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2026

Born on a farm in the country’s interior but raised and academically trained in Wilhelmine Germany, Stern briefly participated in Berlin’s painterly avant-garde before settling permanently in Cape Town in 1920. Her work initially scandalised critics, who branded her “revolutionary” and “ultra-modern”. By the mid-1930s, however, she had achieved national acclaim, later representing South Africa four times at the Venice Biennale during the 1950s.

Stern worked across a range of genres, notably portraiture and still life. Her prodigious output includes numerous autonomous studies of flowers in vases. An avid gardener, painting flowers was a sensuous delight. But, from the late 1920s onwards, when her high-Expressionist phase softened, Stern increasingly used flower painting to develop a more luxuriant and gestural handling of colour. This shift attracted the admiration of critics and collectors alike. Art historian Marion Arnold has described these compositions as among Stern’s “most sumptuous and sensual images”.

Mission educated and shaped by the modernising ethos of Christianity, Sekoto’s early intellectual formation informed his nuanced and cosmopolitan depictions of black urban life in South Africa’s major cities.

Following an extended stay in Cape Town, he moved to Pretoria in 1945 to live with his mother and stepfather in Eastwood, a small freehold settlement on the eastern outskirts of the administrative capital. Two years later, in 1947, he departed for Paris, where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. Works from Sekoto’s brief Eastwood period are widely regarded, both critically and at market, as the high point of his artistic career.

It was in Eastwood that his formal command of painting, notably of colour and mood, cohered with exceptional clarity. Sekoto’s Eastwood paintings are characterised by his emotionally resonant observation of ordinary people. This snapshot-like composition is emblematic. Positioned as attentive observer, Sekoto portrays three barefoot adolescents huddled around a brazier, seeking warmth. Their short trousers and youthful physiques suggest adolescence, yet their solemn expressions and grave bearing lend them an air of premature adulthood. While grounded in close observation, the painting avoids anecdotal realism. Sekoto’s palette, notably in the foreground bands of pink and light blue, is sensuous without extravagance.

The outcome is a painting that balances social description with painterly subtlety, transforming an everyday scene into a quietly monumental meditation on endurance amidst crisis. Writing of Sekoto’s Eastwood works, N. Chabani Manganyi noted that his works restore dignity to his subjects as oppressed people.

Sekoto’s post-1947 work varies in subject, theme and formal style. His Paris output includes various depictions of the city’s vibrant post-war café society. An acute observer, this work possesses a documentary immediacy. In 1959, the year Sekoto produced ‘Le Café Parisien’, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter was the beating heart of Paris’s bohemian, intellectual and cultural life. Far from being a mere bystander, Sekoto’s allegiance to, and immersion in, the quarter’s lively cafés and smoky jazz bars was absolute. An accomplished pianist who for decades earned a second income playing in jazz ensembles, in 1959 Sekoto released a vinyl single of negro spirituals on Roger Fasnacht’s Deva label.

The convivial subject matter of ‘Le Café Parisien’ directly corresponds with Sekoto’s earlier, pre-exile works portraying bar scenes in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Compositionally, it showcases Sekoto’s transforming style, when the umber tones of his earlier post-impressionist works were replaced by a more zestful palette. The predominance of blue, here skilfully used in variegated tones to describe the modish patrons and their milieu, is a notable hallmark of Sekoto’s later work.