics continued to debate how Stern should be viewed in light of her political views. In a 1961 article in the Human Angle section of the publication Jewish Affairs, writer Bernard Sachs noted that Stern believed she was losing her African roots because she no longer felt sympathy with its people.85 However, in discussing the Congo’s recent independence after a long and violent struggle, Sachs lets Stern off the hook for losing interest in new nation because “not even a Goya could paint the nightmare that is the Congo today.”86 On the other hand, Neville Dubow, a friend of Stern, did not withhold judgment from white South African artists, whom he argued failed to depict South African life accurately. “Broken contemporary rhythms of African urban existence have been interpreted not at all,” he wrote. “The artist still remains a traveler in Africa.”87 Again, Jewish writers like Dubow were becoming increasingly critical of artists whose work did not reflect the turbulent social times. Although many of her subjects, both in paintings and in travel narratives, represented complex political and social ideas, Stern herself was not committed to political activism. Stern’s 1962 oil painting Pimento Harvest represents the type of work that she painted in southern Europe during her final years (Figure 4.7). The big, bold spaces of color look back to the nineteenth-century works of the Fauves, such as Henri Matisse, whose works she had studied since she was a student in Berlin. The painting is blanketed with bright red pimento fields in the foreground, and a tall, rugged, and triangular Spanish mountain towers in the background. All of the figures in the painting are shrouded in black outlines, further accentuating the women’s white veils. The painting represents Stern’s general nostalgia for the perceived simplicity of rural life. Europe, like South Africa, was industrializing

Figure 4.7  Irma Stern, Pimento Harvest. Oil on canvas, 1962, 75.5 × 95 cm. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

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and undergoing political reform. On both continents, the cultures that Stern wanted to portray in her paintings were changing rapidly. In the final two years of her life, Stern’s travels were dissected in local newspapers, and her exhibitions were eagerly anticipated. A writer for the Cape Times weekend edition called Stern the “most famous South African woman.”88 Stern was also being recognized as an artist who looked across racial lines for subjects. Writer Leah Bach wrote in the Rand Daily Mail, “Ships, fiestas, flowers, a street vendor, Black, White, Malay, Arab, her subjects have always crossed barriers as well as frontiers.”89 Such reductive and simplistic statements ignore the apartheid-driven racial strife that was tearing South Africa apart. Anti-apartheid demonstrations spread like wildfire throughout the nation, and the government sought to extinguish them just as quickly as they erupted. Yet for many whites living in large homes in all-white neighborhoods, race was an abstract concept that, in their minds, did not affect their daily lives. In 1964, Nelson Mandela and several other Black members of the ANC were tried and convicted of high treason and sentenced to life in prison and later sent to the infamous jail on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. With Mandela’s conviction and sentencing, the armed struggle to end apartheid shifted gears, and tens of thousands of Black and white South Africans began to put increased pressure on the government and the international community to end apartheid. At the same time, reviews of Stern’s work continued to celebrate her as an ambassador for South Africa, citing her diverse subjects as evidence of her liberal and benevolent nature. Although the result was fame and international recognition for Stern, it came at the expense of hundreds of Black artists who were persecuted, fled, or lived in obscurity. Stern’s last paintings depicted life in southern France and Spain, shifting her focus away from South Africa’s turmoil. With her health in severe decline after years of decadent eating and poor management of her diabetes, she preferred to convalesce in Mediterranean climates. For example, the painting Harbour Scene with Tree, Spain (1966) resembles Stern’s paintings of Kalk Bay, a seaside town on the Cape peninsula, as well as the German expressionists’ paintings of fishing boats docked at northern German ports, with images of small fishing boats docked on a shimmering blue bay. Stern held fast to these types of subjects, relentlessly criticizing abstraction even as her work ventured in this same direction. “Most of their canvases look exactly as if the painter has put his backside into a pot and then printed off,” she quipped to a reporter for the publication Femina and Woman’s Life in 1965.90 This strong reaction to abstraction amid the socially charged aesthetics of global art movements

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illustrates how Stern struggled to accept that she was no longer the iconoclast who shocked audiences in conservative Cape Town forty years earlier. As the anti-apartheid movement began to use culture as a weapon in the “struggle” in South Africa, there was no room in the avant-garde for artists with ambivalent politics. Black artists such as Dumile Feni (1942–1991), for example, were gaining attention for their critical interpretations of apartheid’s effects in the Black townships. Feni’s drawings acutely call attention to prominent members of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli. Though Feni was selected by the government to participate in the South African pavilion of the São Paulo Biennale in 1967, to much criticism from fellow Black artists, he was still subjected to arrest and government surveillance upon his return because of the politically incendiary nature of his work.91 Unfortunately, Stern opposed the changing artistic and social trends both internationally and in South Africa. Despite her protests and criticisms, abstract art and other movements—pop art, conceptual art, and photorealism— played an integral role in international art in the 1960s. The political violence resulting from South Africa’s apartheid policies caused the nation to become an international pariah, detracting from the narrative that elevated white cultural achievements. Much of Stern’s work in the final decade of her life reflects the bucolic sereneness of the Mediterranean locales where she went to convalesce during her illnesses. Paintings of beaches and field laborers suggest that Stern was, literally and metaphorically, out to pasture in her final years. She enjoyed a long and successful career and basked in the limelight, but her leadership as an avant-garde modernist had ended. Ironically, her two most provocative works of the period Maid in Uniform and Day of Liberation represent her strongest paintings, possibly because Stern chose contemporary subjects that captured the revolutionary spirit of women who, like herself, were working to liberate themselves. The anger exuded in Stern’s Maid in Uniform and the contemplative mood in Day of Liberation serve as appropriate bookends to this final period of Stern’s career. On August 23, 1966, at the age of seventy-one, Irma Stern died in a Cape Town hospital. Obesity and unregulated diabetes had finally taken their toll. She painted until the very end, and her work still sits on an easel in the studio at her home, now a museum administered by the University of Cape Town. Stern’s passing was mourned in South Africa and Europe. Commentators noted that Stern’s greatest accomplishment was her ability to connect across racial lines through her work. An obituary in the London Times stated that Stern

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“excelled in depicting the vigour and dignity of the tribal Bantu and was the first South African to draw upon this wealth of painting material.”92 A government representative attended Stern’s funeral and referred to Stern as “an ambassador for our own country.”93 Scholars organized a memorial exhibition, “Homage to Irma Stern,” which opened in 1968. Almost immediately, plans were underway to convert her home into a museum showcasing her work.94 Apartheid played a seminal role in Stern’s postwar success. The government’s support of Stern’s work helped her gain international exposure and critical acclaim. But we cannot overlook or minimize that Stern’s work was co-opted by apartheid’s social values of separation and exclusion, and she did not attempt to counteract the system’s unflinching racism. As Neville Dubow described, the true merger of art and social justice would be completed by the next generation of South African artists for whom the prospect of living in an apartheid state was untenable. Stern, however, opened the doors for these artists to take the aesthetic and social debates about art’s role in modern South Africa to the next level. Ironically, the government’s patronage gave Stern the visibility that allowed her to shape the debate about the politics of race, religion, and nation in South African art.

Notes 1 “Political Tom-Tom,” Trek, January 1948. 2 “Classic and Modern Etchings,” Cape Times, August 6, 1951. 3 Eric Rosenthal, “Interview with Irma Stern,” Trek, January 1948. 4 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 195. 5 Ibid., 180. 6 Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 171. 7 Ibid., 183. 8 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 183. 9 Ibid., 189. 10 Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 183. Blacks had been disenfranchised since the early twentieth century and were not permitted to vote in the 1948 election. The 1936 Native Representation Act removed additional Africans from the voting rolls. 11 Jean Cassou, “Irma Stern,” in Exhibition Catalogue, Gallerie Des Beaux Arts, Wildenstein Gallerie (Paris, 1947). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 “African Paintings,” Glasgow Herald, January 16, 1948.

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15 South African Association of Arts, Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, exhibition catalog (Cape Town: Cape Times Ltd., 1948), 7. 16 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 162. 17 South African Association of Arts, 7. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Ibid., 11. Ironically, at the time of the exhibition, Sekoto had moved to Paris, where he lived among an international group of artists and intellectuals in the city. Known for his paintings of township life, Sekoto was one of the few Black South African artists with an international reputation. For more information on Sekoto, see Joe Dolby, Gerard Sekoto: From the Paris Studio (Cape Town: Iziko South African National Gallery, 2005), Gerard Sekoto, Gerard Sekoto: My Life and Work, ed. Ivan Vladislavic (Johannesburg: Viva Books, 1995). And Barbara Lindop, Sekoto: The Life of Gerard Sekoto (London: Pavilion, 1995). 20 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 159. 21 Berman, Remembering Irma, 130. 22 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 182. 23 Jan C. Smuts, May 15, 1950. Irma Stern Collection, National Library of South Africa. 24 “Smuts Memorial Should Be,” Cape Times, September 19, 1950. 25 “An Exciting Artist,” Forward, December 4, 1942. 26 “Artist Wants to Paint in the Holy Land,” Cape Argus, March 5, 1953. 27 Established in 1936 and chaired by a white government official, the Natives Representative Council was designed to provide Black South Africans with representation in government, allowing them to “advise” the prime minister and his administration on native affairs. See Thompson, A History of South Africa, 182. 28 Curator Christraud Geary has done extensive research on Larrabee, securing several thousand photos for the Eliot Elisofon Archive at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art while she was a curator there. Geary curated the exhibit, “South Africa 1936-1949: Photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee” at the Smithsonian and oversaw the development of an extensive website about Larrabee and her work: http:​//afr​ica.s​i.edu​/exhi​bits/​larra​bee/l​arrab​ee.ht​m (last accessed June 27, 2015). 29 Brenda Danilowitz, “Constance Stuart Larrabee’s Photographs of the Ndzunza Ndebele: Performance and History beyond the Modernist Frame,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910-1994, ed. Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 71. 30 Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, “The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa,” The Journal of African History 34, no. 3 (1993): 462–3.

