Painter · South Africa
Irma Stern
Irma Stern (1894–1966) was a South African painter who trained in Germany in the circle of the Expressionists and brought their bold colour and loose brushwork to South Africa in the 1920s. Mocked by critics at first, she became the country's leading modernist. Her portraits of people in South Africa, Zanzibar and the Congo are among the most valuable South African paintings; her house in Cape Town is now the Irma Stern Museum.
Updated 3 min read
Berlin
Irma Stern was born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, a small town in the Transvaal, to German-Jewish parents. The family spent long periods in Germany, and she studied art there. In Berlin she met the painter Max Pechstein of the Expressionist group Die Brücke in 1917, and he became her mentor and introduced her to the city's art world. In 1918 she was a founding member of the Novembergruppe, the revolutionary artists' association, and exhibited with it in 1919, 1920 and 1927. In May 1919 Pechstein helped arrange her first solo show, of 33 drawings, at the Fritz Gurlitt gallery.
Scandal and success in South Africa
Back in South Africa in 1920, Stern exhibited in Cape Town, with her first show there at the Ashbey Gallery. Her strong colours, distorted forms and portraits of Black South Africans shocked conservative critics, one of whom called her work "Ugliness as a cult". She persisted, travelled widely and painted constantly, and by the 1940s she was established as the country's foremost modern painter.
Zanzibar and the Congo
Stern's journeys produced her most celebrated works. She went to Zanzibar in 1939 and 1945, and to the Belgian Congo in 1942 and 1946, painting portraits of the people she met, often in richly carved frames made from Zanzibari doors. Her paintings of this period are among the most valuable South African works ever sold. Arab Priest, signed and dated 1945, sold at Bonhams in London in March 2011 for £3,044,000 including premium; the buyer was Qatar Museums Authority, but South Africa's heritage agency initially blocked the export, and the painting cannot leave the country permanently. Her 1939 Two Arabs sold at Strauss & Co in September 2011 for R21 million, and her 1939 Children Reading the Koran made R22.3 million at auction on 28 March 2023, then a record for a work of art sold at auction in Africa. Today the exoticising view of Africans in these portraits is also discussed critically.
How to look at a Stern: begin with the colour and the brush, which she brought from Berlin, then look at the sitters. Her portraits are of particular people she met on journeys, and the frames, carved from old Zanzibari doors, are part of the picture. The critical question to bring is who is looking and how the sitters are framed; the colonial setting of these journeys is part of what the pictures show.
The Irma Stern Museum
She lived for nearly forty years in a house called The Firs in Rosebank, Cape Town, filled with her collection of African, Asian and European art. After her death in 1966 it became the Irma Stern Museum, run by the University of Cape Town. The house was bequeathed in her will to display and conserve her work.
Berlin, 2025
From 13 July to 2 November 2025 the Brücke-Museum in Berlin presented Irma Stern. A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town, about 40 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints, curated by Lisa Hörstmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt in close collaboration with South African museums. The Irma Stern Trust lent 14 works, including ten oil paintings and her Congo journal.
Where to see the work
The Irma Stern Museum in Rosebank, Cape Town, is the first place to go: it is her house, with her collection and her paintings. The Brücke-Museum show has closed. Strauss & Co and Bonhams publish the catalogues of the sales above, which reproduce works that are now in private hands.
See also
Her contemporaries J. H. Pierneef and Vladimir Tretchikoff; Marlene Dumas; Southern Africa; and our list of South African painters.
