Footnotes

Provenance
Sotheby's/Stephen Welz & Co, Johannesburg, 4th November 1991, lot 317;
A private collection.

Exhibited
South African Association of Arts, Cape Town, Irma Stern, Paintings 1916 to 1957, (1957), no. 25.

Irma Stern's painting of 'Three African Women' can be dated quite precisely to the Winter of 1941. She had had an exhibition at the Argus Gallery, Cape Town, in March/April that year in which no Transkei subject was shown; and in August she travelled through Namaqualand painting the Spring flowers. Both Namaqualand flowers and Eastern Cape subjects feature prominently in her exhibitions at the Gainsborough Galleries, Johannesburg, in October 1941, and in the Argus Gallery, Cape Town, in January 1942.

Stern wrote to her Johannesburg friend, Freda Feldman, on 8 July 1941 using a Poste Restante address in King William's Town in the Eastern Cape. She wrote that she had been "in the native territories for a week", having driven up from Cape Town with a young student, most likely Dudley Welch. An undated report in the Queenstown Representative newspaper that is preserved in the artist's Scrapbooks in the National Library of South Africa, records that Stern based herself at the Qamata Poort Hotel for the duration: Qamata Poort is in the Cofimvaba district of the Transkei, on the R61 about 62 kilometres east of Queenstown. The newspaper continued:

"The Transkei, the home of the red-blanketed Native, is particularly rich in scenes to delight the artist. Around Qamata Poort, especially, there is much to keep Miss Stern busy."

The report concluded with the statement that Stern's paintings would bring honour to the district.

The present lot cannot be identified in the exhibition lists of the Gainsborough and Argus galleries where Stern appears to have chosen major compositions such as 'The Smokers' and 'The Grass Carriers' for her oil paintings. But the several temperas of 'Red-Blanketed Natives' on these shows share both subject-matter and stylistic novelties with this painting. It would seem that Stern made many such smaller works in oil as well as tempera from which she chose which to exhibit and which she would sell later from her studio. In fact, the present work seems to have been exhibited for the first time at the South African Association of Arts in 1957 as No.25 under the title 'Masked African Women'. The formal developments in these works were recognised by 'L.S.' in his review of the Gainsborough Galleries exhibition of 'Irma Stern's Paintings' in the Rand Daily Mail of October 24 1941:

"Her studies, from the Transkei, of red-blanketed natives are colour studies in an entirely new manner. Here the artist's sense of form, so strong that it seems the main impulse of the composition, and her spacious sweeping lines, have equalled the strength of her colour sense. Yellows and mauves combine with a dusty orange that seems so much of the earth, in effects that are at once broad, subtle and fascinating. The finest examples are the magnificent canvases, 'The Smokers' and 'The Grass Carriers', and 'Native Girl with Feather', while almost every one of the 'red-blanket' series of the temperas is impelling in its own way."

These stylistic developments correspond with Irma Stern's new approach to her African subject-matter at this time.

In her letter, Stern told Freda Feldman that, after just a week, she was still "trying to get into a native=primitive spirit – find it most difficult after Zanzibar" – which she had visited in 1939. This is a rare glimpse of the artist mentally preparing for her next project and is quite significant in its way. Stern seems already to have acknowledged that her approach would be completely different from the soulful Orientalism of her Zanzibar work and that she would need to "get into" a much more "primitive spirit". But she would have known also that she could no longer portray the African idyll of her early South African work that had been criticised for not only negating the twin phenomena of urbanisation and integration but also representing African people as essentially passive. To render the "primitive spirit" that she was looking for as an active component of her new red-blanket subject, Stern chose to portray Transkei women in and around the intonjane, the dance festivals associated with women's initiation. The ceremonies provided the ritual, the dance, the exotic headdress and costumes, the intoxication through beer and tobacco, and the loss of identity through face-painting of various kinds; and Stern translated these mysteries through the sweeping lines and truly fascinating colours noted by the critic 'L.S.', and a willingness to abstract features to powerful mask-like presences. The present work is indeed a striking example of this depiction of anonymity achieved by face painting, clearly observed here in the lighter palette around the subject's eyes, therefore implying a mask-like appearance as the title also suggests. Stern's red-blanket paintings attribute a spiritual presence to their subjects every bit as poetic as her early Zanzibar work. But they also document a newly-perceived strength in her African subjects that was to have profound consequences for her sense of herself in Africa.

We are grateful to Professor Michael Godby for his assistance with the compilation of the above footnote.

Bibliography
Sandra Klopper, Irma Stern: Are you still alive? Stern's life and art seen through her letters to Richard and Freda Feldman, 1934-1966, (Cape Town: Orisha Publishing, 1917), p.97.
L.S., 'Irma Stern's Paintings', Rand Daily Mail, (October 24, 1941).