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31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Cape Times, January 31, 1952. Sir Alfred Beit was a South African business magnate whose family invested heavily in Cecil Rhodes’ De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mines. In 1952, Beit and his wife purchased a castle in Russborough, outside of Dublin, Ireland, to house their extensive collection of European art. Stern’s work would join that of Vermeer and Reubens in the Beit Collection. It is also noteworthy that because the Beits were known to be extremely wealthy, the collection was the target of several robberies in the late twentieth century. The older European works were the target of these robberies, and it does not appear that Stern’s work was involved in any of the thefts. For more information on the art thefts and the Beit Collection, see Matthew Hart, The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art (New York: Plume, 2005). 34 “Sick and Tired of Abstract Art,” Cape Argus, October 23, 1958. 35 “Irma Stern Has No Time for Abstraction,” Johannesburg Star, April 17, 1951. 36 “Contrasts in Colour Mark Irma Stern Exhibition,” Sunday Chronicle, September 1, 1953. See also “Swapping Old for New. Changes in the National Galleries, South African Collection,” Cape Times, November 5, 1953. 37 “Contrasts in Colour Mark Irma Stern Exhibition.” See also “Artist Wants to Paint in the Holy Land.” 38 “Ernest Mancoba,” Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, accessed August 15, 2016, http:​//www​.revi​sions​.co.z​a/bio​graph​ies/e​rnest​-manc​oba/#​.V7HQ​ QxQ2L​dk. This website accompanies the exhibition and catalog of the same name and provides excellent access to the artists, essays, and collectors in the exhibition since the publication has very limited availability outside of South Africa. 39 Ibid. 40 Rasheed Araeen, “Modernity, Modernism and Africa’s Authentic Voice,” Third Text, 24, no. 2 (2010): 277–86, DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722272. 41 “Irma Stern to Visit Israel,” South African Jewish Times, March 13, 1953. 42 Ibid. 43 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 4. 44 Sasha Polakow-Suransky, An Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 62. 45 Ibid., 30. 46 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 21. 47 Ibid., 22–3. 48 Ibid., 2. The Jewish Board of Deputies was established as a membership organization in South Africa in 1912 with the purpose of monitoring activities and issues involving the Jewish community. 49 Polakow-Suransky, An Unspoken Alliance, 65.

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50 S. C. Hyman, “New Israel Consul General Assumes Post in New York,” August 19, 1955, JTA Archive, accessed May 1, 2015, http:​//www​.jta.​org/1​955/0​8/19/​archi​ve/s-​ c-hym​an-ne​w-isr​ael-c​onsul​-gene​ral-a​ssume​s-pos​t-in-​new-y​ork. 51 In the 1936 census, whites comprised 21 percent of all South Africans. See Thompson, A History of South Africa, 297. 52 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 36. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 112. 55 Ibid., 32. 56 See Charles Eglington, “Achievements of Afrikaans Poetry: Toonvenden Heever,” Jewish Affairs, June 1959. See also M. Tamari, “Mending the Lives of Israel’s Problem Children,” Jewish Affairs, July 1958. 57 Iris Berger, South Africa in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117–18. 58 Federation of South African Women, “Women’s Charter,” April 17, 1954, accessed June 23, 2015, http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4666. 59 Berger, South Africa in World History, 121–2. 60 Berman, Remembering Irma, 60. 61 Ibid., 59. 62 Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: Domestic Servants in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Women’s Press, 1980), 4–5. 63 Ibid., 11. 64 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 201. 65 Pass laws mandated that anyone who was not classified as “white” have written permission to stay in urban areas for more than seventy-two hours at a time. The law was intended to limit the number of nonwhites who came to the cities looking for work. Initially, only men needed passes because they were primarily migrating to cities to find work in the mining industry. 66 Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 108. 67 “Irma Stern Goes Abroad to Visit,” Cape Argus, August 17, 1955. 68 For more information, see Art Bulletin discussion by Partha Mitter. 69 “Reportages,” in Sender Freies Berlin (West Germany, 1956). 70 Paul Cullen, Barbara Freemantle, Susan Isaac, Elza Miles, and Wilhelm van Rensburg, eds. Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey, exhibition catalog. (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2003), 189. 71 In September 1955, the Turks participated in what has arguably been called a pogrom by some historians in which Turkish citizens banished Greeks living in Istanbul from the city, burning their houses and businesses and raping Greek women. See E. G. Vallianatos, “The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish

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Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955 and the Destruction of the Greek Community in Istanbul (Book Review),” Mediterranean Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2006): 133–40. 72 “Union Will Exhibit in Brazil,” Cape Argus, April 26, 1957. 73 “Women in the Public Eye,” Cape Times, February 20, 1959. 74 “Irma Stern as Envoy for the Arts,” Cape Times, February 25, 1959. 75 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 209. 76 F. H. Adler, “South African Jews and Apartheid,” Patterns of Prejudice 34, no. 4 (2000), 23–36. DOI:10.1080/003132200128810973. 77 Stephan Clingman, “Writing the South African Treason Trial,” Current Writing 22, no. 2 (2010): 37. 78 Berman, Remembering Irma, 141. 79 “Miss Stern Wins Prize on the Eve of Holiday,” Cape Argus, June 15, 1960. 80 Matthys Bokhorst, “Irma Stern Exhibits over 100 Works,” Cape Times, February 26, 1959. 81 Neville Dubow, “Importance of Cape Humanist Tradition Goes On,” Cape Argus, June 4, 1960. Apartheid laws prohibited people of different races from socializing or gathering outside of specified work relationships, but artists and other professionals could apply for permission to visit Black areas. 82 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Guggenheim International Art Award 1960 (New York: Sterlip Press, Inc., 1960). 83 “Miss Stern Wins Prize on the Eve of Holiday,” Cape Argus, June 15, 1960. 84 Berman, Remembering Irma, 132. 85 Bernard Sachs, “Irma Stern: Painter,” South African Jewish Times, December 8, 1961. 86 Ibid. 87 Dubow, “Importance of Cape Humanist Tradition Goes On.” 88 Brian Barrow, “A Golden Jubilee for Irma Stern,” Cape Times Weekend Magazine, March 7, 1964. 89 Leah Bach, “Larger Than Life . . . Portrait of a South African Artist They Once Called ‘Lunatic,’” Rand Daily Mail, April 4, 1964. 90 “Award for an Artist: Irma Stern ‘Woman of the Year,’” Femina and Women’s Life, November 18, 1965. 91 “Dumile Feni,” Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, accessed August 15, 2016, http:​//www​.revi​sions​.co.z​a/bio​graph​ies/d​umile​-feni​/#.V7​HtWhQ​ 2Ldk.​ 92 “Miss Irma Stern, Painter of African Life,” The Times (London), August 24, 1966. 93 Hilda Purwitsky Papers, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town Folder 2 (A2.14) 94 Neville Dubow, “Irma Stern’s House—A Living Museum,” in Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey (Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2004), 46.

