#irmastern

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Thank you Joanne and Russell for the recommendation, I loved it here!

I ventured out of the city center towards the University of Cape Town to check out the Irma Stern Museum, and was delighted that two other girls wanted to join. It’s tucked away in a peaceful residential neighborhood across the highway from UCT. The museum was Stern’s house and studio, now converted into a gallery of her work and home furnishings. From the entryway:

Irma Stern was born in 1894 to German Jewish parents at Schweizer - Reneke, a small town in the North West Province of South Africa, where her father established a thriving trading store and cattle farm. Interned during the Anglo Boer War (1899-1902) because of his pro-Boer sympathies, Irma and her brother were taken by their mother to Cape Town. After his release, the family went to Germany and thus began a pattern of regular travel, which was to characterize her life. 

Irma Stern travelled extensively in Europe and explored Southern Africa, Zanzibar and the Congo. These trips provided a wide range of subject matter for her paintings and gave her opportunities to acquire and assemble an eclectic collection of artefacts for her home. 

A house named ‘The Firs’ in Rosebank, Cape Town, acquired in 1927 remained her home until her death in 1966. This residence became the Irma Stern Museum in 1971. It was established by Trustees of her estate and is administered by the University of Cape Town. 

We talked to a man who welcomed us into his eccentric office and told us all about the gallery, mentioning the famous Zanzibar door. We also read somewhere in the museum that Irma moved into this house with her husband who had some high paying job, I forget what.. but that explained why an artist could afford a manor of this scale. She definitely wasn’t a starving artist, and I assume a lot of her success came from the opportunities surrounding her well-off white family, but nevertheless she was a talent of her time. I thought about how she must’ve traveled through Africa in the early 1900′s and how she documented her observations through paintings rather than iPhone pictures. Irma had quite a nice life it seems like.