Lisa Hörstmann: Many thanks for the introduction and especially for the invitation. I am very pleased that the evening can take place today. I will first briefly outline the biography and give a sketchy overview of the painterly work and then very briefly talk about the reception.
Irma Stern was born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, which is located in the former independent Burmese Transvaal Republic, about 300 km west of Johannesburg. She died in Cape Town in 1966. Her parents were German Jews who moved to South Africa primarily for economic reasons. In 1901, her father was arrested during the Second Boer War, then released, and the family had to leave the country and went to Germany. And from that point on, during Irma Stern's childhood, they moved back and forth between South Africa and Germany, and just a year later to Wolmaransstad, which is 75 km east of Schweizer-Reneke, in the same region. Then in 1904 back to Berlin, via Zanzibar and Italy, in 1909 back to Wolmaransstad, in 1911 back to Berlin, where the family stayed for a long time, and Irma Stern began her studies at the Reimann'sche Kunstschule in 1912. A year later she moved to Weimar to the Großherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstschule, which had a women's class, and remained there until World War I broke out in 1914, when she returned to Berlin and continued her studies with Martin Brandenburg at the Lewin-Funcke Studio. Two years later, in 1916, there was a break with Martin Brandenburg, who allegedly did not find her work The Eternal Child appropriate – I will show the image later – and she in turn could not understand this judgment, and therefore separated from him. In the same year, she also met Max Pechstein, who supported her very much. This connection also led to her becoming a founding member of the Novembergruppe in 1918 and exhibiting with them as well as with the Freie Secession in Berlin. In 1919, she also had her first solo exhibition at the Fritz Gurlitt Gallery, which had been run by his son Wolfgang since 1914 – thanks to Max Pechstein's network.
In 1920, as already mentioned, the family returned to South Africa and settled in Cape Town. Here, two years later, in 1922, Irma Stern had her first solo exhibition in South Africa, which she quite confidently titled "An Exhibition of Modern Art by Miss Irma Stern" – confident because this term had not been used in the African context before. In the same year, she also traveled to Umgababa, where the painting was created that is now on display in the exhibition, and which will also be the subject of today's discussion. From 1924 she had a strong international presence in Europe, her works were shown for example in the colonial exhibition "British Empire Exhibition" in London, and exhibitions in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Spain and in South Africa. In Germany she exhibited only until 1933, following this time she also turned away from the German language.
In 1926, she married her former teacher Johannes Prinz. And in 1927, she purchased the house in Cape Town, where the present Irma Stern Museum is located, where she lived until the end of her life. Just seven years later she sued for divorce, which came into effect in 1934. The marriage was thus of rather short duration.
She traveled a lot, which is also very visible in her work – in the 1920s mainly to what is now KwaZulu-Natal on the east coast of South Africa, to Swaziland (now Eswatini), Pondoland in the Eastern Cape as well as to Europe. In the 1930s trips to Dakar and Zanzibar followed, both times alone, without her husband, and again to Europe. In the 1940s, she traveled twice to the Belgian Congo, again alone with a driver - which was very unusual at the time. She also traveled by car and exhibited in Lubumbashi. She also traveled to Zanzibar and North Africa, and again to Europe.
1955 was her third and last visit to Belgian Congo, after which she traveled mainly to Southern Europe, also in the wake of South Africa's increasing isolation within the African continent due to apartheid policies. In Europe, she stayed primarily in southern Spain. This map shows Irma Stern's longer working stays. She traveled much more within South Africa and Europe, of course, but I think this illustrates quite well how unusual it was for a woman to travel at that time, mostly alone.
Now I will give a sketchy overview of the painterly work. There are also a large number of drawings, as well as some sculptures, but they are rarely exhibited andplay a very minor role in the reception.
This is The Eternal Child, of which I have just spoken. It is her self-declared first work, and shows a girl under the impact of war. That was the reason why she broke away from Martin Brandenburg, who probably did not support this more modern way of painting. This painting is also an important part of her self-dramatization as a misunderstood artist, who nevertheless prevailed because of her genius and revolutionized the South African art scene.
This is Umgababa, on view in the exhibition, loaned from the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town. It was created during her 1922 stay on the east coast of South Africa, south of Durban. Stern wrote a story with the same title in which she romanticizes the place as a paradise far from civilization. This romanticization, however, is contradictory to the central element of this painting, namely the railroad tracks that cut through the landscape and symbolize the technical modernization of the country. That is why it takes on a special character within the oeuvre, because usually she completely ignored this very modernization. Overall, it can certainly be seen as an example of Stern's search for supposedly virgin places.
