It never actually occurred to him, but broadly speaking, the ideologically driven art dealer in Stockholm shared his view of society with the moderately successful artist Adolf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just over a century earlier.
Other young artists had left naturalism behind for something new. What was the point of spending months on a painting if the result was no different to what a photographer could produce given an hour in the darkroom?
Many of those among whom the new ideas caught on came from Paris. The most important factor they had in common was not that they were all named almost the exact same thing (Manet, Monet, Morisot …) but that they had a passion for expressing reality in an entirely subjective manner, as they felt it was. For that reason they came to be known as impressionists. The true impressionist experimented with colour in a way that would cause any realist to become short of both breath and temper.
The movement spread to the rest of Europe and to the United States. In Holland, it was taken up by Vincent van Gogh, who built an artistic bridge to the next -ism that awaited. All while he went crazy, cut off his ear and was locked up. Before this he managed to relocate the motifs of impressionism from rural life and nature to his own inner world, where such chaos reigned that the critics didn’t know what to do. In order to place the Dutchman somewhere along the long timeline of art history, they had to invent the concept of post-impressionism. Vincent had no thoughts on the matter. He had already taken his own life.
After France and Holland, it was Germany’s turn to serve as representative of the new ways. Thus expressionism was born as one big thumbed nose to Adolf the naturalist. While an impressionist preferred to paint beautiful things, the expressionist captured what moved in the soul of the subject, no matter that subject’s beauty.
Among its precursors were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, all inspired by the Norwegian Edvard Munch, who had placed a woman on a road and filled her entire being with his own angst.
Nolde, for the record, was a dedicated Nazi, but that was of no help to him when Adolf became party leader and went to battle with the degenerate art world. In Adolf’s eyes, all the new -isms had transformed what was true and good into something despicable.
He and his like-minded friends took a purely scientific view of the matter. Expressionism was objectively atrocious, and thus it was exhibited in Munich so people could outdo one another in their laughing and crying at Nolde and his ilk.
But the Munich exhibition did not have the effect Adolf had intended. Young art students made their way to Bavaria to get their first and last look at what would soon be destroyed (or secretly sold off – after all, money was money). Influenced by what they saw, they scattered in all directions, out of reach of the future stomping of Nazi boots. And so it was that expressionism survived, unlike the man who wanted more than anyone to kill it dead.
Irma Stern was five years younger than Adolf and remained off his radar, since she was born in a dusty little town 200 kilometres west of Johannesburg. There were no cars and no electricity, but there were plenty of farmers around.
Irma’s father Samuel was an adventurous man from the third-largest city in the world, Berlin; he had brought his brother and his young wife along with him to South Africa.
Samuel opened a shop where he sold fruits and vegetables, cooking oil and sugar, needles and thread, paper and ink, wine, cognac, and the occasional cow.
When there was unrest in the region, he took the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War with the British, which was fought over rule of land that in fact belonged to neither party. The Brits won, placed the Boers in concentration camps, and chased the native people out into the bush.
Counted among the Boers, Samuel was locked up too, until he declared his loyalty to His Majesty the King in London – a man he had hardly even heard of.
Meanwhile his wife Henny fled to Cape Town with little Irma. There the girl began preschool. To her delight, she was given pens and crayons to write and draw with. She drew faces and more faces. All with fiery cheeks and sparkling eyes.
‘Why?’ asked her teacher.
‘I don’t know,’ said Irma.
The schoolteacher wanted to correct the child; that wasn’t what people looked like. But she refrained. The girl was so little; surely she didn’t know any better. And the drawings … no matter how poorly made … the teacher couldn’t quite bear to throw them out.
Irma’s father’s restlessness didn’t fade as the years went by, and the family commuted back and forth between Berlin and southern Africa.
His daughter was no longer a little girl but a young woman with a dream of one day being a real artist.
The world war, the first in the series, broke out and, for a time, kept Samuel from travelling south again. Their postponed Africa trip gave Irma’s mother Henny the chance to enrol her daughter in art school in Berlin.
It was hard for the young and unruined art student not to be influenced by the fact that the world was on fire. Until this point she had been more conventional in her creativity and had taken only cautious steps into the modern. But then one day, on a tram in war-torn Berlin:
Across from her sat a child with skinny arms, her braids hanging straight down on either side of a bare forehead, her frail fingers clutching tight to a bouquet of meadow flowers, as if she were trying to reassure herself that there was still some beauty in life.
The child was in no way one of the worst victims of the war, but in that moment Irma understood that she had to express the suffering that war brought to all.
She called the painting The Eternal Child. When her mentor of several years saw it, he threw his brushes to the floor.
‘Tasteless,’ he said, and went on his way, never to return.
He was an impressionist and had just had the future thrown in his face.
Irma probably would have sunk into depression from all the lack of encouragement, if it weren’t for her newfound friend Max Pechstein, the symbol of everything Adolf didn’t stand for. Pechstein was fully German; Irma was a mix of Germany and South Africa. When they couldn’t meet, they exchanged letters. They developed such a personal relationship that Pechstein once dared to open a letter with ‘Dear I. Stern’. Young Irma blushed.
After Irma Stern’s mentor left her in a rage, she was filled with doubt. Who was right? Her mentor, or Max Pechstein? What was art? Wasn’t The Eternal Child a mirror reflecting her feelings? What gave anyone the right to judge her heart of hearts as tasteless?
She knew she wasn’t alone, and yet she was lonelier than anyone else. The conservative, colonial South Africa was as yet spared from the stunts of the expressionists; the leading social class was still stuck back in romantic realism. Both people and influences travelled slowly in the early days of the previous century.
Certainly there were rumours in Cape Town about new greats like Gauguin and van Gogh. But the revolutionaries of German art never became as famous as their opposite, the increasingly categorical Adolf.
The true expressionist felt that the industrialism of the previous century had a negative effect on people’s spiritual lives. As a counterbalance to black machines in a smoky grey environment, the expressionists filled their works with bright colours that at their very height should clash with one another. Most of all they clashed with all the brown that was spreading through Europe, along its streets and across its town squares.
Max Pechstein was fired from the art academy in Berlin when the most prominent representatives of the brown trousers discovered that he had painted naked, orange women frolicking under a tree. Much later it was said that no one had ever seen Adolf so angry, with the possible exception of the time he was presented with the results of the Battle of Stalingrad. Three hundred and twenty-six of Pechstein’s works vanished from German museums; many of them haven’t been seen since.
But before he was banished from his own country, Pechstein managed to get Irma thinking along the right lines. For her part, she managed to return once more to her beloved Africa.
Which didn’t immediately love her back.
Irma painted and painted. Most of all she loved to paint black men and women in all imaginable colours. They were Malay couples, housekeepers, Zulu women, Xhosa girls – everything she saw, sensed, and felt. Now certain that she was good enough, she exhibited her art in Cape Town. The most tactful critic confessed that he didn’t understand what he was looking at. The least tactful said that his strongest inclination was to vomit. In between she was accused of being an insult to human intelligence. As if that wasn’t enough, she was reported to the police for general indecency. In the name of decency, the report didn’t lead anywhere.
By this point, the artist took her setbacks with aplomb. Max Pechstein’s kind words had hit their mark and taken root. She didn’t need the narrow-minded art-world circles of Cape Town. She turned up her nose at them and packed her bags.
This time her journey didn’t lead her back to her old homeland, and that was just as well. Adolf probably still didn’t know who she was, but she had just about every fault there was to have. Not only was she an expressionist, she fraternized with black and brown people. And was herself a Jew.
All that was missing was Bolshevism.