Irma Stern’s painting selling for millions offers lesson in resilience for emerging collectors in South Africa

Salient facts: Stern portrait from 1946 sells for ZAR21 731 250 / US$ 1 266 619. African record for Stern portrait depicting female sitter. Stern’s international visibility draws multiple bidders

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

Perhaps this good news should not surprise us. Actually anybody who has been following the performance of this artist on the secondary market in the past few years in South Africa. I have. Her work, and lucky are those that have collected her work over the years. And apparently there are several such individuals throughout the world, and fortunately also from South Africa. These collectors had the wisdom to get hold of an Irma Stern painting at a time when the work was affordable.

They are now reaping the financial rewards for that wisdom. For that insight of looking into the distance future where they saw in advance their investment growing. And the love that collectors have shown to the late South African artist’s work over the years is quite phenomenal in every respect. And this is not as if her career like that of artists did not experience hurdles, especially at the beginning.

Stern in fact had her own hurdles on her journey to today’s star of the secondary market. For example, when she started painting back in South Africa in the cannon of expressionist canon, a style she learned while she was in Germany, influenced by a then emerging movement of the time, Impressionists, she had a fair share of South African critics who did not appreciate her style. Reading publications of the time confirms this fact.

However the tables have been turned over the years. Owning an Irma Stern today has proved to be a good investment. So good in fact that it is one’s retirement as her works are fetching high prices, snatched by collectors who are ever hungry to have an Irma Stern.

And therefore the recent new benchmark achieved by Stern’s Malay (Black Headdress) must be therefore understood in the broad context of the current huge interest by collectors in Stern’s work.

This should be a lesson to especially new collectors who sometimes are hesitant to collect new emerging artists in South Africa, preferring to wait till they have proven their popularity by collectors. Unfortunately when they start taking them seriously, their work is beyond the reach of many, and yet they should have collected such work when they were starting, building their collection steadily. Holding to such work till the right. You simply will never know when another Stern will emerge in South Africa. Therefore this is a lesson’s in resilience that emerging collectors must learn especially when it comes to investing in art.

And here is what happened this week in Cape Town regarding the performance of Stern’s work: A chorus of enthusiastic bidders, five on the telephone and one in the salesroom, competed for Irma Stern’s magnificent 1946 portrait Malay (Black Headdress) when it went on sale during the third edition of Strauss & Co’s annual The International Sale on Tuesday, 28 October 2025. Returning to market after more than a half-century in private hands, this luminous portrait of a Cape Muslim woman, executed in predominantly yellow, sold to a resolute telephone bidder for ZAR21.7 million / US$1.26 million.

The impressive result, the highest price ever paid for a Stern portrait of a female sitter in Africa, comes at a time of extraordinary international visibility for the artist. Stern is currently the subject of a comprehensive career survey at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, the city of her early beginnings as an artist in the 1910s. Last year, Stern’s 1942 portrait of Emma Bakayishonga, the sister of Rwanda’s King Mutara III Rudahigwa, was featured in the main exhibition of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale.

 Stern’s renewed prominence, coupled with the exceptional quality and unusually discreet provenance of Malay (Black Headdress), saw buyers from multiple continents register interest. Bidding was intense, at one point jumping in increments of R1 million, until finally the gavel sounded.

The final sale price is the second highest amount ever paid for a Stern at auction at Strauss & Co, bested only by the R22.3 million achieved in a 2023 sale for her 1939 composition Children Reading the Koran. “It was a true privilege to handle this exceptional portrait. The outstanding result reflects the culmination of our dedicated efforts to present this work to the market and to major Stern collectors worldwide. The remarkable price achieved affirms the work’s exceptional quality and significance’, commented Bina Genovese, Managing Executive and Senior auctioneer after taking the sale.

 Strauss & Co’s two-part The International Sale, including Irma Stern’s Malay (Black Headdress)brought together collectable artworks spanning five centuries, including works by Marc Chagall, David Hockney, Otto Modersohn, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. The 69-lot Evening Sale generated a solid ZAR27.8 million / US$1.6 million in turnover from 70% lots sold.

Picasso’s Couple et Flûtistes au Bord d’un Lac (Couple and Flutists by the Lake), a bacchanalian marine scene from the artist’s celebrated late series of linocuts produced in the south of France, fetched ZAR1 million / US$ 60 601. Chagall’s La Baie des Anges (The Bay of Angels), created in 1961–62 at his Mourlot studio in Paris, sold for ZAR485 205 / US$28 280. An undated landscape by Modersohn, rich with symbolism and emotion, achieved R554 520 / US$32 321.