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If Rhodes Must Fall, Must Stern Fall? Audacities of Color in Post-Apartheid South Africa

When Irma Stern died on August 23, 1966, she had moved from an artistic outsider to a cultural and artistic insider on two continents, Africa and Europe. Buoyed by government support for her travels abroad to paint, Stern represented South Africa at major international art venues such as the Biennales in Venice, Italy, and São Paulo, Brazil. A year before her death, in 1965, she received the Medal of Honour from the South African Academy for Science and Art. After her death, an outpouring of praise flowed in about her work. In addition to the government official describing her as “an ambassador for our country,” at her funeral, The Cape Times, for example, noted in an obituary dated August 24, 1966, that Stern had “excelled in depicting the vigour and dignity of the tribal Bantu and was the first South African artist to draw upon this wealth of painting material.”1,2 The writer’s use of the word “material” to refer to Black South African culture illustrates how the language of white supremacy was embedded in its cultural commentary. The Black South Africans that Stern depicted were, according to the writer, neither people nor human beings. They were material— inanimate objects for use and disposal. Apartheid’s insidious aims to degrade the Black majority while elevating the white minority were creating permanent fissures in South African art. The posthumous response to Stern’s work and her subsequent legacy reflected everything about the tenor of the moment and the disparate worlds inhabited by South Africans of different races then and now. Most white South Africans were completely disconnected from apartheid’s brutal effects on Black South Africans. Stern’s memorial praise occurred against a more pressing and dangerous political and cultural climate in South Africa in the late 1960s. Less than two weeks after Stern’s obituary was published, on September 6, 1966, Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd—apartheid architect and enforcer himself—was assassinated by Greek-Mozambican Dimitri Tsafendas. Verwoerd, the diabolical politician who

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conceptualized the idea of separate “homelands” for Black South Africans and oversaw the pursuit, arrest, and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, was a rampant and unapologetic racist. While anti-apartheid activists celebrated his death, this moment ushered in a new era of government oppression and state-sponsored violence, plunging South Africa even deeper into a political quagmire and closer to international pariah status. This unfolding political drama and human rights disaster provides additional context into the extreme contrasts that existed at the time of Stern’s death. White political power and dominance were in a precarious state, yet the extreme nature of apartheid laws still made Black majority rule seem far in the distance. White South Africans had readily signed an “ignorance contract,” as scholar Melissa Steyn calls it, a tacit agreement that allowed them to live in a state of denial that their racial privileges were undergirding oppression.3 Despite the close proximity between the townships and the pristine suburban communities, many whites claimed to know nothing about what was happening in the townships, using apartheid segregation laws and willful ignorance as excuses not to find out. In this study I have introduced Stern to a primarily new American audience. In examining the sociopolitical context in which Stern painted in both Germany and South Africa, I place Stern and her work in the broader context of how race can illustrate concepts of national identity in art. Throughout this book I have also analyzed how whiteness as an identity evolved in South Africa, focusing on how Stern’s Jewish identity helped her move fluidly between insider and outsider status as white South Africans’ views on whiteness at first excluded and then included Jews to expand their population percentages for political purposes. With this emphasis on Stern’s relationship to the members of South Africa’s Jewish community, this book examines the tension between Stern, who was politically conservative on racial issues, and more racially progressive Jewish South Africans, such as Stern’s close friend Richard Feldman. The process by which Jewish South Africans became accepted as white is an important historical moment in the development of transnational white identities and their political and cultural utility. Some South African Jews accepted their new white status while others stridently resisted it. Stern strategically used both her Jewish identity and her white South African identity to advance her career at home and abroad. The racial paradox of South African modern art—that Black and Coloured women were simultaneously central as artistic subjects but peripheral as human beings—is the reason why Irma Stern is still controversial but relevant as an artist today. Relevance, in this case, should not be mistaken for reverence. Reverence

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connotes a level of uncritical admiration that is deeply problematic for Stern. Because of her narcissistic tendencies, Stern was often oblivious to others’ needs and concerns, which applied to both friends and family, as well as the larger world around her. In a 1951 letter to Freda Feldman discussing plans to visit Johannesburg, Stern wrote, “sorry I saw So [sic] little of you at the end of your stay—but you are allways [sic] preoccupied with your duties as wife and mother etc—all very good but only for them—not for me!”4 In another letter written to Freda upon her return from an extended trip, Stern complained that it took “6 days with 4 servants” to clean her house after Canadian High Commissioners used it, going on to express her growing disdain for life in South Africa, “I must say life in Africa—may have its charms for Zulu’s [sic]—but I am quite sure not for me.”5 While she was a gifted artist with a strong vision of what South African art should be, that vision was predicated on racial segregation and exploitation. To be relevant means that Stern’s biography, her artistic approach, and her impact have direct influences on South African art and art history today. Stern’s work continues to define how artists are measured and valued in South Africa. Black curators in museum leadership roles are confronting this issue head on in some cases. Khwezi Gule, director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, reconfigured the museum’s permanent collection to place works by white South African artists, such Irma Stern, Sue Williamson, and William Kentridge, into their historical context in a 2019 exhibition called “All Your Faves Are Problematic.” As Gule argues, there is “nothing inherently racist” about many of Stern’s or other white South African artists’ images; instead, these works must be studied and understood within their historical context.6 He goes on to discuss an idea that he learned from an instructor that every image has a “visual ancestor” and that “It is those kinds of things that, once you put together in a kind of puzzle, a particular picture begins to emerge.”7 In Stern’s case, that picture would raise issues of power and privilege in the relationship between artist and subject, for example. If a white person asks to paint or photograph a Black South African, Gule posits, does the person have the agency to decline? During apartheid, he concludes, probably not. Adding texture to this picture, Gule’s exhibition includes a library of authors from the African diaspora who were theorizing Blackness and galvanizing activists to resist colonialism and racism, such as Njabulo Ndebele, Ben Okri, Frantz Fanon, and Toni Morrison. Gule’s leadership of a predominantly white patronized and supported, apartheid-era institution provides an example of how Black curators in particular are making the distinction between relevance and reverence to their critique of the canon.

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To address this racial paradox, we must bring Stern into dialogue and discussion with the political and social realities of her time. We can no longer discuss Irma Stern outside of the historical context of South Africa’s racist past. Rather, her work must be contextualized within the political and cultural structures that supported apartheid and continue to determine the patterns of selection and emphasis in the historical narrative. Yet, Stern herself is a paradox. Through her own work and actions, Stern inserted Black and Coloured women into a pivotal historical moment in South African art history, but because she viewed Black and Coloured women as inferior, her place in a narrative that is more representative of majority-Black South Africa is rightfully questioned.

Irma Stern in “Rhodes Must Fall” South Africa In 1971, the Irma Stern Museum opened its doors in her home, in the Rosebank section of Cape Town, now on the University of Cape Town’s middle campus. The museum maintains one of the largest collections of Stern’s work and also communicates her biographical story to the public. For a small suburban museum, it has a vibrant energy. Venturing inside, visitors gain a sense of Stern’s personal design choices (with a preference for bright colors), her extensive collection of global art and literature, and the studio where she painted and spent much of her free time. Stern’s eccentricities pop out at every turn—from the beautiful wood carvings of the “Zanzibar doors” (which she brought back from her travels there) to her antique dining room table imported from Germany. On any given day, you might find scholars chatting in her dining room while school groups take a tour of the galleries. Even with this energy, the museum would be more beneficial to the university community if it underwent a reinstallation similar to Gule’s work in the Johannesburg Art Gallery: foregrounding Stern’s complex and problematic relationships with the community—to help visitors understand how race, power, and privilege create artistic narratives. In this vein, the Irma Stern Museum should also be a place where visitors can critique dominant artistic narratives. The museum should present Stern’s work in a way that challenges assumptions about South African art, how various artists approached Black people as subjects, and push viewers to think critically about Stern, her life, and how she was able to become one of the highest-selling South African artists of all time. Although it already does educational outreach to schools and youth groups, now is the time

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to reexamine this outreach and how it corresponds to important contemporary questions about art and identity in contemporary South Africa. The wall text, for example, could provide more historical background information to help viewers understand the political turmoil that was occurring while Stern was painting. Stern’s personal collection of African art, which contains some exquisite examples of sculptural works from across the continent, could also benefit from a reinstallation with a more contextual display. Finally, there is a commercial gallery upstairs that hosts temporary exhibitions of South African artists of different racial backgrounds. Through a structural and curatorial redesign, this gallery could be brought into more direct conversation with Stern’s work in the rest of the museum. Although the museum has a small staff of mostly white professionals who are dedicated to preserving Stern’s legacy, the museum leadership has shown a willingness to support new scholarly perspectives on Stern such as the current study, among others, which are more critical and focused on connecting Stern to South Africa’s broader social context. This is the direction that will ensure that the museum and the study of South African art history are relevant to the university and to the community. The Irma Stern Museum has an important role to play in the future of the arts in South Africa and in Stern’s legacy in post-apartheid South Africa. The museum is not centrally located in a place where tourists will see it easily, but it is still on a university campus where these topics are frequently debated. In recent years, University of Cape Town (UCT) students have expressed the urgency in drastically reorganizing the university to address the academic and financial needs of its Black students. Not far from the Irma Stern Museum, a statue of white supremacist politician and mineral magnate Cecil John Rhodes towered above both the campus and the city of Cape Town below. In April 2015, UCT student Chumani Maxwele threw a bucket of human excrement onto the statue in protest of Rhodes’ racist social and economic policies that laid the foundations of apartheid and its aftermath. Maxwele was also protesting the UCT administration’s failure to reshape the university’s faculty, its fee and bursary (scholarship) structure, and the curriculum’s failure to address the needs of the majority-Black population in the twenty-first century.8 The subsequent movement, known as “Rhodes Must Fall,” resulted in weeks of student protests on campus until the statue was removed on April 9, 2015, starting a global movement to remove statues of Rhodes and other symbols of white supremacy.9 The movement, which calls for the removal of both statues and monuments representing historical figures who supported racism and colonialism and the policies that they created, prompted young people of color

