The Flower Market, Cape Town (recto); Cape coastal landscape with Cape Malays (verso)

After spending the First World War and the years immediately following it in Germany, Irma Stern returned to her native South Africa in the Autumn of 1920. She eventually settled in Cape Town, where she would live for the rest of her life. Stern had lived in Germany previously, having spent her formative years there after her mother had fled the Boer War with her in 1899. She returned to Berlin in 1913 to pursue her artistic education and became a member of the avant-garde and friend of the Expressionist painter Max Pechstein. She was a founding member of the Novembergruppe in December 1918 and an exhibitor at the Neue Secession both in 1918 and 1920, but Stern found her work little understood in her early years back home. As a young, modernist, female painter whose primary subject was 'Africa and all its overwhelming, rugged, vast beauty', Sterns work, first exhibited at Ashbey's Gallery in Long Street, Cape Town in 1922, provoked considerable antagonism from the local press (I. Stern, 'My exotic models', Cape Argus, 3 April 1926). As Marion Arnold has explained, 'She placed her aggressively modern paintings before the public knowing that her picture-making procedures were in the context of South Africa iconoclastic' (M. Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa, Claremont,