by Fionn Adamian // Aug. 29, 2025
The exhibition text at the Brücke-Museum’s retrospective of Irma Stern—a splendid portraitist of finely defined facial cues and colorful idiosyncrasies, who was born in 1894 to a German-Jewish family in Western Transvaal—begins with the statement that while Stern is one of the most significant representatives of modernism in South Africa, her work remains barely known in Germany. This exhibition is nevertheless not the typical recovery project of an under-appreciated artist, with its spirit of valor and exciting headwinds. No reputation that can fetch three million Euros at an auction—as Stern’s ‘Arab Priest’ did in 2011—necessitates rescuing. In truth, it is Stern’s status as a South African lodestar of modernism that warrants the Brücke-Museum’s renewed attention to her work. A nation’s most canonized artists are often cursed by the fate of overfamiliarity, and Stern’s oeuvre has been transmuted into symbolic shorthand, both for Expressionism’s arrival on the Western Cape and for a colonial gaze that valorized a “primitive” Africa as a source of artistic material. Glazed eyes pass over the canonized’s paintings in the spirit of a pedagogical chore.
Ultra-sensitive to the rejection of her paintings, eager for the art world’s understanding, Stern contributed to this idée fixe of her work as a cross between an Expressionist form and colonial-romantic content, by speaking with a chatty loquacity about the pristine nature of Africa and its peoples. “I had to go where there was no sign of Europe, no trace of civilization,” Stern wrote in a 1926 article in Cape Argus entitled ‘My Exotic Models.’ “Just Africa lying in the sun with its stretches of untouched land and its dark people, as it had been lying since the day of creation.”
Though her South African birthplace gave street cred to her lush landscapes in the art scene of Weimar-era Berlin, Stern exaggerated her personal expertise of the subject matter of her paintings early in her career. At first, the tropical plants she depicted would have been just as exotic to a young woman who had primarily spent time in the cool Mediterranean climate of Cape Town, as Palau would have appeared to her mentor Max Pechstein. But as Stern’s social ties to Berlin asphyxiated from the tightening noose of National Socialism (Stern came from a secular German-Jewish family that partook in the city’s cultural life until Hitler’s rise to power), she resettled in Cape Town and embarked on more and more frequent trips to distant African climes. She paid visits to Dakar in 1938, Zanzibar in 1939, the Eastern Cape in 1941, Rwanda and the Congo in 1942, and Zanzibar once more in 1945. As an ethnographic genre of painting, the half-length portraits that Stern preferred for depicting the indigenous people she met allowed a safe distance for the mutual assessment between insider and outsider, local and tourist.
Across their variety, Stern’s travel portraits electrify as a vitally complex moment of inquisitiveness between the painter and the sitter. On the one hand, one is taken aback by the occasional flash of resemblance between the subjects of Stern’s travel paintings and those of her intimate acquaintances. One recognizes, for example, the same tinge of vermillion in the cheek, the same rakish countenance, in Stern’s ‘Zanzibar Boy’ (the painting of a complete stranger) and ‘Portrait of Roza van Gelderen’ (the painting of a close friend), with the sitter figuring in both works as the blasé counterpoint of the painter’s devotion to her muse.
On the other hand, many travel paintings—like ‘Two Arabs, Dakar’—document the subjects’ not altogether trustful inspection of the European artist: the figure on the left stares the portraitist down, the figure on the right gives a less antagonistic but equally quizzical look. Stern could be blithely indifferent to colonial spoilage except as it concerned the aesthetics of Africa’s untainted nature, and demonstrated a galling complacency with the laws that formalized South Africa’s apartheid regime. She was not a snub-nosed realist of a white society clinging desperately to its privileges, like Flannery O’Connor in the unreconstructed American South. Yet her political insight, if she had any, was that she often keenly intuited the clammy effects of her spectatorship on the mood of her subaltern subjects.
‘Maid in Uniform’ is an example of one such sitter that has withdrawn strategically into her interiority. Dressed in a mint-green blouse and a white smock, the maid casts her eyes sideways in a mixture of irritation and evasiveness. The collapsed perspectival depth encourages the illusion that the maid is seated directly opposite the painter, perhaps at the same table. Silence is figured as a disciplined response to the uncomfortable and coercive proximity of domestic service, one of the only professions Black women were legally permitted to practice in apartheid South Africa.
By way of conclusion, the exhibition includes a captivating reworking of ‘Maid in Uniform’ by the contemporary South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. Outfitted with white voluptuous frills, Ruga’s ‘Ponhalo in Excelsior’ serves not just as a commentary on the heroic dimensions that the unnamed maid of Stern’s portrait may have assumed in her private life, but also as a campy escalation of the modernist’s use of color and brushstroke. ‘Ponhalo in Excelsior’ continues to cultivate the most important aspects of Stern’s legacy that I took from this exhibition: a steadfast endearment to color and character.
Exhibition Info
Brücke-Museum
Irma Stern: ‘A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town’
Exhibition: July 13-Nov. 2, 2025
bruecke-museum.de
Bussardsteig 9, 14195 Berlin, click here for map
