Irma Stern was born at Schweizer-Reneke in the Transvaal on 02 October 1894 and died in Cape Town on 23 August 1966. She was an artist and was the daughter of Samuel and Henny Stern. Her parents, who were of German-Jewish origin, settled in the Western Transvaal, but when the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899 she was sent overseas and went to a school in Berlin for a time. She returned to South Africa at the age of nine and was already showing an interest in drawing.

In later years she often accompanied her parents on their visits to Europe. On the outbreak of the First World War (1914-18) they were obliged to remain in Europe until hostilities had ceased, and during this period Irma S. seriously applied herself to painting. In 1913 she enrolled at the Weimar Academy where she studied under Gari Melchers (Melcheris) and the following year went to the Levin-Funcke Studio in Berlin, working under the guidance of Martin Brandenburg. She then returned to Weimar and studied for a short time at Das Bauhaus.

On her return to South Africa she held her first exhibition in the Ashbey Gallery in 1920. Her work, which deviated greatly from the art accepted in Cape Town at that time, evoked strong reaction, although a few critics, notably H.S. Caldecott, Leon Levson, and Hilda Purnitzsky, reacted favourably. Brilliant flower studies were a feature of this exhibition, but in course of time Irma S. also used other objects and her still life pictures were more subtle, the colours, although rich, more subdued. The extent of recognition she already enjoyed in Germany in 1927 is proved by the monograph Irma Stern by Max Osborn which appeared in the series Junge Kunst that year. In 1929 her work was presented at the annual exhibition of the Imperial Institute in London and at the International Jewish Exhibition in Zürich.

She enjoyed travelling and after 1934 toured South Africa, the Congo, Zanzibar, Madeira, and South-European countries such as Turkey, Spain, and Italy. Two books which she wrote and illustrated resulted from these travels, namely Congo (1943) and Zanzibar (1948). An earlier book Visionen had already appeared in 1920.

Irma gradually gained recognition in her own country too. J. Sachs’s monograph Irma Stern and the spirit of Africa was published in Pretoria in 1942, and a film on her art was made in 1947. She received various awards, namely the Prix d’ honneur at the International Exhibition in Bordeaux (1927), the ‘Cape Tercentenary Grant’ (1952), the South African award of the Peggy Guggenheim International Art Prize (1960), the Oppenheimer Trust Award for the best painting at the Art South Africa Today Exhibition (1963), and the medal of honour for South African art from the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (1965).

She was one of the first modern painters in South Africa to paint in the idiom of contemporary European artistic trends such as German expressionism. Although her work had a strong personal stamp, it was never static and showed traces of cubism and fauvism. At first it was powerfully influenced by Pechstein; later her remarkable use of line was strongly reminiscent of H.E.B. Matisse and M. Chagall. She also learnt a great deal from R. Dufy, while V. van Gogh had an unmistakable attraction for her. From the beginning, however, her art showed a definite individual character and great technical ability. It was mainly her use of colour that at first seemed strange – its brightness and warmth, its vital and shrieking contrasts.

Life itself and the world around her were thrilling and exciting to Irma S., and she observed it acutely and with great admiration. Although the depiction of her subjects was often very dramatic, she was seldom tragic and never sentimental. The exotic was natural to her. People, not ideas, enthralled her – people in all sorts of circumstances and all types of action. She was one of the first artists to approach the Black man as an independent person, a man of feeling. The streets of Zanzibar, the exotic tropics of Central Africa, Swaziland scenes, city views, boats, workers in the fields, Arabic figures, and native women are reproduced with dramatic power, full of rhythm and imagination. Her still life studies of fruit and flowers reveal the same characteristics.

She was an artist of great creativity. She painted some 2 000 pictures in oils, but also worked in other media, such as water-colour, gouache, coloured inks, conté and tempera. In addition she produced lithographs, monotypes, charcoal and pencil drawings, and ceramics. She also sculptured.

By 1965 more than a hundred exhibitions of her work had been held in major European cities like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Breslau, and Vienna. From 1923 onwards she exhibited more than sixty times in South Africa, and in the period after 1948 took part in various exhibitions of South African art overseas. In 1962 an exhibition of her work, chronologically selected, was held in the Grosvenor Gallery in London, and after her death memorial exhibitions were held in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg in 1968. Examples of her art can be seen in all the major art museums in South Africa and in the South African Embassies in Paris, London, Washington, The Hague, and Madrid, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Her house at Rosebank, Cape Town, with the large art collection it contains, became the Irma Stern Museum after her death.

A dynamic painter, Irma was one of the most important artists South Africa has produced, and although her art never gave rise to a specific school of painting or a great number of followers, her influence is certainly discernible, particularly in the early works of Alexis Preller. She was a stimulating influence in the development of art and artistic appreciation in South Africa and the major exponent of expressionism in this country. Photographs of her appear in SESA and the S.A.W.W. (both infra). She was married to Professor Johannes Prinz. The marriage was later dissolved.