Fancy some Irma Stern?

AUCTION: HER MASTERPIECE FROM TRIPS TO ZANZIBAR IN THE ’40S COULD GO FOR R13M

Arab with Dagger is ‘a remarkable work’ and shows painter Stern ‘at her best’.

In the summer of 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, South African painter Irma Stern – wearied by the sameness of her life in Cape Town – made a trip to Zanzibar. She returned to the island in 1945 – coincidentally as the Second World War was drawing to a close.

These two visits proved pivotal to her career and inspired a body of work which has come to be seen as definitive. As Stern herself wrote, she was “conquering new ground for my work and my development.”

A painting from that time, Arab with Dagger, leads Bonhams’ Modern and Contemporary African Art sale in London on 17 March. It has an estimate of £700 000 – £1 000 000 (about R13.3 million – R20.4 million).

Painted in 1945, Arab with Dagger, is one of several key works that Stern executed of members of Zanzibar’s Arab community. She was particularly fascinated by the older men in whose faces she saw, in her own words, “depths of suffering, profound wisdom and full understanding of all the pleasures of life – faces alive with life’s experiences”.

As with many works from Stern’s Zanzibar trips, the painting is perfectly framed in wood cut from Arab doors. In their complete state, the highly distinctive doors were subject to an export ban, but there was nothing to prevent Stern’s Arab carpenter from converting them into picture frames.

Bonhams Director of African Art Giles Peppiatt said: “Arab with Dagger is a remarkable work and shows Irma Stern at her best. Like many of her portraits from this period, it conveys not only an individual likeness, but also the fatalism and the deep spiritually that the artist found among the Arab people, and which she so much admired.”