Norval Foundation
03.11 - 28.03.2022

Irma Stern was a product of her time and her education. She was a primitivist; a modernist; a rebel; an artist; a German; a Jew; a white South African and an immigrant. We are all made up of many parts.  

While Stern was a woman of her time, as a contemporary viewer I too am shaped by my time and place. The question raised by the exhibition The Zanzibari Years: Irma Stern is, how do we curate and frame work that reflects a world view that does not sit at ease with our current time? We need to grapple with how to engage with Stern’s work in such a way that we can revel in its sensual beauty, while not being complicit with its framing.  

The Zanzibari Years: Irma Stern (installation view), 2021. Courtesy of Norval Foundation.

On entering the room, it is easy to be swept up by the boldness of the generous brushstrokes, the surety with which paint was applied and the expressive colour. A little more time, and certain absences start to rise up. More shadows than ghosts, these shades start to gather shape. Soon, the room is filled with their figures. What is missing from the exhibition is a suggestion of the many other aspects of Zanzibar, the complexity of the place and the people captured by Stern in 1939.  

This exhibition is framed largely by the Zanzibar book produced by Stern that included sources of visual inspiration for her, such as the carved doors, calligraphy and other artifacts included in the exhibition itself. Mention is made of the value and symbolism embedded in the doors, as well as the Swahili chairs. The two enlarged photographs of Stern’s studio in Zanzibar serve as evidence of her interest in using the doors as frames for her work. While the significance of Stern’s creative decision and the obvious splendour that the ornate frames contribute to her work is clearly evident, the large scale of these photographs appears overstated.  These photographic images also trigger a memory of other photographs. It is this thread that this review will unravel.

By the time Stern was painting, Zanzibar had already enjoyed a long, cosmopolitan history and served as an important hub for trade¹This included the slave trade, for which Zanzibar was notorious throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The trade was legal until 1897. linking the African interior to the coast and further afield to the Arab world and also the Indian subcontinent. The wealth and movement of products and people all contributed to the plural and hybrid culture of the Indian Ocean island. Along with other coastal cities, such as Mombasa and the island of Lamu, Zanzibar was also one of the first places where photographic studios flourished from as early as the 1890s.

The photographic portraits emanating from these studios are the images that arose in my mind as I contemplated the portraits of Bibi Azziza (1939) and Rich Old Arab (1945). Apart from those portraits taken within studios, others capture clients within their homes to display the wealth evident in the interiors, or in front of the doors so admired by Stern. These photographs serve as a shadow archive to Stern’s paintings.²A number of scholars have written on the photographic portrait studios of East Africa including Erin Haney (2016), Nasira Sheikh-Miller (2015; 2020), Prita Meier (2009) and Heike Behrend (1998) among others.       

It is revealing that the merchant class who appear in some of Stern’s sumptuous portraits chose photography, not painting, to capture themselves, their wives, children and servants. The choice of photography suggests a desire to position themselves as people with means, but it also undeniably reveals them as modernists people intent on embracing the new. Far from a culture untouched by outside (or western) influence, Zanzibar was no stranger to embracing novel ideas, fashions and styles. The hybrid dress of the women captured by the portrait studios is another example.

A.C. Gomes and Son, Arab Ladies, Zanzibar, c. 1910. Courtesy of Erin Haney, “Daughters of Zanzibar,” 2016.

That Stern chose a specific type of subject is not a surprise. Given her stature, a great deal is written on the artist and her choice of subject matter. In a recent exhibition of Stern’s nudes, Michael Godby draws attention to the fact that the majority of Irma Stern’s paintings of African subjects in South Africa and the Congo were young women. It is also no secret that Stern’s decision to focus on Zanzibar (and a few years later on Congo) at this particular point of her career stemmed from her growing concern that in South Africa “the Natives are no longer picturesque.”³Irma Stern, “Natives no longer Picturesque, Woman Artist finds them Civilised and Sad,” The Cape Argus, 5 July 1933. In Michael Godby, “Nudes in the Field.” Catalogue for exhibition Irma Stern Nudes, 1916-1965 (2001), 75-93. It is also known that Stern included portraits of the Cape Malay community and Dakar within the Zanzibar work. Like Gauguin, Stern was intoxicated with an idea of an idyll beyond the corrupting influence of Europe, and she was intent on creating the vision she held in her mind. In essence, like colonial archives, the images on the walls tell us more about Stern than they reveal about her subjects.  

While the subjects of Stern’s Zanzibar portraits are more diverse than her South African work in terms of gender, age and class, there is one omission within the exhibition that the photography of this period reveals. Zanzibar was also home to Swahili people. While the wall text refers to Stern painting Swahili women, none of these works are included in the exhibition itself, which dilutes the representation of the plural culture of Zanzibar.  

Zanzibar, c. 1900. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Erin Haney, “Daughters of Zanzibar,” 2016.

The photographic portraits emanating from Zanzibar studios are recalled not to negate or diminish the importance and beauty of Stern’s paintings, but rather to suggest an alternative way to frame this significant body of work. An engagement with the photographic portraits commissioned by the inhabitants of Zanzibar undeniably reveals that Stern was certainly not the only Modernist in town.   Stern made this work nearly a century ago. Our challenge is to find new ways to look at it now.