South Africa

The woman behind South Africa’s most expensive painting

Kirsten Minnaar • 30 May 2025

Irma Stern is considered South Africa’s most valuable artist and is celebrated worldwide for pioneering modernist expressionism in the country.

In 2023, Stern’s painting, Children Reading the Koran, set a record for an African artwork sold at auction on the African continent. It went under the hammer for R22.3 million.

As of 2025, Irma Stern is the most valuable South African artist. Her paintings sell for an average of R5 million. The highest value recorded for one of her paintings is R87.3 million for Arab Priest.

Although Stern is widely regarded today, she endured multiple wars and condemnation from the art scene to build her legacy.

Irma Stern, a celebrated South African artist who achieved international recognition during her lifetime and significantly influenced the local avant-garde art scene

Irma Stern was born to German Jewish parents in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, a small town in the North West Province of South Africa, in the Transvaal.

Here, her father established a thriving trading store and cattle farm. During the Anglo-Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, her father was interned by the British in a concentration camp because of his pro-Boer sympathies.

Stern and her younger brother, Rudi, were taken by their mother to Cape Town during this time. When her father was finally released, their family went to Germany.

This marked the beginning of a regular travel pattern between South Africa and Germany, which characterised her life and influenced her development as an artist.

While intermittent periods of her childhood were spent in South Africa, the years of the First World War were spent in Germany.

It was around this time that Stern decided to become an artist. She studied art in Germany at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar in 1913 and at the Levin-Funcke Studio in 1914.

Notably, from 1917 onwards, she studied with Max Pechstein, a founder of the Novembergruppe. Stern was associated with the German Expressionist painters of this period.

With the support of Expressionist Max Pechstein, her first solo exhibition was held in Berlin in 1916.

In 1920, Stern returned permanently to South Africa, specifically Cape Town, with her family. Despite the international support she had started gaining, her work was initially derided upon her return, and she was dismissed as an artist.

In 1922, she held her first local exhibition at Ashbey’s Galleries in Cape Town. The conservative Cape Town art world considered this exhibition outrageous, and people even queued to see what was described as a shocking exhibition.

One newspaper from the time described a first visit to Stern’s museum as causing “undoubted amusement.”

However, the reviewer wrote that on subsequent inspections, “this feeling vanishes, to be replaced by frank disgust at the general nastiness of the work.”

“One may be conversant, and even sympathetic with modern art methods, but no serious attention need be paid to this attempt to startle the susceptibilities of Cape Town art lovers.”

The Irma Stern Museum

For four decades, from 1927 to 1966, her home, ‘The Firs’, served as the stable point in Irma’s life. There, she painted, lived, and entertained.

She also returned her collections of artworks and artefacts from her extensive travels in Africa and Europe to the house.

Stern was a discriminating collector, assembling an eclectic collection displayed throughout the rooms of her home.

Her collections included ancient Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek artefacts, 3rd-century Indian stone carvings, Chinese ceramics, and pre-Columbian masks.

She also had 14th-century European church carvings, European furniture dating back to the 15th century, and an extensive collection of African art.

Throughout her life, Stern travelled extensively in Europe and Africa and exhibited widely at home and abroad. She explored Southern Africa, Zanzibar, and the Congo.

These trips provided a wide range of subject matter for her paintings and allowed her to acquire and assemble her collection of artefacts.

She also spent time in Dakar, Senegal, Zanzibar, the Congo, Israel, Turkey, Spain and France. Notably, Stern refused to travel or exhibit in Germany during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.

These expeditions resulted in a wealth of artistic creativity and energy. She also published two illustrated journals: Congo, published in 1943, and Zanzibar, published in 1948.

Irma’s reputation became firmly established in South Africa in her late forties, and she gained widespread recognition after the Empire Exhibition of 1936.

By the 1940s, she had become an established artist. From 1945 to 1966, she was acclaimed in South Africa. During the 1950s and 1960s, her works entered the major South African public collections.

She also gained international recognition during these decades, participating in numerous Venice Biennales and receiving the Guggenheim Award in 1961.

Today, Stern is recognised as a true pioneer of modernist Expressionism in South Africa, particularly for her use of bright, expressive colour, which is especially evident in her many still-life paintings.

After she died in 1966, Stern’s home in Rosebank was turned into a museum in her name. In her will, Irma Stern left her collections in trust to encourage and promote the Fine Arts within and outside South Africa.

From this trust, the Irma Stern Museum was founded so that these collections would be used to further the arts in South Africa and internationally.

The Irma Stern Trust owns the museum’s collection, while the University of Cape Town administers the museum on behalf of the Trustees of the Trust, which was created by her will.

The museum allows visitors to view Stern’s artworks, collection of artefacts, and furniture displayed in her eccentric home.

Some rooms, such as her studio, are kept substantially as she would have had them, where her paintbrushes, easel, rags, and painting overcoat lie as she last left them.

Other rooms are more impressionistic, reflecting her while housing temporary exhibitions that draw on the museum’s holdings to highlight and engage with art and culture.