Marianne Podlashuc at the Old Town House
by Stephen Conor Ralphs
I am constantly struck by the facility of certain words to somehow ensure or encourage their own repeatability and extended usage. 'Vicissitudes' is one such contagious word, its form recalling an echo, a return. True to this repetitive nature, the word recurs in the reviews and re-hashed media 'bytes' of the Marianne Podlashuc exhibition currently showing at the Old Town House.
'The vicissitudes of an era' are referenced in the captions set in an elegant, if sentimental, typeface on (Delft-inspired) decorated placards next to each work in the exhibition. The phrase pertains to the shifting context in Europe from whence Miss Van den Berg came in 1952 and the discordant South African political landscape in which she settled as Ms Podlashuc until her death in 2004. The exhibition is entitled 'Woman from Delft' and includes an impressive range of works spanning the years of her production.
From these placard descriptions, a further meaning of the word surfaces: the unexpected turn of fortune that included her sudden allergy to oil paint in 1957 and the birth of her son, Boris in 1967, with a terminal illness. These assist in both formal and contextual considerations: her later style, after a super-realist fashion is, arguably, limited by her use of acrylic paint and Boris features in numerous emotionally-charged compositions.
But the vicissitudes I wish to raise, as a response to these paintings and this curatorial project by Iziko curator Hayden Proud, are invoked rather by some important connections that this exhibition, and arguably art history, have failed to sufficiently emphasise: the vicissitudes of painting as a discipline, and its political or cultural efficacy. That is to say: there is very little information contextualising Podlashuc's works within the shifting, and at times precarious, field of the painted representation over the time of her production.
From the artist's early student work (at the Rotterdam academy), informed by a dominant trend towards abstraction in Europe in the 1950s, to the inspiration of the American super-realist movement (the likes of Richard Estes) in the 1970s, Podlashuc�s work evidences a telling dialogue with the contemporary. In the early 1980s, when strong calls were made for painting's death as new video and audio media seemed to capture the essence or multiplicity of identities or social realities more convincingly, Podlashuc persisted in producing painted depictions of the human condition in circumstances of elation, whim and quandary. The clear return to the painted form in the late 1990s and early 2000s marked a tribute to her persistence.
This perseverance with a threatened medium and a difficult subject matter is to my mind the strength of her work but it does not seem to be adequately emphasised in the second section of the exhibition - the display of her work produced after 1970. Although there is sufficient (largely biographical) contextualisation of the works in the downstairs section, perhaps further insight regarding some of her contemporary influences and artistic struggles would have been useful in the upstairs display.
There seems, here, to be an echo of injustice that has weighed down Podlashuc's work in the past. I am thinking particularly of her unrecognised role as an early social realist painter that prefigured much protest art, notably by black artists. These works of the 1960s and 1970s include seminal pieces such as Herder with Goats (1958), Three boys (1961) and her depictions of ill young patients in a hospital's burn ward - undoubtedly an emotive portent of the injustices affecting South African youth of the 1970s.
Considering this art historical oversight and a critic's comment made at the time of Three Boys - that it was the inappropriate view of an outsider ('uitlander') - the exhibition title seems misleading and slightly unfortunate. 'A Woman from Delft' seems to suggest that these often insightful portraits of life in South Africa were simply the observations of a tourist, a visitor, instead of someone embedded and implicated in the daily experience of South African life. Many works suggest otherwise - Podlashuc was aware of the dangers of social realism and objectifying her subjects. In some works such as Self Portrait at the Zebra Crossing (1982) the artist situates herself within the pictorial frame, acknowledging that she too is implicated in life's complexities and injustices.
Since Podlashuc's work did not receive widespread critical acclaim for its social message, perhaps it is relevant to note that art history too has undergone far-reaching changes over the past 50 years, to a large extent as a result of the feminist critique. This exhibition coincides with the commemoration of Women's Day and marks an historical shift where women are increasingly being written into history. My concern is that this exhibition writes Podlashuc into South African art history in too narrowly a biographical, if sentimental, way.
Opens: July 6
Closes: October 31
The Old Town House
Greenmarket Square, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 481 3933
Hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 4pm
