Beschreibung:

Irma Stern (South African, 1894-1966)The Yellow Hat
signed and dated 'Irma Stern/ 193?' (lower left); bears inscription 'Man in Yellow Hat (1938)' (verso), further inscribed 'Wolpe Gallery' (verso)
oil on canvas
65 x 66cm (25 9/16 x 26in).
(framed)FootnotesProvenance
Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town;
Sotheby's/ Stephen Welz & Co sale, Johannesburg, 31st October 1988, Lot 221;
A private collection.
Exhibited
MacFayden Hall, University of Pretoria, (April 1933), no. 24.
Lezard's Gallery, Johannesburg, (May 1933), no. 20.
Newland's House, Cape Town (19-26 February 1934), no. 24.
Literature
Stephan Welz, Art at Auction in South Africa: Twenty Years of Sotheby's/Stephan Welz & Co., 1969-1989, (Johannesburg: A.D. Donker, 1989), p.122
Irma Stern's handwriting, given her expressive hand, prevents the date of 'The Yellow Hat' from being clearly legible. The last digit of the date she has inscribed beneath her signature in the lower left corner of the painting is unclear.
More clear is an inscription, not in Stern's hand, on the stretcher that includes reference to the Wolpe Gallery and was probably made in the 1960s when Joe Wolpe befriended the artist. The inscription reads 'The Man in the Yellow Hat (1938)'. It is this inscription that seems to have persuaded previous cataloguers to date the work '1938' when it was first brought to market in 1988. In fact, the origin of the painting can be traced with certainty to the beginning of this decade, to 1931 when Stern spent a few months on Madeira on her way to Europe. A drawing that is unmistakably a portrait study for the painting is preserved in the Irma Stern Museum and is clearly dated 1931 (Irma Stern Trust #741). As Stern left Madeira on the Kenilworth Castle in November 1931 the painting is likely to have been at least started before then. She had an exhibition of some of her Madeira work at Foyle's Gallery, London, in January 1932, but it is not known what works were shown because there is no exhibition list preserved in her Scrapbooks at the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town. Nor did the work feature on the list of her first exhibition following her return to Cape Town, at Ashbey's Gallery in November. But it is listed in both her exhibition at MacFadyen Hall, University of Pretoria, in April 1933 (as #24 at 40 guineas), and that at Lezard's Gallery, Johannesburg, in May (#20). And 'The Yellow Hat' was shown at Newlands House, Cape Town, between 19 and 26 February 1934, as #24 again at 40 guineas. Although Stern left the island before the end of 1931, some of her Madeira paintings, for example 'The Fisherman' and 'The Two Harlots', are clearly dated 1932. The last digit of the date on 'The Yellow Hat' may best be explained by imagining Stern completing the work with signature and date while still on the island but revising both the work and the date in 1932 or 1933 after she had returned to South Africa.
Stern wrote (in her inimitable style) on 11 October 1931 from Madeira to Roza van Gelderen, her friend in Cape Town, that she was staying in Santa Cruz, on the east coast of the island in "a delight full fisher village":
"You cannot imagine how interessing [sic] this all is for me. But how I ever can go away from here and feel happy again I do not know – it is so full of beauty and colour and life."
There are indications at other times during her stay that she was not always so happy and even that she might have had some kind of breakdown, but Karel Schoeman is undoubtedly correct in suggesting that Stern used her visit to Madeira to find a new direction in her art, particularly for the role of colour. According to an interview she gave in June 1931, a few months before her stay in Madeira, Stern found the colour scheme of her 'Native Studies', that had been her principal subject up to this time, limited to the browns of African bodies enlivened only by touches of orange, red and green; and that she felt the need to expand her palette, interestingly through the medium of Still Life painting that allowed the distribution of colour accents across the picture surface. And, in 1933, looking back on the time leading up to her visit to Madeira, she stated:
"But now a growing absorption in colour theory even to the exclusion of the subject-matter, overtook me to such a degree that for two or three years all my work consisted in studying and building up a new palette. The year 1931 brought me for a few months to Madeira where I was able to harvest the benefits of my recent studies."
The reaction to Madeira expressed in her letter to van Gelderen confirms that she found beauty and colour there. Significantly, she also found 'life' in human figures who were rather less passive than the mode she had devised for her African subjects.
'The Yellow Hat' is one of several fisher subjects that Stern exhibited in South Africa in 1933 and 1934. While perhaps not as overtly dramatic as other subjects she recorded in Madeira – such as 'The Hunchback', 'The Blind Boy', 'The Two Harlots', etc. – ocean fishing was seen generally at that time as a heroic occupation representing the idea of human struggle with nature. To capture the implicit drama of these fishermen's lives, Stern returned to her Expressionist roots in her vigorous brushstrokes, loosely defined planes, broken contours, and compressed spaces. All these devices were achieved through a newly energised application of colour. The mood of many of Stern's Madeira paintings is sombre, not to say tragic. But in 'The Yellow Hat' she uses the bright yellow of the large Sou'Wester to introduce a heightened, even fauvist palette as another way to express the exceptional nature of the mariner's heroism. As D.L. wrote in response to the Lezard Gallery exhibition in 'Miss Irma Stern's Exhibition. A Brilliant Modernist', in The Star, May 11 1933, "'Yellow Hat', and several more are not only harmonious in colour, but express the character of their subjects in a way quite impossible by more conventional methods".
We are grateful to Professor Michael Godby for his completion of the above footnote.
Bibliography
Jeanne van Eeden, 'Irma Stern's First Exhibition in Pretoria, 1933', South African Journal of Art History, 13, (1988), pp.89-104.
Marion Arnold, Irma Stern, A Feast for the Eye, (Cape Town: Fernwood Press, 1995), passim, for the Madeira works.
Karel Schoeman, Irma Stern, The Early Years, 1894-1933, (Cape Town: The South African Library), pp. 99-100.
'Irma Stern and her Work', South African Life and the Woman's Forum, (December 7 1933)