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in particular to examine the connection between their absence in public spaces and their lack of political agency. As Cape Town artist Sethembile Mzesane mentioned in her 2017 TED talk “Living Sculptures that Stand for History’s Truths”: You see, public spaces are hardly ever as neutral as they may seem. I discovered this when I made this performance in 2013 on Heritage Day. Cape Town is teeming with masculine architecture, monuments and statues, such as Louis Botha in that photograph. This overt presence of White colonial and Afrikaner nationalist men not only echoes a social, gender and racial divide, but it also continues to affect the way that women—and the way, particularly, black women—see themselves in relation to dominant male figures in public spaces. For this reason, among others, I don’t believe that we need statues. The preservation of history and the act of remembering can be achieved in more memorable and effective ways.10

The Irma Stern Museum itself is not a monument like the Cecil Rhodes statue, but university art collections are part of the academic curriculum and should also be decolonized. The museum’s presence on UCT’s campus still represents a narrative that privileges white identity in a majority-Black country. Left unexamined and out of historical context, the Irma Stern Museum suggests a type of cultural superiority and control over Black South Africans in particular. Many of Stern’s paintings evoke a type of visual mastery over her subjects that also alludes to a type of social dominance as well. Through her use of color, Stern renders Black women highly visible and available for consumption by her predominantly white audience, but completely invisible as human beings with struggles, triumphs, and stories. As Msezane correctly points out, Black women are woefully absent from public spaces in South Africa and globally, and rectifying these glaring omissions should be a priority. However, in raising the issue of the presence of white males in South African public monuments, she is also emphasizing the issue of the gendered double standard that has minimized the positive and negative contributions of almost all women artists and historical figures to historical narratives. In this vein, even complex and controversial artists like Stern add value, namely through the emphasis on her own complicated position as a woman artist from a minority religious group in South Africa. As a Jewish South African woman, Stern made choices that supported her own personal and artistic self-preservation. As she decried the absence of a “colour bar” in Dakar in 1938, for example, Stern herself was the subject of discrimination in predominantly male art circles and as a Jewish artist during the Nazi era.11 These

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situations are on a different level in comparison with Black artists’ sacrifices and degradations, but they do offer some way to work toward finding common ground. There are ways, as Gule has done in Johannesburg, to create and curate change. Bringing even more young, Black South Africans into this discussion as curators and through exhibitions, gallery shows, and artists discussions would help them engage with these vital questions of identity, specifically as they relate to colonial and apartheid-era politics. These discussions will not always produce a favorable view of Stern and her work, but they will advance the idea that the art historical canon needs to be reimagined, interrogated, and expanded in a way that makes identity a central aspect of the South African art historical experience.

“Born Free” Reflections on Irma Stern It’s July 2018 in Johannesburg (Joburg), South Africa. At the Artist Proof Studio in the city’s Newtown district, young Black artists are in the studio mixing paint and examining their lithographs. A few weeks earlier, fifteen artists from the Artist Proof Studio participated in the Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) Turbine Art Fair (RMB TAF), where they displayed their works specifically created in response to their interactions with Irma Stern’s work through lectures, study of her paintings, and discussions. Describing itself as an “accessible” venue on its website, the Turbine Art Fair’s goal is to provide emerging artists with access to the growing South African art market. Each year, an established South African artist is selected and presented to the emerging artists for study and inspiration, while galleries from across the country select artists to participate and display their work. The Artist Proof Studio artists, all of them Black, were given the opportunity to study and critique Stern’s still lifes from their own perspectives as a diverse group trying to make sense of South African art twenty-five years after apartheid’s end. Artists were exposed to Stern’s work through Strauss and Co, a predominantly white-owned art auction house. Both the Turbine Art Fair and the Strauss and Co are commercial organizations, so there is a material incentive to present a specific narrative about Stern and her contributions to South African art. Irma Stern’s selection for the 2018 RMB TAF was timely as the conversation about representation in art had grown more intense at UCT and other university campuses. Protesters at UCT, for example, removed and burned works of art from the campus administrative buildings.12 “We [must] go to each and every

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building and every problematic white person’s picture we must take down,” stated one protester.13 I visited the Artist Proof Studio in July 2018 while teaching a summer course for the George Mason University Honors College called “Monuments, Museums, and Memory in South Africa.” During my visit, I met Tracey Munungufhala, a manager at the studio who explained more about the artists who participated in the Turbine Art Fair and showed me some of their work. We toured the studio and listened to her describe the instructional curriculum, which also focuses on building self-confidence and artistic agency among the students. Tracey connected me to one artist, Duduzile (Dudu) More, who in turn introduced me to the other artists in the group. I was able to have phone conversations with four of the artists who were available. I was interested in how the artists understood the Turbine Art Fair theme and their impressions of Stern, her biography, and her work. In particular, I sought to understand whether or how younger Black artists connected to Stern and her work. I wanted to learn more about what struck them as meaningful in her background and how they were inspired by her. Many of the artists had not learned much about Stern’s life before being exposed to her work through the Turbine Art Fair, and this was an interesting moment to hear young Black artists comment on Stern as an artist and her reception in the Black community. During the next week, I interviewed four of the fifteen artists, and their responses varied widely. Overall, they were interested in Stern’s use of color and how they could incorporate color into their own work. Some were curious about her extensive travels abroad, wanting to explore how she connected with people in other places. A few other artists were inspired by how Stern overcame obstacles to succeed as an artist—being a woman, for example, or being a modern artist when modern art was not accepted in South Africa. The artists I interviewed were Duduzile (Dudu) More, Thuli Lubisi, Pule Ratsoma, and David Madlabane.

Duduzile (Dudu) More Dudu More is one of the older artists working in the Artist Proof Studio. She was born in 1990, before the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Dudu has received several commissions for her work, and she was selected to be an exhibitor with Cartier for the First National Bank (FNB) Johannesburg Art Fair,

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according to her biography in her artist statement.14 Dudu also participated in an artist exchange program to Rosenclaire in Florence, Italy. Dudu had mixed feelings about Stern’s work and her connection to Black South Africans. A self-described “color junkie,” Dudu mentioned that “her skill in color is what I can take away from her.” Dudu “was not necessarily bothered as to the way she depicted Black people in the paintings because her use of color doesn’t make them seem as bad people . . . it doesn’t really jump out as to how they were treated back then or how they were seen.”15 Dudu questioned why Stern painted Black people, whether she spent time with them “in a good way,” and whether she attempted to establish relationships with her subjects. She wondered how Stern observed Black people and whether she “got consent” to paint them. Dudu also, however, could understand why Stern wanted to paint Black people because they are, as she acknowledged, “the most colorful and soulful” people and have “a lot to express.” Yet, Dudu also noted the importance of historical context in understanding Stern’s work: “The only thing that can scream harmful or violent towards the Black people in the paintings is the context of the time she was painting in.”16 Inspired by Stern’s interest in color, Dudu’s work Pink Things explores her love for the color pink as well as the “existence and simplicity of ‘things’” (Figure 5.1). The screen print organizes the objects into groups labeled “round things,” “pretty things,” “writer things,” and so on. Like Stern, Dudu sees colors bursting from everyday objects, and her work draws out these colors for the viewer’s pleasure. Her interpretation of Stern’s work engaged with both actual colors and metaphorically through her thoughts on Stern’s connections with skin color and race in South Africa.

Figure 5.1  Duduzile (Dudu) More, Pink Things, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio. (See Plate 14.)

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Thuli Lubisi Thuli Lubisi was born in Pretoria in 1993 but now lives in Soweto. She studied visual art at the Funda Art Centre before studying at the Artist Proof Studio. Her interest in Stern was inspired by Stern’s use of tropical colors “to create a stylized still life,” specifically during her travels to Zanzibar.17 In speaking with Thuli, she mentioned that in general she is “inspired by African fabrics, how people of different cultures and tribes come together to learn about how other people live their lives.”18 She discussed her personal experience navigating cultural differences, mentioning that her mother and father come from different ethnic groups; her mother is Sotho and her father is Tsonga. Thuli believes that an artist’s role in society is to “take everyday issues of today and address in their work,” a perspective that seemed to both empathize with Stern and push back against the narrative that she was a product of her time.19 She mentioned that by observing African women from countries such as Zimbabwe experience discrimination in South Africa, these experiences have shaped her views as an artist and as a citizen.

Pule Ratsoma Pule Ratsoma is also one of the older artists who participated in the RMB TAF. Born in 1989, Pule has studied at the Artist Proof Studio with the goal of “teaching art and printmaking in the rural areas and townships in the future.”20 He is active in community arts projects and “social awareness campaigns.” In his artist statement, Pule wrote, “I was inspired by how Irma Stern documented the beauty of life and her surroundings, her still life paintings capture this period of time extensively. I [drew] inspiration from this to reinterpret the Artwork titled ‘Nurture,’ a contemporary impression and document of how life and beauty is perceived today.”21 Pule’s views were an interesting contrast between his desire to serve his community through art and his inspiration by Stern’s documentation of life’s beauty. In my interview with him, he mentioned how his concerns about South Africa’s social and political directions drove his interest in art and the subjects he pursued. When asked about the artist’s role in society, he stated emphatically that artists have a duty to address “[i]ssues that are prevalent that people should think about, an artist’s job [is] to bring up those issues.”22 Pule’s work Nurture is a set of three screen prints that he describes as “a contemporary impression and document of how life and beauty is perceived

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Figure 5.2  Pule Ratsoma, Nurture, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio. (See Plate 15.)

today”23 (Figure 5.2). The set of three images depict a yellow cube resembling a piece of cheese sitting on a blue plate in each image as well as the progression of an apple being eaten in the lower left foreground. In the first image, there is one bite in the apple, several more in the second, and in the third just the core remains. Loss is visually evident as the apple disappears, but its consumption is nourishing someone or something. Like the apple, beauty also has utility. It can be nourishing and add value to our lives.

