Title: Portrait of a girl
Medium: Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1936
Unframed: 58.5cm x 50.5cm
Framed: 76cm x 66.5
Throughout Irma Stern’s career, she was interested in the primitive and exotic. These interests landed her in trouble when she exhibited her work in South Africa for the first time. The conservative onlookers did not yet appreciate Post-Impressionist and Expressionist painting styles. Her first exhibition held at the Ashbey’s Art Gallery in 1922 was reason for a police investigation of alleged charges of immorality. These charges made what was being exhibited far more interesting and people queued outside the gallery to see why her work were considered depraved (Kaufmann, C & Lewis, A 2015:22).
Hannah O’Leary head of SA Bonhams London explained Irma as: “…an artist who was always at the top of her game; a woman low in self-esteem when it came to her looks and love life, yet completely self-assured and confident in her ability as an artist.” Because of Stern’s discontent with her own physical appearance, she had a passionate longing for the antithetical mirror image and was attracted to exuded beauty and grace which can be seen in the countless portraits of women painted during her life (brushing up:38).
The oil painting: Portrait of a girl, made in 1936 most probably is an image of a women she painted during a visit to Dakar.
