For the first time since 1932, Irma Stern has returned to Berlin. The city’s Brücke Museum is hosting a landmark exhibition Irma Stern: A Modern Artist between Berlin and Cape Town from July to November 2025. It is dedicated to the South African Jewish artist, who fled Germany after the rise of the Nazis brought her promising European career to an abrupt halt.
Now, nearly a century later, the Brücke Museum has mounted the first solo museum exhibition of Stern in her former home city. More than forty works, paintings, drawings, and watercolours, many drawn from South African museums and private collections, fill the museum’s galleries. Five are on loan from the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch, which shipped works from its collection to Berlin. The result is more than a retrospective: it is a recognition that Stern belongs firmly within the global modernist canon, and that her work, long celebrated in South Africa, deserves full acknowledgement in Europe.
Irma Stern: A life between two worlds
The exhibition is a homecoming of sorts. Stern was born in the Transvaal in 1894 but spent much of her formative years in Germany. She studied painting in Weimar and Berlin, absorbing the spirit of Expressionism, and developed close ties with artists such as Max Pechstein. In the 1920s her bold canvases, portraits and landscapes of unusual intensity were displayed in the capital’s leading galleries.
Her career in Germany ended abruptly with the rise of the Nazis. As a Jewish woman, her art was branded ‘degenerate’,* and she was forced to abandon her European career. Returning to South Africa, she painted prolifically, both here and in the rest of the African continent, negotiating the contradictions of her identity: a woman artist in a male-dominated field, a Jew facing exclusion, and a white artist depicting African subjects within the structures of colonialism and apartheid. These tensions run through her work, giving it both its richness and its complexity. She would live until her death in 1966, mainly in her iconic house in Mowbray in Cape Town, now a captivating museum to her life and work.
The Eternal Child
At the heart of the Brücke exhibition is Stern’s haunting 1916 portrait The Eternal Child, painted when she was only 22 and still a student in Berlin during the First World War. The work was inspired by a fleeting glimpse of a malnourished girl on a tram. Deeply shaken, Stern captured the child’s gaunt face:
These were the war years in Germany. I knew what I had to express – the suffering and agony that a war means to all life. Soon afterwards I painted my Eternal Child – a little girl with large mistrusting eyes, with an embittered tight mouth, sitting on a chair, her plaits hanging straight off her naked forehead, her undefined hands clinging to a few field flowers … so as to assure that some beauty was always left.”
Her teacher disapproved of the work, failing to grasp its intensity. But for Stern, it marked her first truly ‘independent’ painting, the moment she found her artistic voice. She left art school, sought guidance from Pechstein, and embraced Expressionism on her own terms.
For decades, The Eternal Child remained one of her most personal works. Stern refused to sell it until 1964, just two years before her death, when she finally agreed to part with it to her friend and patron Huberte Rupert. Today the portrait belongs to the Rupert Art Foundation, where it has taken its place along with other works of Stern and a vast collection of iconic South African art. (https://rupertmuseum.org/). Its reappearance in Berlin marks the first time since 1919 that the painting has been exhibited in the city where Stern originally created it.
The portrait endures not only as a deeply moving response to wartime suffering but also as the foundation of Stern’s career: the moment she asserted herself as an artist of originality, empathy, and vision.
Sean O’Sullivan: Preserving Stern’s voice
The Berlin exhibition also coincides with the visit to the Brücke of Cape Town filmmaker Sean O’Sullivan who has not only worked all over the world, but has also created films for the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation, the South African Jewish Museum, the Kaplan Centre, and the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, where he documented Holocaust survivors’ testimonies.
Speaking of the exhibition, Sean observed: “After more than a century The Eternal Child has returned to a very different Berlin. And to say that much has passed in the interim would be more than an understatement. We had to be there to film it.”
Until recently, it seemed impossible to make a full documentary about Stern: no film or audio records were thought to exist. That changed with the discovery of historic archive material. Building on this, O’Sullivan is now developing a comprehensive documentary on Stern’s life and work.
Sean hopes to hear from anyone who personally knew Irma, or has film footage of her, to help complete this project of remembrance. If you can assist, please contact him via email at sean@sosfilm.com.
Looking ahead
This October, Stellenbosch’s Woordfees will host sessions dedicated to Stern, underscoring how her work continues to inspire new generations of artists, scholars, and admirers. (https://woordfees.co.za/en/program/)
Back in Berlin, however, it is The Eternal Child that commands attention. Painted in the anguish of war by a young Jewish student, withheld from sale for nearly half a century, and now showing in the city that once rejected her, the portrait embodies both fragility and resilience. For Jewish audiences especially, it stands as a symbol of endurance, a reminder that beauty and identity can survive even the darkest of times. ●
* ’Degenerate art’ was a term used by the Nazis to denounce modernist, abstract, or experimental art, which they associated with groups they persecuted, especially Jews and homosexuals, labelling it as un-German, subversive, and corrupt.
- Read the latest Edition of the Cape Jewish Chronicle here.
- SUBSCRIBE: Subscribe to the Cape Jewish Chronicle for just R450/year (or R38/month debit order) and you will remain connected. Simply email us at subscriptions@ctjc.co.za and click here for payment info.
- ADVERTISE in the Cape Jewish Chronicle and on this website. Contact Adéle on 021 464 6736 or email advertising@ctjc.co.za.