David Madlabane David Madlabane’s work looks at “deconstructing and reconstructing manmade objects.”24 Born in the East Rand Gauteng in 1996, David was in his third year at the Artist Proof Studio when I spoke to him, where he focuses on printmaking. His work is bold in both its colors and forms. He is interested in the impasto technique, which he admired in Stern’s work. David was interested in Stern’s personal experience with loss—how she dealt with death—since he had also experienced several deaths in his family recently. David took the position that an artist’s role depends on whether they are pushing a “negative or positive perspective.”25 He noted that the focus of the art lecture for the Turbine Art Fair was on Stern’s still lifes, so he did not see any of her paintings of Black Africans until he looked in a book. Relative to Irma Stern, David did not fault Stern for having a view on race that he believed “was the perspective of the time.”26 To note, David also had a strong orientation toward serving his community. “It is important for younger artists to give back, many young people are creative they need direction,” he said.27 Like the other artists I interviewed,

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David was also concerned about the country’s direction, noting that he believed South Africa was “going backwards.”28 David’s approach and his views reflect the idea that apartheid, also a manmade concept, is still in the process of being completely deconstructed so that the country can move forward. David’s Stern-inspired linocut and watercolor Existence, for example, combines abstraction with the still life genre (Figure 5.3). The work depicts a deconstructed vase of flowers and fruit display against an abstract black and white background. The bright florals are juxtaposed against the stark black and white colors behind it. The vase is positioned off-center and to the right. A series of straight vertical lines divide the space into dozens of rectangular shapes, severing some of the floral buds and suspending them in space. This work captures the complexity of David’s thinking about Stern’s use of manmade objects such as floral vases and his own philosophical interpretation of the still life genre as it applies to South Africa: intentionally uprooting something from its natural place to give it a reconstructed, manmade, and ephemeral existence. In taking apart and “deconstructing” objects in his art, David exposes the extent to which human existence can be both shaped and changed by manmade concepts and objects. The breadth of the artists’ interpretations of Stern’s legacy and impact on South African art is astounding. Artists connected to Stern’s style and her biography in unique and interesting ways. Despite coming from drastically different economic and racial backgrounds, several found inspiration from Stern’s struggles to overcome gender stereotypes and mentioned their own personal obstacles in becoming artists. In general, few of the artists mentioned Stern’s race as either an obstacle to connecting with her or as a consideration in interpreting her work. Each mentioned that artists were in a unique position to provide social

Figure 5.3  David Madlabane, Existence, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio. (See Plate 16.)

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commentary. The RMB TAF focus on Stern’s still lifes—instead of her paintings of Black people—meant that there were fewer opportunities to discuss the direct impact on the historical context of her work. These discussions, however, are crucial in providing the next generation of artists with a more critical framework to create art that is social commentary. Most importantly, aspects of Stern’s biography and her work continue to speak to Black artists and intellectuals. They continue to lean into contradictions, grappling with her artistic and intellectual complexity. In an almost 100-year span, from around 1920 to the present, the Born Free artists of the Artist Proof Studio and Black intellectuals such as scholar Alain Locke and Rhodes Must Fall founder and activist Chumani Maxwele have found elements of Stern’s work that have both affirmed and challenged their societal views on race and national identity. Artists such as Dudu More and David Madlabane explored formal elements such as color and form in Stern’s work. As Locke articulated in The New Negro in 1925, Stern’s use of modernist formal techniques to paint Black people as subjects was prophetic at the time and pushed the conventions of contemporary Black representation, and he urged Black American artists to be inspired by her example. Beginning in July 2018, Maxwele and I engaged in ongoing conversations about Irma Stern and South Africa’s future. Maxwele mentioned that he was introduced to Stern through the South African business community. Surprised at the high price for her work, he decided to visit the Irma Stern Museum. While visiting the museum, he viewed Stern’s work with, as he called it, “a politically critical eye,” going on to state, “The question of the educationality of Irma Museum is the same question that is posed in relation to the Apartheid Museum which is owned and controlled by white people. My constant agony is that: How can our painful history be told by the apartheid beneficiaries?”29 Although he believes that the Irma Stern Museum should be “left as it is,” in other words, not permanently closed, he suggested that Black South Africans should engage with the museum and Stern’s work “politically and socially.”30

Conclusion The July 2018 moment is also a way to connect the beginning and the end of this study of Stern’s life, work, and legacy. As the nation celebrated Nelson Mandela’s centenary, it reflected on its progress, as well as whether the African National Congress was the right political party to lead South Africa into the future. To be sure, the racial paradox of South African art persists today. It remains

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difficult for Black artists to break into the mainstream, and very few Black artists’ representational works fetch the same value at auction as Stern’s paintings of Black Africans. In South Africa, “apartheid-era tastes,” as South African art history professor Rory Bester refers to them, still dictate which art is valued financially and in the canon.31 Irma Stern holds eight of ten records for auction house sales, while Black artists like Gerard Sekoto command a fraction of that amount.32 But with curators such as Khwezi Gule and Nontobeko Ntombela, an independent curator who also teaches curatorial practice at Wits University in Johannesburg, there is hope that museum collections and exhibitions will be able to revise the historical narrative and give more Black artists the scholarly attention they deserve. Irma Stern’s 1955 Maid in Uniform and David Madlabane’s 2018 Existence serve as bookends to this study. Stern’s oil painting uses several shades of blue and gray that contrast with the stark white apron and cap to depict the maid’s uniform, a tragic national symbol of domestic servitude and Black female social immobility in South Africa. Combined with the Black woman’s rich brown skin tone and obviously agitated facial expression, her furor transcends space and time. Stern should have used her artistic talent to create more paintings like Maid in Uniform, which is visually striking for both its formal elements and for the emotional tenor of that year, when growing numbers of Black women protested pass law legislation and demanded access to better childcare and working conditions. Compared with David Madlabane’s Existence, the viewer can see both the formal and social contrasts between black and white in the two works. For Stern’s Black female subject in 1955, apartheid’s oppressive yoke was stoking the fires of dissent and resistance. In Madlabane’s 2018 lithograph, black and white shapes sit uncomfortably close to each other in a struggle for dominance on paper. Both works, separated by sixty-three years of history and an intractable racial divide, illuminate the complex ways in which South African artists have struggled to understand race, gender, and politics through their work. Neither figurative work nor abstraction can completely escape the racial paradox of modern art, but they can deepen our understanding of its political and social context. In this book I have argued for a reconsideration of how we think of Irma Stern in the art historical framework of modernism in South Africa, and also how we think in general about an artist’s political and social views relative to their work. Stern herself reflected this discussion’s complexity: marginalized as a female, Jewish artist in South Africa and privileged as a white woman in the same colonial and apartheid-era country. Her political views and her political

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relationships are important in understanding her worldview and her approach to her work. Based on the types of relationships she cultivated with politicians and academics, Stern was very aware that these political relationships would allow her to travel the world and become a successful artist. Her simultaneous insider and outsider identities shifted over time and location. It is vital that we understand how, for decades, white South African artists and the apartheid regime used artists like Stern to shape artistic tastes and cultural norms. Placing Black women in a state of artistic arrested development by depicting them as exotic, hypersexualized, or confined only to agrarian roles in society, Stern fed the dominant narrative of white supremacy. Even when the regime disagreed with Stern’s embrace of European modernism through her exposure to German expressionism first and later cubism and abstraction, its financial and political support for Stern’s career through public art competitions and letters of introduction from Prime Minister Jan Smuts worked together or conspired to contribute to Black oppression and disenfranchisement. The racial paradox of modern art allowed Stern to thrive artistically and financially, depicting her version of a multiracial South Africa that seemed bucolic, idyllic, and palatable to white audiences in South Africa and around the world. Her career success was predicated upon her ability to interpret her surroundings in splendid colors. It’s difficult, however, to focus on lavish gallery openings and tea parties at Stern’s home in Cape Town, when we consider that less than a mile away, Black South African townships were being raided, bulldozed, and destroyed by apartheid-era police. The audacities of color provided Stern with the privilege to escape painting the harsh realities of Black township life, a subject that most white South Africans avoided. Unfortunately, this “ignorance contract” helped fuel the oppressive apartheid regime. The value in Stern’s work today lies not in the bright colors of her still lifes or the social prestige of her sitters, but in the contentious conversations about the role of the artist in society and how artists use their position as cultural observers to illuminate important political and social questions. At the height of her career, Irma Stern had extraordinary access to power, and through her work and her privilege, she could have done some important consciousness raising. She chose not to do this, but her work indirectly inspired other artists to explore social issues by rendering Blackness in art. In South Africa, young people are critical of both the white establishment that still controls much of the country’s wealth and the Black politicians in the African National Congress, whom they believe have not done enough to alleviate economic inequality and eliminate the vestiges of apartheid. With limited access

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Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art

to higher education, economic and social mobility are nearly impossible. To older generations, the arts may seem secondary to these urgent concerns, but for youth, there is value in understanding the arts as a means of political expression and a vehicle for social change. As Maxwele mentioned in one of our conversations, The artists who benefited during apartheid and who were racists towards Black people and thus who are still, some of them, holding high up position in the democratic South Africa can only be challenged together with their work through a political scrutiny. The question of what to do with them is equally the same question of what to do with the apartheid project that is still with us in South Africa today.33

Many of these issues transcend the borders of South Africa. Through media, social policies, and structural inequality, dominant cultures use anti-Black racism to denigrate Blackness and Black people around the globe. Now more than ever, politically, socially, and culturally Black people must actively assert that they matter. The racial paradox of modern art in South Africa defined Stern’s career and makes her work so problematic, yet worthy of continued discussion today. Stern spent much of her time searching for Black and Coloured South African women as artistic subjects, seeking to be closer to them aesthetically but never socially, culturally, or politically. While she was attracted by their physical beauty and cultural richness, Stern was less interested in how these women lived their daily lives as politically marginalized and disenfranchised people. Sorting through these contradictions is our challenge as viewers and as citizens.