Apart from that, landscapes are depicted more in the tradition of „terra nullius“, that is, unsettled and uncultivated land available to white settlers, as in the Natal landscape on the left, or as exoticizing representations of unconquerable, lush nature, such as this landscape from the Congo. It is also significant that one is South Africa, which was naturally to be farmed by the white settlers, and the other is the Congo, which is portrayed as more wild and virgin. Overall, however, depictions of landscape are not really featured in Stern's work.
Best-known are depictions of African women she portrayed during her various travels. Often these are of either ethnological interest, like the portraits of these young Ndebele women, or for theiraesthetic aspects such as color and composition, like these porters. The racist and sexist objectification from today's perspective contrasts with the fact that the images were seen by a white audience at the time as respectful representations of black people, who had previously been almost invisible in South African art.
Many works are definitely more like portraits and make this interpretation a bit more comprehensible from today's point of view, like this picture of the Tutsi queen, which is nevertheless an expression of the racist view that the Tutsi are superior to the Hutu because they are more highly developed, cultured people who immigrated from the north, this is the so-called Hamite theory.
There are only very few depictions of black South Africans in contemporary dress in Stern's work. I only know two, and one of them is this one, Maid in Uniform from 1955. The defensive attitude as well as the refusal of eye contact of the figures are also very untypical.
Countless portraits were created during Stern's travels, for example to Madeira or Zanzibar, including these paintings framed in wooden elements taken out of Zanzibar doors. In the past, similar works have fetched prices in the millions on the art market.
Beginning in the 1960s, as mentioned, Stern traveled increasingly to Europe, where she became interested primarily in the rural population, such as the Spanish peasant woman depicted here. South Africa's political isolation, as well as Stern's deteriorating health, can be blamed for this. However, she continued to seek out the supposedly primitive.
In addition to portraits, Stern's oeuvre also includes many still lives. These often show objects from Stern's collection, such as the chair on the left, which comes from the Buli master's workshop. Many of these works can be read as representations of an exotic and fertile landscape, like this floral still life. There are also numerous portraits of white South Africans, especially from the Jewish diaspora in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Portraits of Hilda Purwitsky on the left and Roza van Gelderen on the right, friends, collectors and supporters of Stern, can be seen here.
This brings me to the reception of the artist’s work. On the whole, Stern's first exhibitions in Germany had a very positive response; she was a member of the Berlin avant-garde there and was able to assert her advantage over painters such as Gauguin or Pechstein, since she was perceived as an authentic African. She also was supported by important art critics such as Fritz Stahl and Max Osborn, who also published a monograph on her work in 1927, in a series whose previous volume was dedicated to Pablo Picasso.
In South Africa, she was supported primarily by women's networks, especially within the Jewish Diaspora, including the two journalists Hilda Purwitzky and Roza van Gelderen, who are depicted here, who increasingly campaigned for Stern and repeatedly published texts and even translated Stahl's laudatory reviews from German into English for South African magazines. The goal was the (self-)stylization carried on by Stern herself as a shocking, modern artist, established in the European avant-garde and attempting to assert herself against the romantic realism of the English tradition that prevailed in South Africa. She succeeded, and Stern became a pioneer of South African modernism. Together with her successors, such as the African artist Maggie Laubscher, her works were politically instrumentalized by government as "true South African art" that symbolized the ethnic differences propagated by apartheid politics.
Stern received this instrumentalization very opportunistically. She represented South Africa in international art contexts – for example, in foreign embassies, at the Venice Biennials from 1950, and also at the São Paulo Biennial in 1957. Even during her lifetime, Stern was seen as a pioneer of South African modernism, whose supposedly compassionate portraits of black women revolutionized the South African art scene.
Since the 1970s, a psychological reading has dominated in South Africa, according to which Stern sought her own identity and sexuality in the black "other" because of her eccentricity, moodiness and unattractiveness. This has been repeatedly criticized, especially from abroad, by Irene Below in Germany and LaNitra Michele Berger in the U.S., and has since given way to more nuanced interpretations. In Germany, Stern was almost completely forgotten after 1945, until the 1996 exhibition in Bielefeld, which was also discussed in the press rather as a show of an "imitator" of Pechstein.
