Berliner Brücke Museum | Irma Stern: Giving with the Left, Taking with the Right

A Black woman with a strikingly short and modern hairstyle, head, ear, and neck jewelry, and a purple shawl is captured with a dignified, serious, and perhaps even skeptical gaze in an expressionist-looking painting titled "Young Mpondo Woman" and painted by Irma Stern in South Africa in 1935.

Irma Stern was born in 1894 to German Jews Samuel and Henni Stern in Schweizer-Reneke, Transvaal, and died of heart failure in a Cape Town hospital in 1966. Her parents had moved to South Africa three years before her birth – her father ran a successful general store there with his brother; they were thus winners of the colonial policy. The Brücke Museum in Berlin, dedicated to Expressionism, is now presenting a breathtaking exhibition of the largely unknown work of Stern, who, as curator Lisa Hörstmann explains in the accompanying catalog, "became the most important artist of the modern era there."

The Stern family lived in Berlin again from 1912 to 1920, where Irma Stern briefly attended the private art and applied arts school in Schöneberg, established by the German Artists' Association, before transferring to the Grand Ducal Saxon Art and Applied Arts School in Weimar in 1913. During those years, she met the Expressionist Max Pechstein, who appreciated her work and likely arranged for her to be invited to the founding meeting of the November Group, where she would initially be the only female artist. Stern is documented to have remained in correspondence with Pechstein until 1926.

Stern's work was shown three times during the Weimar Republic at the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition and, along with many South African motifs, was on display at the renowned Fritz Gurlitt Gallery in 1919. Her paintings were also exhibited in other European countries. During shorter stays in Berlin and from afar, she followed the gradual rise of the Nazi Party. As a Jewish and Expressionist artist, she was doubly marginalized after the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. She not only severed all ties with Germany but also refused to speak German.

Even though white racists were outraged by her portrayal of Black people, the work was revered in South Africa as genuinely national art, and Stern's paintings were purchased by state museums to be shown abroad as representative South African art. Today, the portraits of Black people in particular are sensibly examined not only by Black art historians for traces of Stern's racist perspective. However, they acknowledge the appealing aesthetics and dignified individuality in Stern's portraits at a time when white painters viewed the majority of the population merely as servants, and by no means as subjects of their art.

Stern, who was persecuted as a Jewish artist in Germany and whose work was classified as "degenerate," refrained, with few exceptions, from naming her subjects. In doing so, she reduced them, as in the above-mentioned picture or in "Watussi Girl" from 1946 and "Maid in Uniform" from 1955, solely to their ethnic origins or their subservient function in the white-ruled country. Had Stern done the same with her white subjects, her method could be compared to that of the photographer August Sander, who attempted a typology based on professions and functions in 20th-century German society.

In doing so, however, she denied Black people a piece of her personality and thus also manifested apartheid, whose segregation policies she supported, even though she knew full well that one day they would come back to haunt her. In 1955, she confessed in a letter expressing her ambivalent attitude: "The beautiful, fairytale view of Black life – which my early works had – can hardly continue (…). Of course, I can understand their sudden awakening and the realization that their country is full of white people – their foot on their necks – but still, I cannot say that I look happily and peacefully into the future of 'our' South Africa. We are only passionately waiting for a great bloodbath. We stoke it daily – hourly – giving with the left hand and taking with the right."

However, one should caution against premature outrage and easy condemnation of her perspective from a historical distance, because it is important to remember that colonialism and racism were dominant and affirmed ideologies until the middle of the 20th century. In contrast, the fact that Stern predominantly portrayed the Black population respectfully in her paintings, even maintaining contact with them and even partially supporting anti-apartheid activists, should be acknowledged by the public, in addition to the high aesthetic quality of her works.

"Irma Stern. A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town," Brücke-Museum Berlin, until November 2.