Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

10 Alexander Podlashuc, who died at the age of 79 in Cape Town in 2009, was a highly gifted, forthright and smouldering personality who was known to his family, friends, students and associates by the simple, somewhat blunt contraction of his surname - as ‘Pod’. The family name was of Ukrainian origin. Pod’s father Charles Podlashuc had first arrived in South Africa as a child sent from Russia to join his sister in Pretoria. He was fluent in Russian, and became equally so in both English and Afrikaans. Charles qualified as a lawyer and subsequently became Inspector of Schools in the-then Transvaal. Somehow, Charles Podlashuc always kept the company of a number of artists in Pretoria. In the 1930s, for example, he assisted the young Walter Battiss in getting his first job as an art teacher. Pod often used to recount his early memories of his father Charles’ regular chess games with the painter Frans Oerder (1867- 1944) in a room in the bell tower of the Pretoria Town Hall. 1 At the age of 16, Pod enrolled at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. Here, his youthful disrespect and prankish lampooning of his artistically conservative mentors Professor Edward Roworth (1880-1964) and Melvin Simmers (1907-1992) aroused the former’s considerable ire. 2 Expelled from Michaelis, he briefly sought refuge at the Continental School of Art under the painter Maurice van Essche (1906- 1977), with whose modernist sensibilities he felt a greater sympathy. In 1948, Pod was accepted as a student at the Central School of Art in London. This, in many ways, proved to be his most formative educational experience, as much as the emotional impact After the completion of his studies, Pod remained a while in London where he briefly worked as a cartoonist for Punch Magazine . Moving in influential circles as a portrait painter, his sitters included the famous military strategist Basil Liddle-Hart (1895-1970), the writer Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), and the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg trials, Sir Hartley Shawcross (1902- 2003). He later moved to Amsterdam where he worked briefly in the printing and publishing field, returning to South Africa in 1954 to take up a job as a graphic artist on the Pretoria News. In 1955 he settled in Bloemfontein, which was then the epicentre of the magazine publishing industry. It was here that he met and married his Dutch-born wife Marianne in 1957 with whom he had an enduring artistic partnership until her death in 2004. Together with Renee le Roux, Frans Claerhout, Eben van der Merwe and Marianne Podlashuc, Pod was the ‘driving force’ and leading member of the Bloemfontein Group, which he helped to establish in 1958. Esmé Berman recognised the strong influence of British modernism in Pod’s work when she described him as ‘a figurative painter of social- realist inclinations’, whose ‘dry linear technique is related to a number English artists of similar intention’. 4 His work, she added, is ‘saved from purely illustrational effect by the sensitivity of drawing and the sympathy with which he presents his images’. 5 There is always a strong interplay between Pod’s painting and his printmaking. His painting displays certain graphic qualities, while his black and white prints convey something of the seething surreality, ‘colour’ and and varied expression of line seen in his larger paintings. of the parlous state of war-torn Poland and the suffering that he witnessed there in his student travels on the Continent. London was also mired in post-war austerity, but it was here that he encountered a stellar range some of the greatest talents in modern British art as his teachers. Over four years he was taught by Keith Vaughan (1912-1977), Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983), Victor Pasmore (1908-1998)), William Roberts (1895-1980), Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) and Paul Hogarth (1917-2001). Broadly and very simply put, this diverse group of artists made two major impressions on the young Pod’s aesthetic sensibilities. Generally, Hogarth, Hermes and Peake were superbly skilled in drawing, illustration, caricature and graphic techniques whereas Roberts,Vaughan and, to a lesser degree, the early, pre-abstract Pasmore, defined and simplified form, especially the human figure in semi-mechanical terms. This they achieved through the faceting, quasi-cubist lens of what came to be known as BritishVorticism. Derived in part from the dynamism and strident manifestoes of Italian Futurism (itself a variant of Cubism), Vorticism was the particular creation of Roberts and his famous associate Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). It was for their work that Pod was to have a life-long admiration. Pod’s late oil painting Cattle Auction in Leeuwaarden (1992), with its planar forms and clashing green and red complementaries, demonstrates the persistence of the influence of Roberts’ and Lewis’s graphic and quasi-satirical imagery. It has been said that for Wyndham Lewis that ‘the function of art, as for satire, is to depict reality’, and so it became also for Pod. 3 Alexander Podlashuc (1930-2009)