
Helene Love-Allotey
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Sold for £176,700 inc. premium
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Provenance
A private UK collection.
The present work displaying a girl holding a ceramic jug was executed by the artist following her travels to Spain in 1960. With an interest in ceramics, often incorporating them into still lifes and creating physical pottery herself, we a presented here with a beautiful fusion of this passion with her captivating portraiture. Accomplished with a muted tonal palette, Stern draws us into the intimacy of the portrait with a focus on the subject who gazes back at us.
After receiving the Guggenheim Foundation National Award for South Africa in 1960, the present work was painted at a time when the artist had received great recognition for her work. Furthermore, upon arriving in Alicante on Spain's Costa Blanca between December 1960 and June 1961 with her companion Dudley Welch, she was affectionately acknowledged by the local Alicante press as 'La Picasso'. This was not only due to her profession, but also the extravagance of the hotel, Hotel Carlton, as recorded in a letter to Richard and Freda Feldman (February 1961). Indeed, to be linked to Picasso during these years was received by the artist with great honour, as Picasso was already, by the 1960's, acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the century.
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), p. 207.