Still Life with Kelim and Fruit

Oil on Canvas
61 x 50.8cm (excl. frame)
74.7 x 63.8 x 4.5cm (incl. frame)
Signed: “Irma Stern” (Lower/Left)
Dated: 1939

Illustrated & Referenced:     Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. 2008. The Modern Palimpsest: Envisioning South African Modernity. Graham’s Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg. p. 60 & 61

This grand still life by Irma Stern emphasises the formal composition that plays itself out on the picture plane. It reinforces the notion of the still life genre as a cerebral and orchestrated studio-oriented process and production, rather than a spontaneous rendering of nature.

The symbolic value of the still life – namely the mortality of nature and everything in it – is canonical in the Western tradition. In this still life, the flowers are in full bloom and the fruit are perfectly ripened but, apparently, only for the duration of the time when it was painted. The rest is memory: the flowers wilted, the fruit rotted. The role of art, however, is clearly demarcated by this seemingly inadvertent natural process of decay: art wants to suggest something immortal and, as such, Stern’s still life assumes emblematic qualities of this immortality.

What is unusual about this still life, however, is that there are a number of other interesting allusions that can be pursued. Chief amongst these is the prayer mat that serves as a backdrop in the composition of plates, vases and flowers. Many of these prayer mats, from Irma Stern’s personal collection, are reproduced in her book Zanzibar (1948), and are still exhibited in her former home, now the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, together with her vast collection of African art. Of special note is the phallic motif in the middle of the mat. This lends an altogether different quality to the painting.

Stern’s still life not only comments on the mortality of everything natural but also, by means of this phallic symbol, on the regenerative aspect of nature. Plates and vases are often interpreted as symbolic of femininity and the plate and the vase in this still life are no exception. What is very special about this still life is that the prayer mat suggests that the work transcends obvious allusions to nature and its fecundity by introducing a spiritual, if not religious dimension, to the painting.