Notes 1 Hilda Purwitzky Papers, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town Folder 2 (A2.14). 2 “Miss Irma Stern: Painter of African Life,” Cape Times, August 24, 1966. 3 Melissa Steyn, “The Ignorance Contract: Recollections of Apartheid Childhoods and the Construction of Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19, no. 1 (2012): 8–25, DOI:10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840. 4 Letter to Freda Feldman, January 26, 1951, in Sandra Klopper, Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? (Cape Town: Orisha Publishing, 2017), 179. Klopper transcribes and interprets Stern’s voluminous correspondence with the Feldmans in this book. It importantly provides great insight into Stern’s inner thoughts and feelings about herself, her observations of the world, and her personal relationships. It also underscores Stern’s self-absorbed personality.

If Rhodes Must Fall, Must Stern Fall?

155

5 Letter to Freda Feldman, September 23, 1953, Klopper, 181. 6 Percy Zvomuya, “An Invitation to Re-view at the Joburg Art Gallery,” New Frame, February 27, 2019. 7 Ibid. 8 Eve Fairbanks, “Why South African Students Have Turned on Their Parents’ Generation,” The Guardian, November 18, 2015. 9 See also Kim Miller and Brenda Schmahmann, Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 10 Sethembile Msezane, “Living Sculptures That Stand for History’s Truths,” Arusha TED Talk, August 2017. 11 “No Colour Bar at Dakar,” Cape Times, March 3, 1938. 12 “Rhodes Must Fall Protesters Burn UCT Art,” GroundUp.org, February 17, 2016. 13 Ibid. 14 Artist Proof Studio, Duduzile More, Artist Statement, “Irma Stern Biographies and Statements” (Johannesburg: Artist Proof Studio, 2018), 20. 15 Duduzile More (artist), phone interview, September 11, 2018. 16 Ibid. 17 Thuli Lubisi (artist), phone interview, August 23, 2018. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Artist Proof Studio, Pule Ratsoma, Artist Statement, “Irma Stern Biographies and Statements” (Johannesburg: Artist Proof Studio, 2018), 1. 21 Artist Proof Studio, “Irma Stern Biographies and Statements” (Johannesburg: Artist Proof Studio, 2018), 1. 22 Pule Ratsoma (artist), phone interview, August 23, 2018. 23 Pule Ratsoma, Artist Statement, 1. 24 Artist Proof Studio, David Madlabane, Artist Statement in “Irma Stern Biographies and Statements” (Johannesburg: Artist Proof Studio, 2018), 5. 25 David Madlabane (artist), phone interview, August 24, 2018. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Chumani Maxwele (student activist), personal communication, December 13, 2018. 30 Ibid. 31 Rory Bester, “Gerard Sekoto: Apartheid Era Tastes Are Still Borne Out at Art Auctions,” The Conversation, September 26, 2018, https​://th​econv​ersat​ion.c​om/ge​ rard-​sekot​o-apa​rthei​d-era​-tast​es-ar​e-sti​ll-bo​rne-o​ut-at​-art-​aucti​ons-1​03562​. 32 Ibid. 33 Chumani Maxwele (student activist), personal communication, December 13, 2018.

156

Biographical Timeline and Selected Exhibitions 1894

Born in the Schweizer-Reneke, Transvaal, South Africa

1896

First visit to Germany

1899

Brother Rudi born

1900

Stern’s father arrested during the Boer War; family moves to Cape Town

1901

Sterns move to Germany

1902

Sterns resettle in Wolmaransstad, Transvaal

1904

Sterns return to Germany via Zanzibar and Italy

1909

Stern family returns to Wolmaransstad

1912

Begins art classes in Berlin

1913

Transfers to Weimar Academy

1914

Studies with Max Brandenburg in Berlin and later Gari Melchers in Weimar

1916 Paints The Eternal Child and meets Max Pechstein 1918

Exhibits with the Novembergruppe and the Freie Sezession

1919

Holds exhibition at Fritz Gurlitt Gallery, Berlin

1920 Publishes lithographic portfolios, Visionen and Dumela Marena; moves back to South Africa; exhibits with the Novembergruppe 1921

Holds exhibition at Ashbey’s Gallery, Cape Town

1922

Second exhibition at Ashbey’s Gallery, Cape Town

1923

Writes Umgababa, unpublished travel narrative

1925 Exhibits at the Empire Exhibition in London and Ashbey’s Gallery in Cape Town; also exhibits in Germany and Austria; visits Natal and Zululand 1926 Marries Johannes Prinz; meets Richard Feldman; exhibits in the Champions’ Art Gallery in Bloemfontein and the Levson Gallery in Johannesburg 1927 Publication of Max Osborn’s Junge Kunst monograph; awarded the Prix d’Honneur at the Bordeaux International Exhibition in France; exhibits at Galerie Le Tryptique in Paris; buys home in Rondebosch, Cape Town, and names it “The Firs” 1929 Travels to Pondoland; exhibits in Cape Town and at the International Jewish Exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland; exhibits at the Gallery Nierendorf in Berlin

158

Biographical Timeline and Selected Exhibitions

1931

Visits Madeira

1932

Exhibits at the Galerie Kleikamp in The Hague and Foyles Gallery in London

1933 Ends visits to Germany due to Nazi rise to power; exhibits at Lazard Galleries in Johannesburg 1934 Divorce granted from Johannes Prinz; exhibits at the University of Stellenbosch 1935

Samuel Stern dies

1936 Exhibits at the Selwyn Chambers in Cape Town and the Criterion in Johannesburg 1937

Visits Dakar and Italy

1938

Returns to Dakar

1939 Visits Zanzibar; exhibits at the Sun Buildings in Cape Town and the Transvaal Art Gallery in Johannesburg 1941

Exhibits at the Gainsborough Gallery in Johannesburg

1942 Travels to Belgian Congo; writes Congo travel narrative; exhibits at the Gainsborough Gallery in Johannesburg and the Argus Gallery in Cape Town 1945

Visits Zanzibar

1946

Returns to Europe

1947

Exhibits at the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris

1948 Exhibits at Tate Gallery in London, the Kunst Kring Gallery in Rotterdam, and Christie’s Gallery in Pretoria 1950 Exhibits at the Venice Biennale, and then at the Association of Art Gallery in Cape Town 1951

Returns to Transkei and the Natal

1952

Participates in Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Celebration

1953

Exhibited at Galerie André Weil in Paris

1955

Travels to Turkey; exhibits at the Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt in Munich

1956

Exhibits at Galerie Wasmuth in Berlin and Stadt Galerie in Linz (Austria)

