Hazel Friedman
IRMA STERN: A FEAST FOR THE EYE
by Marion Arnold
(Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation, R197,99)
IN these earnest, multi-culturally correct times, it’s not merely fashionable to trash artist Irma Stern. It’s downright obligatory. She is variously called the female version of Tretchikoff, a mediore modernist whose paintings are but poor imitations of German Expressionism. The noble savages whom she depicted in frozen Arcadian landscapes have been decoded as the products of a colonial eye, ignorant and insensitive to the oppression suffered daily by her favourite exotic subjects.
The fact that until her death Stern was easily one of South Africa’s most prolific artists, holding over 100 exhibitions during her career, has not endeared her to a world that is cynical about an artist capable of churning out paintings like cupcakes. But, notwithstanding the crumbs of truth evident in all of theses criticisms, one fact is beyond debate — Irma Stern could paint.
And she did so with passion and obsessive imagination. That much is evident in the latest book on Stern, artist and art-historian Marion Arnold’s Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye. Although the visual allure of Stern’s paintings — reproduced in technicolour splendour — clearly dominates the text, this book is much more than a coffee-table ornament.
Arnold has painstakingly researched the trajectory of Stern’s career, offering insights into the internal life of an artist for whom the exotic other was as a funnel for her own frustrated erotic desire.
Although Arnold is initally diplomatic, verging on tentative, in her description of the biographical titbits that coloured Stern’s life, in the later chapters she embarks on a lucid, perceptive analysis of the artist’s oeuvre, from her portraits of black people, which seem to ooze sentiment, to her relatively radical depictions — given the conservative social context in which Stern was painting — of people, places, nature and culture.
Throughout her career, spanning several decades, Stern’s appetite for experience was as insatiable as her appetite for food. In many ways, she was the artistic equivalent of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, examining exotic cultures with the bristling enthusaism born of naive Romanticism yet simultaneously providing valuable ethnographic insights.
Arnold acknowledges the problems inherent in Stern’s persona and paintings: their technical unevenness; Stern’s over-eager and uncritical appropriation of styles ranging from Gauguin and Matisse to Picasso and the German Expressionists. And even though she used art as a window on the world, as a tinted mirror of how she wanted her own life to be, Stern’s paintings still possess the ability to seduce.
Although in many ways her work tends to reinforce colonial preconceptions and values, in formal terms she was almost revolutionary in her liberation of colour from previous conventional constraints. She also refused to conform to stereotypical notions of femininity, stepping on the toes of the art patriarchy more times than can be adequately documented. In becoming one of those rare artists who can support themselves solely through making art, she altered peceptions about both art and women artists in Southern Africa.
As Arnold astutely observes, “time and time again she transcends her own limitations, creating exhilarating examples of her artistic judgment that offer a feast for the eye and tease the mind”.