oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1965
Signature details: signed and dated bottom right

(1)

61.5 x 45 cm; framed size: 70 x 37 x 7 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Pretoria.

Notes:

Authenticated by Marion Arnold and Wilhelm Van Rensburg.

Throughout her life, Irma Stern retained a deep interest in producing still-life paintings, noting on one occasion that she wished it were daytime as she badly wanted to return to her studio to work on a series of compositions centred on flowers. Like Still life with Poinsettias with its exuberant display of unruly petals cascading forward as though to embrace the viewer, these paintings often include fruit, flowers and cloths placed in seemingly random arrangements that augment the sense of energetic spontaneity imparted through Stern’s lyrical juxtaposition of saturated colours and her organic strokes of thick, impasto oils.

Over time, as Stern grew less interested in markers of space and place, she used her life-long interest in still life painting to explore increasingly abstract, pictorial interests. Although keenly attentive to the spatial and compositional relationships between the different forms she chose to include in her works, she used these relationships to heighten the tension between asserting illusionistic depth and affirming the surface of the canvas.

In Still life with Poinsettias Stern’s palpable delight in exploring these ambiguities is apparent, most obviously, in her decision to mask the corner of the table behind the vase of flowers, a technique she favoured in countless compositions. In combination with the high viewpoint, this leads to a flattening of the pictorial space. But given the extraordinary sophistication of Stern’s vision, here as in many of her other works, she reasserts a sense of depth by placing a bowl of fruit in the foreground, thereby also anchoring the blue and white cloth scattered across the table.

Since poinsettias naturally flower in winter, this painting probably dates to June or July 1965 and, given their fragility once cut, they were presumably from Stern’s garden in Rosebank rather than Cape Town’s Adderley street flower market.

Sandra Klopper

Professor Emeritus, University of Cape Town

Collections:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Bielefeld Art Gallery, Bielefeld; Collection of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, London; Musee de l’Art Modern, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, The Hague; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Contemporary Art Society, London and the South African Embassies in: Geneva, The Hague, Madrid, Paris, London and Washington D.C.