Yvette Mutumba: Thank you very much for this first overview and impression. And before we go into the discussion, Prof. Juneja would now give a response to Ms. Hörstmann's input.
Monica Juneja: Yes, thank you. This was very insightful, very informative, this overview of Irma Stern's life and work. It's so important because we know so little about this artist, even though she has been such an important part of this expressionist movement – she was active in Germany as well as in South Africa. And that leads to the question that you also mentioned at the end of your presentation: the lack of reception in recent years. And that's where I could start. I think the life and work of Irma Stern draws our attention to the blind spots that still exist in the common narrative of art history about modernism, the ethnocentric explanations of this narrative. For several decades, mainstream art history has given us a narrative in which modernism is fundamentally and essentially stylized as a European cultural achievement, with centers in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and which then relocated to New York after the war. And from these centers, according to this narrative, modernity spread to the "peripheries" of the world, so to speak, and has been practically absorbed there and then had the effect of producing such "stragglers" of modernity, variants of this modernity. And that's where a whole structure of value judgments and discourses about quality comes into play - what is original modernity and what is late modernity? Is there a chronological sequence? And thereby we see that such an artist like Irma Stern, who was active in South Africa, has no place in that narrative. Because everything that happened outside the European centers was not recognized as something independent. And I think we are very aware of this blind spot today.
Furthermore, she was a female artist, although she was active in her life both in Europe and South Africa as an important part of the mainstream - she exhibited in Berlin and other cities, she was a member of groups, together with important women artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, she was part of the Frauen-Künstlerinnenbund, she was also a founding member of the revolutionary Novembergruppe, so she was always on the go. In Irene Below's catalog, reference is also made to the gender stereotypes of art criticism of the time. Her work is described here as "interesting," but the characterizations always slide into the decorative - so that's where you see these structures of discrimination, especially at the time.
So these are the reasons why she has no place in this canon. And in the 1990s, when this exhibition took place in Bielefeld, the history of modernism was still very incomplete. In 2006, the African-American art historian Kobena Mercer also noted that we know too little about what has unfolded as artistic modernism in different parts of the world. But today, in 2023, you can say that research is much further along. You have a lot of studies now that have looked at different sites across the world, from Shanghai to Tokyo, to Bombay, to São Paulo, to Ljubljana, Beirut and so on. This showed how every single location in every different continent was practically a laboratory, a field of experimentation for artistic positions that appropriated and continued an international style without finding their way into the canon. So modernism was not only a style, it was also a discourse of a self-positioning. And always in a local context, under specific regional circumstances. There are new subject positions in the world. Anti-colonial movements or new nation-building have taken place. And now we have a whole series of these individual micro-histories about different sites of modernity. So today the challenge for art history is: How do we get these sites all together in conversation with each other - after all, they were interconnected at the time. For example, we have individual studies showing that Surrealism was not just a Parisian movement, but there existed close networks with sites in North Africa. So the challenge is also: how should art history today develop new paradigms to bring these movements onto a common matrix? I think that's important. I'm not entirely happy when you talk about alternative moderns, or multiple moderns, or regional modernisms, or a Brazilian, South African, Korean, Japanese modernism. Then you fall back into all these closed, national-historical categories that in the end implicitly confirm the existence of a “mainstream” Euro-American modernism. How can you write a history that addresses the intersection of different sites and that designs new chronologies so that a truly global and intertwined modernity is expressed? I think that's the challenge. This is the direction in which parts of art history are working today. And it's in this context that the work of Irma Stern is so important and a bright spot in this interwoven modernity. She has moved in so many locations. There is an own unique formulation of expressionism in her work. Yes, she was trained by Pechstein. But you can actually see from her work a style that is more complex, that is independent, and that is part of the canon of Expressionism.
One last point about why it's important to talk about Irma Stern today. We are at a point in this post-apartheid South Africa where there is also a lot of turmoil. The „Rhodes Must Fall“ movement opposes the pervasive visibility of colonial history in the cityscape of various places in South Africa, the monuments that still admire colonial masters. The protest movement wants to raise awareness about what is visible and what is not. When I look at the art world, there is still an invisibility of black artists, men and women, who were also part of modernism at the time Irma Stern was active. And I think today the challenge is also to bring those stories back into art history, into an intertwined modernity. Through this inclusion, which does not involve purely additive processes, our basic categories, paradigms, and also values of the discipline are being challenged. I am convinced of this.
