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South African artist Irma Stern (1894–1966) is one of the nation's most enigmatic modern figures. Stern held conservative political positions on race even as her subjects openly challenged racism and later the apartheid regime. Using paintings, archival research, and new interviews, this book explores how Stern became South Africa's most prolific painter of Black, Jewish, and Colored (mixed-race) life while maintaining controversial positions on race. Through her art, Stern played a crucial role in both the development of modernism in South Africa and in defining modernism as a global movement. Spanning the Boer War to Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and into the contemporary #RhodesMustFall movement, Irma Stern's work documents important twentieth-century cultural and political moments. More than fifty years after her death, Stern's legacy challenges assumptions about race, gender roles, and religious identity and how they are represented in art history.
"Irma Stern grew up on a farm in Schweizer-Reneke, playing with insects in the dust and admiring the dry flowers. It was not until she was a young woman, living in Berlin, that she realized how deeply the arid landscape of her childhood had inspired in her a passion for Africa which was to reach its full expression in her art. Fighting the conventions of her day and the scorn of art critics, Irma worked hard to establish herself, travelling to exotic and remote locations to find inspiration for her art. By the time she died, her reputation as one of South Africa's most foremost artists was sealed and today her paintings are highly sought-after all over the world."--Back cover.
Sheds new light on Native Life appearing at a critical historical juncture, and reflects on how to read it in South Africa’s heightened challenges today. First published in 1916, Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa was written by one of the South Africa's most talented early twentieth-century black leaders and journalists. Plaatje's pioneering book arose out of an early African National Congress campaign to protest against the discriminatory 1913 Natives Land Act. Native Life vividly narrates Plaatje's investigative journeying into South Africa's rural heartlands to report on the effects of the Act and his involvement in the deputation to the British imperial government. At the same time it tells the bigger story of the assault on black rights and opportunities in the newly consolidated Union of South Africa - and the resistance to it. Originally published in war-time London, but about South Africa and its place in the world, Native Life travelled far and wide, being distributed in the United States under the auspices of prominent African-American W E B Du Bois. South African editions were to follow only in the late apartheid period and beyond. The aim of this multi-authored volume is to shed new light on how and why Native Life came into being at a critical historical juncture, and to reflect on how it can be read in relation to South Africa's heightened challenges today. Crucial areas that come under the spotlight in this collection include land, race, history, mobility, belonging, war, the press, law, literature, language, gender, politics, and the state.
In this pioneering study, Marion Arnold explores the connections, hitherto hidden or neglected, between women and art in South Africa. By doing so, she recovers the rich histories of South African women artists and celebrates their creativity in the visual arts. In a series of related essays teeming with fresh insights, Marion Arnold asks new questions about the ways women have portrayed themselves, depicted landscapes, painted images of plants and sculpted the body. She examines, too, portraits of women (both black and white) in service and the long history of representations (usually by men) of the female 'other'. Throughout the book, the connections Marion Arnold makes between ideas, artists and their works are always illuminating and often unexpected. Here are not only familiar names viewed afresh - such as Maggie Laubser, Irma Stern, Helen Sebidi and Jane Alexander - but lesser-known artists who are rediscovered and brought to life.