1957

Exhibits at the São Paulo Biennale

1960

Receives the Guggenheim International Art Prize

1961

Visits Spain; exhibits at the Stadt Galerie in Berlin

1963

Receives Oppenheimer Award for Best Painting, Durban

1965 Exhibits at the Galerie André Weil in Paris and the Walter Schwitter Gallery in Pretoria 1966

Exhibits at the Wolpe Gallery in Cape Town; dies on August 23 in Cape Town

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Shoumatoff, Alex. “The Devil and the Art Dealer.” Vanity Fair, April 2014. “Sick and Tired of Abstract Art.” Cape Argus, October 23, 1958. Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre, and the Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Sinisi, Sarah. “Irma Stern (1894–1966): The Creation of an Artist’s Reputation in Her Lifetime and Posthumously, 1920–2013.” M.A. diss., University of Cape Town, 2016. Smuts, Jan C. Letter to Irma Stern. May 15, 1950. “Smuts Memorial Should Be.” Cape Times, September 19, 1950. South African Association of Arts. Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture. Cape Town: Cape Times Ltd., 1948. “South African Minister Describes Lesbian Photos as Immoral.” The Guardian Online, March 2, 2010. Sowden, Lewis. “Jewish Art in South Africa.” Hashalom Rosh Hashonah, September 1935. Sparks, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. New York: Ballantine Press, 1990. Sparks, Allister. Tomorrow Is Another Country. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Steiner, Christopher B. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Stern, Irma. Audio Clip of Irma Stern Interview, Jewish Museum of South Africa Exhibition. Stern, Irma. Journal Page 43. Cape Town: Chameleon Press, 1917–1920. Stern, Irma. “Umgababa.” In Irma Stern Papers. Cape Town: National Library of South Africa, 1923. Stern, Irma. “My Exotic Models.” Cape Argus, April 3, 1926. Stern, Irma. “My Critics Some Home Truths.” Cape Review, May 3, 1935. Stern, Irma. “My Amazing Models.” Sunday Express, November 6, 1936. Stern, Irma. Congo. Pretoria: van Schaik, Ltd., 1943. Stern, Irma. Zanzibar. Pretoria: van Schaik, Ltd., 1948. “Stern Words on Dakar.” Johannesburg Sunday Times, 1938. Stockstad, Marilyn, and Michael W. Cothren. Art: A Brief History. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2016. “Swapping Old for New. Changes in the National Galleries, South African Collection.” Cape Times, November 5, 1953. “Swazis from the Brush: Colourful Canvases That May Influence South African Art.” Johannesburg Star, 1928 (approx.). Tamari, M. “Mending the Lives of Israel’s Problem Children.” Jewish Affairs, July 1958. Teachout, Terry. “Dirty Laundry: How to React When Artists and Morality Collide.” Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2006. “The Revolutionary—Irma Stern.” Cape Argus, November 10, 1924. “The Wanderer.” Cape Argus, March 25, 1939. Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Index African National Congress  74 n.94, 115, 127, 151, 153 anti-Black racism  4, 9, 12, 30, 46–7, 49, 56, 67, 107, 119, 127, 133, 141, 143. See also anti-Semitism anti-Semitism  38, 49, 53, 56, 58, 64, 67, 71 n.44, 107, 119. See also antiBlack racism apartheid. See also anti-Black racism; Black disenfranchisement; colonialism art and activism  131–2 beginning policies  106–8 Irma Stern’s conservative views on  129, 133 Arab Priest  109 art exhibits for Irma Stern Argus Gallery (Cape Town)  63, 158 Ashbey’s Gallery (Cape Town)  43–6, 59, 157 Champions’ Art Gallery (Bloemfontein)  157 Christie’s Gallery (Pretoria)  158 Criterion (Johannesburg)  158 Degenerate Art (Munich)  56 Empire Exhibition (London)  157 Foyles Gallery (London)  158 Gainsborough Galleries (Johannesburg)  79, 158 Galerie Andre Weil in Paris  158 Galerie Fritz Gurlitt (Berlin)  25, 37, 157 Galerie Le Tryptique (Paris)  157 Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt (Munich)  158 Gallerie de Beaux Arts (Paris)  108 Gallery Nierendorf (Berlin)  157 Gurlitt’s art gallery (Linz, Austria)  125 International Jewish Exhibition (Zurich, Switzerland)  53, 157

Kunst Kring Gallery (Rotterdam)  158 Lazard Galleries (Johannesburg)  158 Levson Gallery (Johannesburg)  157 Novembergruppe  157 São Paulo Biennale (Cape Town)  12, 126, 158 South African Association of Arts (SAAA) Gallery (Cape Town)  105, 126, 158 Stadt Galeries (Berlin and Linz, Austria)  158 Sun Buildings (Cape Town)  158 Tate Gallery in London  109–10, 158 Transvaal Art Gallery (Johannesburg)  158 University of Stellenbosch  158 Venice Biennale  12, 126, 158 Walter Schwitter Gallery (Pretoria)  158 Wildenstein Gallery (Paris)  158 Wolpe Gallery (Cape Town)  158 Artist Proof Studio  145–6, 148–9, 151 Ashbey’s Gallery (Cape Town) GFC Faustman’s opening remarks  43 Irma Stern’s first exhibition in 1922  43 Irma Stern’s second exhibition in 1925  45–6 Lippy Lipshitz  60 significance of race in exhibitions  44–6, 59 awards and prizes for Irma Stern Molteno Award from the Cape Tercentenary Foundation  128 Oppenheimer Award for Best Painting (Durban)  158 Peggy Guggenheim International Art Prize  128, 158 Prix d’Honneur at the Bordeaux International Exhibition (France)  52

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Bahutu Musicians  91–2 Beit, Alfred  115, 135 n.33 Beit, Alfred Lane  115 Belgian Congo. See also colonialism; Congo (travel narrative); Kuba; Mangbetu; slavery Irma Stern’s travels to  8, 14, 77–8, 81–3, 89, 92–3, 106, 108, 119, 158 Below, Irene  12, 32 n.8, 34 n.21, 100 n.22 Benin Bronzes  28 Berlin, Germany. See also Below, Irene; Gurlitt, Wolfgang art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt  24, 58 influence on Irma Stern’s life  6–7, 17, 37, 130, 157 Black and White: Stories of South Africa (by Richard Feldman)  51. See also Feldman, Richard Black disenfranchisement  54, 107, 123, 153. See also apartheid; Feldman, Richard; Smuts, Jan Christian (South African Prime Minister) gendered discrimination  124, 154 voting restrictions  133 n.10 Black Prophet (The African; by Winold Reiss)  29. See also Reiss, Winold Boer War  6, 32 n.8, 157 Brandenburg, Max  7, 157 Breuil, Abbe Henri  93, 102 nn.55, 56 Cape Argus (newspaper) critique of Irma Stern as radical  44 Cape Town, South Africa. See also apartheid; Black disenfranchisement; colonialism; slavery Dr. Louis Herrman  70 n.42 history of colonialism and enslavement  37 influence on Irma Stern’s life  6, 32, 37–9, 43–5, 79 Jewish community  40, 41–2, 49 khalifa performance  55 Chief Ekibondo  84–5, 101 n.30 colonialism  37, 54, 77, 93, 97. See also apartheid; slavery monuments and histories of  141, 143

Coloured  4, 15 n.6, 53, 55–6, 79, 112, 140, 142, 154. See also anti-Black racism; apartheid; colonialism; slavery Cape Malay  54–5, 79 Cape Muslims  54, 55, 79 Congo (travel narrative)  13, 77, 83, 92–3, 102 n.50, 158. See also colonialism; slavery; Zanzibar (travel narrative) Congo: Man With Spear  86–7 Congo: Mother and Young Child  85–6 Congo: Tutsi Woman  90–1 Congo: Woman With Bananas  83–4 Congo: Woman Sitting on Stool  86–7 Defiance Campaign  115, 121, 124. See also anti-Black racism; apartheid; colonialism Degenerate Art (Munich) exhibitions  58–9 Dubow, Neville  10–11, 128, 130, 133, 137 n.81 Dumela Marena  25–8, 157 commissioned by Wolfgang Gurlitt  25 Dumela Marena Panels 1–4  27 The Eternal Child  19–21, 24, 34 n.25, 39, 157 Existence (by David Madlabane)  150, 152. See also Madlabane, David expressionist art Galerie Fritz Gurlitt  25 influence on Irma Stern  13, 17–18, 26, 37, 45, 83, 87, 126 Joseph Goebbels and  58 Nazi persection against  58 Pechstein, Max  8, 17, 21, 23, 30 poet Elsa Lasker-Schuler and  121 primitivism  34 n.18 Fanon, Frantz  141 Feldman, Freda. See also Feldman, Richard Irma Stern’s letters to  67, 94, 111, 141, 154 n.4 social activism about race and racism  122 Treason Trial Defense Fund  127 Feldman, Richard

Index background  49–50, 71 n.45, 71 n.47 Black and White: Stories of South Africa  51 Irma Stern’s letters to  59, 80, 94, 111, 123, 154 n.4 social activism about race and racism  38, 49–2, 67–8, 123, 140 Feni, Dumile  132. See under apartheid, art and activism Fishing Boats  1–2 Frobenius, Leo  82, 87–8, 100 nn.20, 22 Girls Central High School (Cape Town) mentorship by Irma Stern  63, 74 n.97 teaching by Rosa Van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitsky  63, 80 Girl With a Pendulum  20 Greyshirts  67 Guinea Fowls  43 Gule, Khwezi  141–2, 145, 152 Gurlitt, Wolfgang  24. See also Verlag Fritz Gurlitt press family ties to Nazis  73 n.78 friendship with Irma Stern  68, 125 Galerie Fritz Gurlitt  24–5, 35 n.36, 37 subsidizing artists overseas  22, 25 Hermanus  43 Hutus  8, 77, 81, 90. See also Rwanda genocide; Tutsis In the Harem  108 Irma Stern Museum  70 n.12, 142–4, 151 Israel  118–20 Tikvat Israel Congregation in Cape Town of 1841  42 Jewish Affairs  121 Jewish community  8–9, 12–13, 37–42, 49–51, 56, 60–1, 119–21, 127, 135 n.48, 140 Jewish identity  5, 39, 118, 120, 140 Litvak Jews  38, 42 South African Jewish Board of Deputies  42, 119 Kentridge, William  141 khalifa  55. See also ratiep; slavery painting Khalifa labeled a “degenerate form of art”  55