Yvette Mutumba: Thank you very much for that very important outline of the situation. First of all, I would like to ask you, Lisa, one question again, following on from what you had mentioned, Monica Juneja. It is a question regarding the visibility of black women artists in art history, because you had also talked a lot about reception and maybe you could go into that again in more detail. You had talked about different groups of women, you had shown the patronesses, who are now all white women as well, which means that Irma Stern probably ostensibly participated in a white art scene as well, and that's where the reception took place. But at the same time, as you just said, there was of course also an art production that was created by black artists, but which of course could not become part of the canon in South Africa, because of apartheid. It would certainly be exciting if you could say more about the reception, in the sense of black art history. The two people who became part of the reception, namely Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, both went to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, respectively, and also made a career there in the sense that they definitely became part of modernism. The fact that they had a position at that time means that they are still very much honored today. However, at that time, people wrote about the artists from a primitivist point of view and there are very clear racist stereotypes in the existing texts. The two men were already visible there at that time, but in this context actually. And due to the fact that no black historiography was really possible yet, not much was said about their work from a black perspective - or has there been a stronger reception or classification in the meantime?
Lisa Hörstmann: LaNitra Michele Berger, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Irma Stern, is black American. So she writes from a black perspective, but not a South African perspective.
Yvette Mutumba: And I would like to point on something that also came up in the lecture and that you also worked on, thought about. That is this notion of settler primitivism, so what was briefly described, their romanticizing idea of, yes, landscape, but just a very specific perspective on it, so on the one hand the image where just the farmed landscape by white settlers takes place versus the wild, the wild jungle in the Congo. Perhaps you, Prof. Juneja, could give us another classification, because this is not only Irma Stern's perspective, but a much larger phenomenon in time.
Monica Juneja: The historian of modernist art, Partha Mitter, who has worked on primitivism, has called it the alter ego of modernism, in sense that modernism itself has produced it. It's about a subject position. It's a form of temporality that positions itself in the present, perceives itself as a historical subject. And in order to construct historicity and this presentness, you need the opposite, what I call the primordial, the unchanging-there are also pejorative connotations-the backward, the barbaric, which also means a mentality that is so very mystical and not rational-these are all attributions of the primitive. And in the 19th century, with the beginning of modernity, a whole production of knowledge emerged. Primitivism was an anthropological concept, it was also an artistic category, also a political concept. And then with colonialism, the primitives were picked out, identified all over the world - they found a primitive state in communities, groups of people who lived in the present, but who had not changed for centuries. So this is a definition on which modern art is then also based, and seeks the primitive - the artists often considered as primitive what is natural, what is a primal state, actually a source of inspiration - we know this whole story about Picasso. These are also mythologies that art history has created about the artistic genius who suddenly has such an epiphany when he sees an African statue or a mask, and this has practically generated a creativity. But modernism and primitivism are two stories of the same phenomenon. And so, in that context, you see many European artists, - Nolde, Kirchner, and Gauguin - who actually had their travels made possible by the colonial occupation of territories in parts of the world. They also worked with the primitive as part of a colonial ideology. But the concept in itself is not something static. I work with the approach of transculturation. The processes of transculturation allow us to understand the migration of people and objects, and also of knowledge, in parts of the world. So the term "primitive" is found in very different contexts, it is also reinterpreted - depending on who is using it. We have different modes of use. An important question - also a blind spot in art history - would be: a European center Paris has had artists from all over the world - but you don't ask how their activity in Paris contributed to modernity. The artistic scene in Paris itself cannot be explained from within alone. It is also shaped by these contacts, by these artists from all over the world who have also brought impulses to the capital. And there's also a reversal of the primitive, for example, in movements like Négritude, where the term has been reappropriated and positively coded as the heritage of African society. We also have - so I'm thinking of my work in India - cases where the colonial state practically also used this idea of the primitive as an attribution for population groups in South Asia, on the Indian subcontinent. These were groups of people who lived, for example, in such isolated areas as forests or mountains. They were called tribal peoples. To designate these people, the category of tribes was created. And these were then the primitives who lived in this primitive state. Then anthropologists came, colonial photography dealt with it. At the same time, people practically collected their objects. We find musical instruments that are also in European museums today. So this term "primitive" spread all over the world. During the anti-colonial movement in India itself, the Indian elites then tried to reverse this. They tried to practically apply primitivism as a critique of civilization - which you also find in European art - as a critique of colonialism itself, as modern civilization. So that was one direction. But there are also very many contradictions in the art of the time. We see, this is a society that is changing. Colonialism also brings change, where among the elites, the artistic profession is also developing, and artists who think of themselves as elites, along with other elites, also see themselves as modern subjects who are also anchored in modern history. And in order to define oneself, one also needs a primitive, one then also looks for the primitive within one's own country. And therefore, in a sense, we find a continuation of the concept of primitivism among the elites in India itself, which was then used for certain population groups. And this continues also in independent India after the end of the colonial period, as a program, for example, the modernization program of the country in the 1960s, where the areas where these people lived were needed for mineral resources, for timber, for coal mines or dam construction, in other words, everything that was necessary for modern industrialization. There, practically, a kind of internal colonization took place. And within this colonization one has then practically the use of the primitive in the art by artists, who then perhaps exactly humans, which then also Irma Stern painted, so worthy, at the same time exoticizing and as other humans in the past living represented. So that shows how this term is so resilient that it can be used in very different contexts in very different ways.
