Portrait of Dora Sowden
Irma Stern
Artwork 1943
Artwork: Irma Stern, Portrait of Dora Sowden (1943). Oil on canvas. 55.9 x 50.8 cm. Private collection.
Artist Irma Stern Title Portrait of Dora Sowden Date 1943 Materials Oil on canvas Dimensions 55.9 x 50.8 cm Credit Private collection

Of the many people Stern painted, only those depicting the artist’s friends and acquaintances, patrons, and admirers are named. Most often commissioned, these ‘society portraits’ demanded a passing likeness to their sitters unlike Stern’s more archetypal paintings, which lent themselves as prompts to both the artist’s reductive fancies and formal propositions. Such is her Portrait of Dora Sowden, a study of the Rand Daily Mail critic, who wrote on concerts and dance performances. Married to Lewis Sowden, a novelist, poet and cultural affairs correspondent for the same paper, Dora and her husband held prominent positions in South Africa’s arts community. Though Dora herself never wrote on Stern, the artist was included in Lewis’ 1935 essay on Jewish art in South Africa, and he later reviewed her 1942 exhibition at the Gainsborough Galleries, shortly before this portrait was painted. Here, the critic, submitting to the close looking and careful attention she reserved for her own subjects, is shown in headscarf and blazer, her red shirt set against the emerald green backdrop. Resting her chin in one hand and leaning forward, Dora appears lost in thought, eyelids heavy, gaze unfocused.

b.1894, Schweizer-Reneke; d.1966, Cape Town

Throughout her life, Irma Stern pursued visions of the exotic. She travelled widely in both Europe and Africa and found in the latter reflections of a timeless idyll. Stern was particularly drawn to the otherness of the people she encountered, to – as she wrote – “the hidden depths of the primitive and childlike yet rich soul of the native.” Unconcerned with the particularity of individuals, her paintings of African figures are seldom portraits but rather ethnographic imaginings (to this end, these sitters are seldom ever named). All this considered, there remains a compelling complexity to her paintings. An artist seduced by colour and rhythm, she in turn seduces the viewer. There is a material richness to Stern’s canvas, a sensual pleasure to her impasto paint. While her words more often revealed her colonial sentiments and a profound lack of insight into the lives of others, in paint, she was redeemed. Stern can perhaps be forgiven for being of her time and, like so many modernists, excused her primitivism. Beauty, above all, was what Stern sought to express, and the lasting influence of her paintings is a testament to her aesthetic achievements. She remains a commanding presence in the South African art world, in death as she was in life.

Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall

The present and implied figure in A4's inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025

Path page
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall
The present and implied figure in A4’s inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025
Path page

A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.

Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.
David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Ephraim Zulu watering his garden, 179 Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. September' shows a man seated on a chair in a yard, holding a hosepipe. In the background is a dog and a woman.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.

A more oblique example of the same mode –
Artwork photograph that shows George Hallett’s framed monochrome photographic diptych ‘Peter Clarke’s Tongue’, from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, mounted on a white wall.

Another at the edge of effacement –
Artwork photograph that shows Dor Guez’s photographic print ‘Samira’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery.

Then:

A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.

Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –
Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Absence of Identities’, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadowed faces of a bride and groom.

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.
A photograph of Christo's collotype print and collage 'Wrapped monument to Leonardo, Project for the Piazza Della Scala, Milan'.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.
Jo Ractliffe's monochrome photograph print 'Roadside stall on the way to Viana, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado'.
An installation photograph of Haroon Gunn-Salie and James Mathews' installation 'Amongst Men' shows casts of kufiyas suspended from the ceiling.
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.
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