Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

13 Marianne Podlashuc neé Van Den Berg, was born in Delft in 1932. Her parents were Dutch Communists who had met at the Socialist International of 1926. Her father, Ben was a skilled worker, and shop-steward in the Dutch Metal Workers Union, her mother Amalie, was a librarian. After the humiliatingly swift capitulation of the dutch military in WW2, Ben was drawn into an underground cohort and was hardly ever seen. The war dominated Marianne’s early life, she learnt to shoot and eat cats. The terror and the dreadful hunger took its toll. At the close of the war, her mother, Amalie, had TB and weighed only 32 kgs. Her only hope, a Canadian red cross medic advised, was to go somewhere dry and hot, like Argentina, Africa or Australia. And so, in 1947, Marianne’s family set off for Australia, leaving her behind in Rotterdam studying art. They never made it, by the time they reached Cape Town, Amalie was too ill to continue and Ben, via the international ties of trade unions got work at the power station in Bloemfontein. And hot and dry it was. Marianne in time made a life for herself in arty, bohemian post war Rotterdam. She loved the world she was in, it was a time of new beginnings and optimism, and her work of the time is washed in this joyous light. The Korean War, so soon after WW2 ended this. The atomic armageddon of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced her parents that peace would not hold, and that a nuclear war was immanent between the US and USSR. Europe would again be the battleground, and they begged her to come to South Africa, at least for a while. And so, the joyous Marianne, landed in Bloemfontein in 1953. That it was a shock for her is an understatement. The racism, the starving, kwashiorkor riddled children, the poverty of the masses bludgeoned her. Her paintings moved from cheery light filled works to brutal social realism, causing Betsy Verwoed to spit at an opening, “waarom skilder sy die k——— altyd so treurig?” The Cold War deepened and she couldn’t afford to return to Europe, so she put a room in her flat up for rent. A young artist who spoke dutch answered. His name was Pod. They married and became core members of an artistic and creative circle that became known as the Bloemfontein Group… the rest you know. Professor Leo Podlashuc Cape Town, July 2019 Girl Dancer Wanted See page 60