Yvette Mutumba: Anything else you'd like to add to that?
Lisa Hörstmann: Yes, one more addition to the term settler primitivism - This goes back to Nicolas Thomas, who argued in relation to Australia that there we have a different situation. Because the European artists didn't necessarily know the people they depicted in a dignifying, exoticizing, primitivizing way from everyday life, but rather from folk shows or the circus. And in the colony, of course, you have a completely different reality, when you are confronted every day with the fact that these people actually live quite differently, namely also in a modern way, and yet they are still portrayed in a way that disparages them to a lower developmental status.
Yvette Mutumba: After that, I would like to come back to Irma Stern in more concrete terms, because she is a special case: she is, so to speak, German, white, lives in South Africa and is then again perceived here as African. Maybe we can talk more about what that actually means, her involvement in the whole thing - so on the one hand what you just described: yet also dignifying and fascinating, at the same time also part of a colonial, exoticizing language in an apartheid context. It might be interesting to know how you deal with this tricky situation - even if you write about it - in order to be able to evaluate it somehow. At the same time, there is also the question of what this means for the avant-garde. How was it perceived and how did it have an influence, so to speak, because it was on the ground and brought a completely different perception with it, because it didn't see the people from ethnographic shows or elsewhere, but also met these people. Because I believe that this intricacy is also something that is definitely a good example in a broader context with this concept of transculturality - to work through it again a bit.
Lisa Hörstmann: Of course, the whole thing is complicated by the fact that she was also Jewish, which means that both in Germany, at the latest since the National Socialists seized power, after which she never returned, and in South Africa, where there were also very strong anti-Semitic tendencies, she herself was in the position of those who themselves faced a racist gaze.
Yvette Mutumba: Yes, but how can one deal with this trickiness from the perspective of art historians or do justice to it, so that's also a question for both of you.
Lisa Hörstmann: I think, above all, by acknowledging that and trying to look at it from different perspectives - that is, by saying: of course she acted opportunistically, but she was a woman in a male-dominated art context, in Berlin also at the very beginning of her career. And I think you have to take into account that you can't or shouldn't always pass judgment directly, but that you simply present it as you see it, without condemning it directly.
