Portrait of a Woman with Lilac Turban

Oil on Canvas
61.5 x 51cm (excl. frame)
84.2 x 74 x 4.5cm (incl. frame)
Signed: “Irma Stern” (Lower/Left)
Dated: 1941

Exhibitions:    South African Paintings 1780 – 1980, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, 2000

Illustrated & Referenced:     Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. 2008. The Modern Palimpsest: Envisioning South African Modernity. Graham’s Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg. p. 62 & 63

Irma Stern frequently travelled throughout Southern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa looking for new models to paint. In an article, ‘My exotic models’ in The Cape Argus of 4 April 1926, she writes: “I found the natives lovely and happy children, laughing and singing and dancing through life with a peculiar animal-like beauty which adds a touch of the tragic to the expression on their faces – the heaviness of an awaking race not yet freed from the soil, so well portrayed by Rodin in his Iron Age.” This type of pronouncement has led to such critics as Sandra Klopper (Becker & Keene, 2000: 235) condemning her, like the German Expressionists, for reinforcing both racial and gender stereotypes; the former by expressing a nostalgia for the supposed innocence of the communities she encountered on her travels, and the latter by depicting a seemingly endless succession of nubile girls and voluptuous women surrounded by exotic plants that clearly serve to underline the idea of women as archetypal metaphors of nature’s fecundity.

This “portrait of a Woman in Lilac Turban”, then, should be one of these ‘seemingly endless succession of nubile girls’. On closer inspection, however, this portrait reveals the inner thoughts of an individual, not of a ‘type’. Individual features are clearly articulated, together with a furtive expression in the eyes of the sitter. In addition, this is a three-quarter size portrait, not just the head of the sitter. As such, the physical body of the individual sitter is emphasised in an expressive, rather assertive posture. The posture is enhanced by the dramatic, expressive, contrasting colours of pink, red and orange in her dress.

If this portrait is compared to portraits of indigenous people painted by the German Expressionists, the differences become clear. The Expressionists are the painters who keep these people at a distance, often simplifying their features so that they do indeed become types, rather than individuals.

Compared to South African painters such as Frances Greaves and Neville Lewis, who went the other way, trying to capture ethnic types in the abundant hyper-realistic detail of their sitters, it is clear that Stern had much more empathy for the individual and his or her emotional life.