"A nation's most canonized artists are often cursed by the fate of overfamiliarity, and Stern's oeuvre has been transmuted into symbolic shorthand, both for Expressionism's arrival on the Western Cape and for a colonial gaze that valorized a "primitive" Africa as a source of artistic material. Glazed eyes pass over the canonized's paintings in the spirit of a pedagogical chore."
"Ultra-sensitive to the rejection of her paintings, eager for the art world's understanding, Stern contributed to this idée fixe of her work as a cross between an Expressionist form and colonial-romantic content, by speaking with a chatty loquacity about the pristine nature of Africa and its peoples. "I had to go where there was no sign of Europe, no trace of civilization," Stern wrote in a 1926 article in Cape Argus entitled 'My Exotic Models.' "Just Africa lying in the sun with its stretches of untouched land and its dark people, as it had been lying since the day of creation.""
Irma Stern emerged as a central modernist figure in South Africa while remaining little-known in Germany. The Brücke-Museum staged a retrospective that avoids a simple recovery narrative because Stern's market value and canonized status already secure her reputation. Stern's oeuvre has been reduced to symbolic shorthand that conflates Expressionist form with a colonial-romantic depiction of Africa. Her own writings amplified exoticized portrayals of African landscapes and peoples, describing Africa as untouched by Europe. Overfamiliarity and pedagogical display have flattened responses to her work, obscuring formal subtlety and the complexities of her position within colonial and modernist networks.
Read at Berlin Art Link
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