173

Klopper, Sandra  12, 154 n.4 Kuba Irma Stern visits to  77, 80–3, 86–9 Larrabee, Constance Stuart  113–14, 134 n.28 Young Gold Miner Watching Sunday Mine Dance, Witwatersrand, South  113–14 Locke, Alain artistic influence  13, 17, 28, 30, 32, 151 Benin Bronzes  28 essay for Legacy of the Ancestral Arts  29, 31 and Irma Stern  30–1 The New Negro  29–30, 151 and Walter von Ruckteschell  30–1 Winold Reiss illustrations for  29 Lubisi, Thuli  146, 148 Madlabane, David background  146, 149 Existence  150, 152 influence of Irma Stern  149, 151 Maid in Uniform  8, 123–5, 132, 152 Malay Girl  116–17, 121 Malay Girls in Twilight  43 Malay Mother and Child  54 Mancoba, Ernest art and influence  118 captive by Nazis during Second World War  117 Mandela, Nelson (President  1994–99)  113, 127, 131, 140, 151 Mangbetu Georg, Schweinfurth  82, 88, 98, 100 n.20 Irma Stern visits to  77, 81–7 Mangbetu Chief ’s Daughter  89 Matisse, Henri  130 Maxwele, Chumani  143, 151, 154 Millin, Sarah Gertrude. See also Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin friendship with Irma Stern  64–5 novel God’s Stepchildren  63–4 More, Duduzile (Dudu)  14, 146–7 Pink Things  147 Morrison, Toni  141

174 National Party (South Africa) beginning of apartheid  106–8 critiques by Rabbi Andre Ungar  120 incorporation of Jews  120 Irma Stern’s artwork as propaganda  106, 111 Prime Minister Daniel Francois Malan  107 pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish migration  119 white supremacy ideology  95 nature influence on Irma Stern  80, 83 influence on Max Pechstein  22–3 Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza on  47 as a source of artistic inspiration  23, 127 Nazi  8, 158. See also Black disenfranchisement; Degenerate Art and Afrikaner Broaderbond, and Eastern Africa  30 “degenerate art” campaign  8, 56, 58–61, 67 influence on Irma Stern’s career  61, 68, 73–4 n.83, 144, 158 and literature by Sarah Gertrude Millin  64 movement against modern art  57–61 South African sympathizers  67, 107 New Group  61 Novembergruppe. See under art exhibits for Irma Stern, Novembergruppe; Nazi, movement against modern art; Pechstein, Max, Novembergruppe; Weimar Academy, Irma Stern’s paintings of Black Africans Nurture (by Pule Ratsoma)  149 Oppenheimer, Ernest  55–6 Osborn, Max  10, 52, 71 n.52, 72 n.75 Pan-African  93, 98 Pechstein, Max Alain Locke and  30 and art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt  22, 24 (group of natives around a hut)  26 Irma Stern’s influence on  8

Index Letter to Irma Stern  23, 34 n.20 mentorship of Stern in expressionist art  17–18, 21–2, 32, 34 n.25, 157 Novembergruppe  23–4, 34 n.25 Nursing Child  21–2 travels in Palau with wife, Lotte  22, 27 Pimento Harvest  130 Pink Things (by Duduzile (Dudu) More)  147 Portrait of Dr. Louis Herrman  49 Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky  41 Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen  41 Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin  64 Prinz, Johannes marriage with Irma Stern  52 separation and divorce from Irma Stern  62, 158 Purwitsky, Hilda. See also Girls Central High School (Cape Town); Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky; Van Gelderen, Roza background  38–9, 69 n.7 Girls Central High School  80 the “Jewish idea”  39 painted by Irma Stern  41 social activism  68 support for Irma Stern  38, 40, 63, 70 n.12, 89 Radziwill, Franz  73 n.83 ratiep  55. See also khalifa Ratsoma, Pule  14, 148–9 Nurture  149 Reiss, Winold. See also Alain Locke Alain Locke and  29, 31 Black Prophet (The African)  29 Rhodes, Cecil John  143 statue of  144 Rhodes Must Fall  14, 142–3, 151 Rwanda genocide  8, 14, 77, 81, 90, 102 n.50. See also Hutus; Tutsis Schweinfurth, Georg  82, 88, 98, 100 n.20 Sixpence a Door (by Gerard Sekoto)  110–11 Slavery  56, 77, 92–3, 95. See also colonialism; Coloured Dutch East India Company  53–4, 114 slave trade  53–4, 66, 114

Index Small Coloured Girl  40 Smuts, Jan Christian (Prime Minister 1919–24, 1939–48)  62, 78. See also apartheid; Black disenfranchisement and Abbe Henri Breuil  102 n.56 support for Irma Stern  111, 153 United Party’s loss to Afrikaner-led National Party  107 South African Association of Arts (SAAA). See also art exhibits for Irma Stern Eurocentric views on art, politics, and race  105, 110–11 organized exhibition of South African artists at Tate Gallery (London)  109–10 Stern, Irma. See apartheid; art exhibits for Irma Stern; Ashbey’s Gallery (Cape Town); awards and prizes for Irma Stern; Belgian Congo; Expressionist art; Feldman, Freda; Feldman, Richard; Girls Central High School (Cape Town), mentorship by Irma Stern; Nazi, influence on Irma Stern’s career; Pechstein, Max; Prinz, Johannes; travel narratives; Weimar Academy; Weimar era Tambo, Oliver  113, 127 travel narratives. See also colonialism; Congo; slavery; Umgababa; Zanzibar colonialism and racism  77, 81 gender, conquest, and subjugation  82 Stern’s influence through the genre  92–3, 96, 130 Tutsis  8, 77, 81, 90–2. See also Hutus; Rwanda genocide Two Malay Musicians  1, 2, 54 Umgababa (unpublished travel narrative)  45, 52, 80, 157 Natal  45, 47, 96, 113, 157 Zululand  45, 48, 113, 157

175

van Dycke, James  73–4 n.83 Van Gelderen, Roza. See also Girls Central High School (Cape Town); Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen; Purwitsky, Hilda leadership of Girls Central High School  63, 80 painted by Irma Stern  41 social activism  68 support for Irma Stern  38 Verlag Fritz Gurlitt press  25. See also Gurlitt, Wolfgang Verwoerd, Henrik (Prime Minister 1958–66)  139–40 Von Ruckteschell, Walter Alain Locke and  30–1 Kwaheri Askari: Auf Wiedersehen Askari  30 Washerwoman  55 Water Colours  43 Weimar Academy The Eternal Child  19 influence on Irma Stern’s paintings of Black Africans  24 significance in Irma Stern’s life  7, 157 Weimar era background  28 influence on Irma Stern’s race consciousness  32, 42 whiteness  4–5, 42, 57, 140 Williamson, Sue  141 Xakaza, Mzuzile Mduduzi, analysis of Black artists  47. See also nature Xhosa Woman  115–16 Young Africa  30–1 Zanzibar (travel narrative)  77, 94, 96, 158. See also colonialism; Congo (travel narrative); slavery Zanzibar: Arab Man With Pipe  96–7 Zulu Woman  43, 48

Plate 1 Irma Stern, Two Malay Musicians, 1930. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Pretoria Art Museum.

Plate 2  Irma Stern, Maid in Uniform. Oil on canvas, 1955, 69 × 63 cm. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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Plate 3  Irma Stern (1894–1966), The Eternal Child (1916). Oil on board. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Rupert Family Foundation, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch, South Africa.   

Plate 4  Winold Reiss, Black Prophet (The African), 1925. © Reiss Partners.

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Plate 5  Moses Kottler, Small Coloured Girl, 1917. © Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Plate 6  Irma Stern, Portrait of Hilda Purwitsky. Oil on canvas, ca. 1930s. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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Plate 7 Irma Stern, Portrait of Roza Van Gelderen. Oil on canvas, ca. 1930s. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

Plate 8  Irma Stern, Portrait of Sarah Gertrude Millin. Oil on canvas, 1941. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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Plate 9 Irma Stern, Bahutu Musicians. Oil on canvas, 1942, 135 × 145 cm. © Johannesburg Art Gallery. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

Plate 10  Irma Stern, Arab Priest. Oil on canvas, 1945, 96.5 × 85 cm. OM.831, National Collection of Qatar. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Photography © National Collection of Qatar. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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Plate 11  Gerard Sekoto, Sixpence a Door. Oil on canvas, 1947. © 2019 Gerard Sekoto Foundation / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

Plate 12  Irma Stern, Xhosa Woman. Oil on canvas, 1941, 75.5 × 75 cm. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy of Irma Stern Museum.

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Plate 13  Irma Stern, Malay Girl. Oil on canvas, 1939, 61 × 51 cm. © Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town. © 2020 Irma Stern / DALRO, Johannesburg / VAGA at ARS, NY.

Plate 14  Duduzile (Dudu) More, Pink Things, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio.

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Plate 15  Pule Ratsoma, Nurture, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio.

Plate 16  David Madlabane, Existence, 2018. © Artist Proof Studio.

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176