oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1942
Signature details: signed and dated top right

(1)

60.5 x 50 cm; framed size: 85 x 64.5 x 11.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

Volks Art Auctioneers, Pretoria.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

This solemn family portrait of an Arab mother, father and child is a remarkable example from Irma Stern’s rich archive of paintings recording the widespread existence of the Islamic faith in sub-Saharan Africa.

The artist’s fascination with Islam first developed from an introduction to the Cape Malay culture in her hometown of Cape Town and her enchantment grew in her travels in Africa; to Dakar (1937 & 1938), Zanzibar (1939 & 1945) and the Congo (1942). Attracted to the splendour of Muslim women in their finery and adornment and men in their flowing robes, some of the artist’s most beloved and celebrated Islamic subjects, include Two Arabs, Dakar (1938) in the collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery, The Malay Bride (1942) from the Homestead Collection and Arab Priest (1945) which sold for a record-breaking £ 3 million in London in 2011 and is now in the collection of The Qatar Museums Authority.

LEFT: Two Arabs, Dakar (1938) in the collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery

CENTRE: The Malay Bride (1942) from the Homestead Collection

RIGHT: Arab Priest (1945), The Qatar Museums Authority, Doha, State of Qatar.

Stern was known to paint from live subjects who would be required to patiently pose for the artist, but also from memory and preparatory sketches when she could not persuade subjects to sit for the required time. Arab Family, painted in 1942, may have been painted from in the artist’s studio in Cape Town – from sketch or subject – but evidence suggests that the intriguing work may, in fact, have been captured during her seminal trip to the Congo that year.

On 25 May 1942 Irma Stern left Cape Town and journeyed by train to Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville) in the Congo. She would spend nearly 5 months travelling and painting in the area today known as the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Belgian colonial region in central Africa that currently also encompasses Rwanda. From Lubumbashi the artist travelled north-east to Lake Kivu, Butare and Kigali before traveling to Kisangani and then to Isiro. Her paintings from central Africa include wonderful, lush forest landscapes, river and village scenes as well as captivating portrait and figure studies. The majority of her subjects from the period were from three cultural groups; the Watussi (Tutsi), Megbwena (Mangbetu) and Kuba but she notably also continued her exploration of Islam subjects in the Congo.

In July, Stern visited the annual Fête Nationale in Kigale. The grand festival was attended by important guests; King Kutara Rudahigwa, his new Queen Rosalie Gicanda, the Queen mother, Government officials, and what Stern referred to as wealthy Arab coffee dealers.[[1]] Stern’s ‘chief desire’ had been to paint the Queen. The royal subject, however, had likely not been able to sit for the required period – and Professor Sandra Klopper notes that most of the works she produced in Kigali depict others at the festival including Princess Emma Bakayishonga and members of the Arab community.

On the artist’s return to Lubumbashi, before travelling home to South Africa, she held an exhibition at the Musée Ethnographique. Here she showed 73 works including a Cape landscape and seven still-life paintings she had presumably taken with her from Cape Town.[2] None of these works sold but her exhibition catalogue does indicate that 11 other works did sell on the one-day exhibition, including an ‘Arab Family’ which sold for 3 500 francs.[3]

While Stern’s personal records and exhibition catalogue do not include images, the work shown in Elisabethville is likely the very Arab Family currently on offer. The price paid for the painting is indeed in line with what Stern charged for works of similar dimensions at the time. What is more, the subject matter – a family – is extremely rare. Stern often painted portraits of individuals, children, and throughout her career captured the archetypal ‘mother and child’ as seen in well-known work such as Mother and Child (1949) and Mother and Child: Elsabe Einhorn (1949) – the addition of a father figure makes this work stand out within her extensive oeuvre.

LEFT: Mother and Child (1949), Private Collection

RIGHT: Mother and Child- Elsabe Einhorn (1949), The Irma Stern Trust

Purchased in the late 1980s by a late Pretoria collector at Volks Art Auctioneers, the work has remained in the same family collection, for nearly forty years. With the exception of a 2000 presentation at Stephan Welz and Co. – when Stephan Welz, a then trusted advisor to the late-owner, offered the work in Johannesburg – the painting has rarely been seen. The impressive family portrait painted in expressive brushstrokes in deep maroons – the fine fabric adorning the mother figure highlighted with golden and ochre – and set against a brilliant turquoise background presents a unique opportunity. Viewers are invited to engage with and explore Stern’s engagement with Islam in this most unusual and intriguing family portrait.

^{[1] Stern, I. (1943). Congo. Wallachs’ P&P Co. Ltd.: Cape Town.p.39.}

^{[2] Klopper, S. (2017). Irma Stern: Are you Still Alive?. Orisha Publishing: Cape Town. p.154.}

^{[3] Elisabethville Exhibition Catalogue, National Library of South Africa Cape Town campus, Irma Stern archives (MSC 31, folio 18, p.258).}

COLLECTOR'S NOTE

• Irma Stern currently features in the prestigious, 60th International Art Exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, at The Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and running from 20 April to 24 November 2024.
• In her lifetime, Stern exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1950, 1952, 1954 and 1958.
• Stern has consistently retained her role as one of Africa’s top-selling artists at auction, with her market reaching $31.5 million in 2023.
• Arab Priest (1945) was purchased by the Qatar Museum (formerly Qatar Museums Authority) in 2011 for $4.9 million (R34 million), thus achieving the record as the most expensive South African painting sold at auction.
• Important early recognition includes the artist’s first exhibition in 1919 at Fritz Gurlitt Gallery, one of Berlin’s most noteworthy art salons and in 1927 inclusion in a series of monographs, Junge Kunst, on leading modernist painters such as Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso.
• Significant awards include the Prix d’Honneur at the Bordeaux International Exhibition (1927), the Molteno Grant for outstanding work (1952), the Peggy Guggenheim international art prize (1960), the Oppenheimer Award (1963) and the Medal of Honor of Die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (1965).
• Large-scale museum exhibitions include Irma Stern and expressionism: Africa and Europe. Pictures and drawings up to 1945 at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany in 1996, and a retrospective Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey, at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg in 2003.
• Most recently, Norval Foundation in Cape Town exhibited Irma Stern: The Zanzibari Years, from 3 November 2021 to 1 August 2022.
• Recent publications include Irma Stern: Are you Still Alive? (2017) by Proffesor Sandra Klopper, Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art: Audacities of Color (2020) by the award-winning and social justice advocate, American scholar and educator, Dr LaNitra M. Berger, and Sean O’Toole’s, Irma Stern: African in Europe – European in Africa (2020).
• After Irma Stern’s death in 1966, the artist’s home along with its contents was considered a national legacy and in 1972, it become the Irma Stern Museum, which can still be visited today in Rosebank, Cape Town.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Bielefeld Art Gallery, Germany; Collection of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, London; Musee de l’Art Modern, Paris; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.