Irma Stern

(South African, 1894-1966)

Meinkie with Pumpkin (framed)

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection, USA.

Exhibited
Cape Town, Burg Street, Association of Arts Gallery, 8-20 March 1948, no 6.

In her exhibition at the Association of Arts Gallery, Burg Street, Cape Town, 8 – 20 March 1948, Irma Stern included two paintings of a certain Meinkie, both priced at the relatively low sum of 90 guineas. #25 is simply called Meinkie in the exhibition list. But #6 is called Meinkie with Pumpkin which obviously refers to the present work. Confirmation that this work indeed formed part of this show is to be found in a photograph in Irma Stern's Scrapbook of the exhibition installation in which it is shown on the back wall. Much of the March exhibition, including Meinkie, now #17, was shown again at the Constantia Gallery, Johannesburg, in April 1948. Although there is no record of sales from the Association of Arts exhibition in Irma Stern's Cashbook, the absence of Meinkie with Pumpkin from this later exhibition suggests that the painting was sold at or soon after the original Cape Town show.

The present owner, who is American, recalls that his late father acquired the painting on a business trip to South Africa. Given the nationality of the purchaser, it is probably no coincidence that, as the Cape Times reported on March 20 1948, Irma Stern believed at this precise time she would soon have an exhibition in New York City. The artist's Cashbook records that the second Meinkie painting was sold by the Constantia Gallery in April 1948 at the reduced sum of £80: this work appeared on the Cape Town art market in November 2015.

The name Meinke (diminutive Meinkie) was sometimes used by German-speaking South Africans to describe Dutch or Afrikaans-speaking women of exceptional courage. The name, therefore, may have been Stern's nickname for a person of colour from District 6 or Bo-Kaap. The name appears twice in Stern's correspondence with her Johannesburg friends, the Feldmans, both times in relation to her dismissal from Stern's service towards the end of 1956, together with Charlie, Stern's long-suffering cook. At this time, therefore, Meinkie was Stern's domestic worker rather than a professional model. In fact, Stern's Cashbook records no payment to Meinkie as a model at any time between 1948, when the two Meinkie paintings were made, and 1956 when she was sacked. Such payment may have been concealed in the substantial figure of £20 in January 1947 for "modelles Malay and Indian", but it is more likely that Stern simply called Meinkie to her studio as part of her job. Shortly before the Meinkie paintings were made Thelma Gutsche wrote about "those conspicuously indigenous groups, the Malays and Cape Coloured" who "drift inconsequently among her household". And the fluidity of roles in Stern's ménage is confirmed in a report in the Cape Argus 12 March 1955:

"Irma Stern has been keeping Asa, the pretty Malay housemaid, from her brooms and dusters and letting her pose for a portrait in a graceful white yashmak."

Strictly speaking, neither the painting of Asa, nor those of Meinkie, were actually portraits in the sense that they were commissioned by the sitter or that the sitter had any interest at all in the outcome. They are studies in which the artist imposed her aesthetic and social concerns on the sitter for her own benefit and that of her privileged white clientele. At this time, Stern made several studies of what Thelma Gutsche called "quite unpicturesque types" seemingly in response to growing criticism that her paintings of African people were idealised and unreal. Stern's decision to paint Meinkie either peeling vegetables or clasping a pumpkin invites consideration of the nature of domestic work - perhaps servitude - which thought may be found in the expression and attitude of the subject in both paintings. An anonymous reviewer of the Cape Town exhibition in the Cape Argus March 8, 1948, remarked that a loose, painterly style, and a resonant colour palette is appropriate to such interpretation, and continued:

"It would be absurd to demand precision from a volcano; and if Miss Stern chooses on occasion to subordinate intellect to emotion, and the sensitive to the spontaneous, the dynamic quality of her work is a triumphant vindication of such a choice."

We are grateful to Professor Michael Godby for the compilation of the above footnote.

Bibliography
Sandra Klopper, Irma Stern - Are you Still Alive? Stern's Life and Art seen through her Letters to Richard and Freda Feldman, 1934-1966, (Cape Town: Orisha Publishing, 2017), pp.183 and 185.
Thelma Gutsche, Ph.D, 'Irma Stern – Ambassador for Africa', The Outspan, October 31 1947, pp.39-41.
Irma Stern's Cashbook, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, MSC 31, 3.