Monica Juneja: Yes, complicated question... There will be no short answer, I warn you. I got to know the work of Irma Stern, which is hardly known in Germany, through this Bielefeld catalog, which has a lot of pictures, and there you get an impression of her work. And you had also shown quite beautiful examples here now and one sees a variety of positions in this work itself. And I think it's difficult to practically reduce the work to intentions. So that's why I'm very reluctant to talk about the artistic intentions - whether it takes a racist position or also an opportunism. I would have to dig much deeper into the sources to work out an intention. Still, one can ask: How are identities created? How do such subjects come into being? And there you can see that many factors play a role here. So for me, it's wrong to reduce her work to a white woman painting black people, and therefore condemn it. Because that's just as much a power imbalance that's racist - to me, that's just as reductive as these gender-typical stereotopias of 19th century art criticism that said, because it's a woman, her art is decorative and can't be more. So those kinds of reductive, reductionist arguments I want to avoid. Then we come back to her work and also to her own life experience. You said this is a person who is a European, living in South Africa, so she has emigrated. She's migrating through different worlds, she's Jewish, and she's a woman. So that means she is involved in very different contexts where in her life experience she has experienced both discrimination as well as being in a position of power. I think you have to take these contradictions into account when you talk about identity formation. And you see that in the work as well. So on the one hand, it's her claim to establish herself as an artist, in a world that is still largely dominated by men, in Europe. And many of these pictures, which are painted as exoticizing, as a search for the primordial state, like an unspoiled nature - they are also formed in dialogue with currents in Europe - similar to Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was one of her models, so these many mother-child pictures. I think there is such a dialogical relationship with Paula Modersohn-Becker. These are also pictures in which an artist tries to make her artistic activity visible and legible by taking various common typifications. There are also other pictures, including this picture, I think you see such a paradox here. This is a romanticized landscape and then the railroad line runs across the landscape. So this is not a landscape that is untouched by modernity. The railroad is par excellence the symbol of a modernizing society. So you see contradictions like that all the time. As for her work in South Africa, she painted exotically there as well. What was striking was this painting that they had also shown, which she saw as ethnological, where she tried to typify cultures, by depicting women in particular. And then there's a picture that you showed, of this maid in uniform - and that's a very different picture, that's a picture that really depicts an individuality. That's a portrait that shows an individual, that's not just an object of contemplation, that's an individual, that's a woman who's practically rebelling, so her whole body language is full of passion, even anger, and so that means there's also such a different consciousness. And you see all these contradictions. It's true that as a white woman in South Africa, she didn't take an open position - she never spoke out publicly against discrimination, against the apartheid regime. On the other hand, you know, as a Jewish woman, she was very aware of what discrimination, what genocide is - at that time, in the 1930s, a lot of exiled Jews from Europe had fled to South Africa and she was part of this Jewish diaspora, and they had also founded an anti-apartheid movement then, in which she was involved. So you see then practically all these contradictions. On the other hand, she never took a public position against the apartheid state. She also represented the South African state in international art exhibitions, such as the São Paulo Biennale. So again, you see these contradictions when she presents herself as a representative of an apartheid state abroad as an artist. And so I think that's a complex situation, because identities are also sometimes full of contradictions that you can't reduce to single factors. Yes, I think I would leave it at that for now.
Lisa Hörstmann: I just want to put that into perspective a little bit... Because I think my choice of pictures, I should emphasize that again, is not representative at all. So both this picture and Maid in uniform are absolute special positions. There are no other pictures in which modernity, yes, technical progress, and South Africa as an industrial nation or whatever are depicted in such a way. And also Maid in Uniform is really the only image of a South African black person in contemporary dress. And just that defensiveness, that refusal to look, doesn't exist elsewhere. So I definitely agree that there was something clear in that, that she was already aware of that and that she may have already been interested in that, but most of the work is very much in conformity with what is also held by the government, which is the view that people of different skin colors have different intelligences and cultures and standards of living.
Monica Juneja: Yes, I wouldn't deny that there is always a hierarchy of power between a white artist and her subject. I just wanted to say that within these hierarchical relationships there are sometimes a lot of contradictions and refractions as well, and that's important that we identify those.
Lisa Hörstmann: Yes, absolutely, I also simply think that this work here in the context of the National Gallery is once again an important example of how the historiography of modernism is and must be one of contradictions, including positions such as Ernest Mancoba or others who came to Europe from other perspectives, for example, all of whom also carry these contradictions, other contradictions within themselves. I think that somehow you also have to bear that, in the way you can approach the moderns.
Monica Juneja: Yes, absolutely. And then another point is the individual again. Now, despite all these contradictions, despite her "complicity" with official politics, I wouldn't deny her the capacity to feel empathy - on a very individual level - with the subjects she painted. And this is not only Irma Stern herself, but in general. So history has given us very many examples of people who, even across power differentials, were able to be empathetic and to oppose the slave trade, for example. One example that is very important to me is the research of historian Catherine Hall, who did research in England on Christian, middle-class, white women who had practically mobilized against the slave trade in England. They went door to door asking people to stop consuming sugar - that was such a favorite consumer item that was produced via slave trade. And that was so double-edged. At one point, these were women who got out of their bourgeois role as housewives and became political. And out of empathy with other oppressed groups that were far away, on another continent that they had no contact with, but only through images and media about slavery, they formed a movement against it. And they have argued very much through Christian messages, Christian love for people, based on this pattern. You can say that is also a paternalistic attitude against an oppressed. Nevertheless, I would not simply deny the ability to feel empathy - even if you have a different culture, a different religion or different skin color.