Irma Stern

Biography

Some of the portraits Irma Stern brought back from Zanzibar are set in frames made from fragments of carved Zanzibari doors. She visited the island twice, in 1939 and 1945, collected Islamic manuscripts and studied the carved inscriptions on the door lintels. The curators who showed these paintings in Cape Town in 2021–2022 saw the rhythm of Arabic calligraphy in her thick, heavy brushwork. I think the door frames are not decoration here: she simply did not separate a painting from the place where she had painted it.

She was born on 2 October 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, a small town in the Boer republic of the Transvaal, into a well-off family of German-Jewish immigrants, Samuel and Henny Stern. Her father kept a shop and later became a successful farmer. During the Anglo-Boer War the British interned him for his Boer sympathies, and her mother took Irma and her younger brother Rudi to Cape Town. After her father’s release, in 1901, the family went to Germany, then came back, and from then on their life moved between two continents.

In 1913 Stern enrolled at the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Art in Weimar, was soon disappointed in it and in 1914 moved to the Levin-Funcke studio in Berlin. She found her teacher in 1917: Max Pechstein, a member of Die Brücke and one of the founders of the Novembergruppe. In 1918–1919 her work appeared in exhibitions of the German Expressionists, and in May 1919, with Pechstein’s help, her first solo exhibition, of 33 drawings, opened at Fritz Gurlitt’s gallery in Berlin.

In 1920 she returned to Cape Town with her family. The colonial city did not take to her Expressionism. Reviews came out under headlines like “The Art of Miss Irma Stern: Ugliness as a Cult”, her paintings were called “agony in oils” and an insult to the intellect, and after complaints of indecency the police even carried out an inspection. In Europe, meanwhile, she was received differently. Almost every two years she showed the same works first in Cape Town, then in Paris, Amsterdam and The Hague, and the publisher Klinkhardt & Biermann brought out a book on her in its “Junge Kunst” series, which also had monographs on Vlaminck, Derain and Marie Laurencin. In 1927 she received an honorary prize at the international exhibition in Bordeaux, in 1929 she represented South Africa at the Empire Exhibition in London, and after a trip to Madeira in 1931 she had her first exhibition in England, at the Foyles gallery in London. By the 1940s she had been recognised at home as well.

In 1926 she married her former tutor Johannes Prinz, later professor of German at the University of Cape Town; they divorced in 1934. From 1927 until the end of her life Stern lived at The Firs, a house in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch.

After 1933 she refused to travel to Germany or to exhibit there while the Nazis were in power, and turned towards Africa. Swaziland and Pondoland (1926), Namaqualand (1933), Dakar (1937, 1938), Zanzibar, the Congo region (1942, 1946, 1955), the Eastern Cape (1941). In 1942 her work was exhibited at the ethnographic museum in Elisabethville in the Congo. The journeys produced the illustrated diaries “Congo” (1943) and “Zanzibar” (1948), portraits such as “Children Reading the Koran” (1939), and a large collection of objects that she gathered along the way. In the same year, 1942, Joseph Sachs’s book “Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa” was published in Pretoria.

The post-war Stern was already an official figure: the Venice Biennale in 1950, 1952, 1954 and 1958, the Molteno grant (1952), the Oppenheimer award (1963), the medal for painting of the South African Academy of Science and Arts (1965). In the 1950s and 1960s she still travelled to Israel, Turkey, Spain and France. Altogether she had almost a hundred solo exhibitions in South Africa and Europe.

Irma Stern died in Cape Town on 23 August 1966 while preparing a large exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in London; it opened in 1967. In the early 1970s her house in Rondebosch, with her collection, became the Irma Stern Museum. The museum closed in October 2025, and while the artist’s trust looks for a new permanent home for the collection, the Norval Foundation in Cape Town has been showing it since February 2026 in a series of four exhibitions.