IT IS NOT every day that an artist’s work can be contained by the conventional genres of still life, portraits and abstraction, but also by another almost invented genre: ‘Rembrandt’. The painter and arts writer, Marianne Meijer enjoyed a lifetime-long love affair with Rembrandt’s work, which brought darkness and joy to her canvases. Indeed, art was her life purpose. An unabashed painter, with a strong line and a brazen ability to characterise her sitters, her skill in writing critically about the work of others, was a life blood to her career. She never stopped being curious, learning or developing her art, but Rembrandt, in contemplation and evocation, in mimicry and quotation, was central to her vision. She died on 30 July 2020, in her beautiful seaward-facing home in Umhlanga, KwaZulu-Natal. She was 85.

Born in Amsterdam on 28 May 1935, Meijer was the eldest of three daughters to the Dutch poet Ed Hoornick, who was outspokenly liberal. In a Europe dominated by Nazi ideology, this was dangerous. Alongside his wife, Liesel (nee Nussbaum), he worked for the underground resistance, protecting the Jews, and alongside Liesel, he was arrested by the Nazis at gunpoint in front of his three children. While Liesel was interred for a few months, Ed eventually landed up in Dachau concentration camp, where he remained until the end of the war.

Marianne was a teenager when she met Sjoerd Meijer, the man she was to marry. She was studying nursing at the time. Meijer was the son of a man who had business interests in cotton in South Africa. He was keen for his son to take the business over when he came of age, but Sjoerd’s true passion was the written word. It was a whirlwind trip, shortly after Marianne’s graduation; just before they returned to the Netherlands, Sjoerd was offered a job at a paper. It was 1958; they stayed. Sjoerd grew to be a widely respected art and theatre critic.

“She loved telling the story about how they had to get permission from the Dutch Queen as students were not legally permitted to marry,”said Carol Brown, former Director of the Durban Art Gallery and one of Marianne’s long-time friends.

In the late 1960s, after travelling between Johannesburg and Kimberley, the Meijers eventually settled in Durban with their two children, Gwynne and Eric. At the time, Meijer earned her income by running a swimming school.

While her children were little, Meijer began taking art lessons with the artist Andrew Verster who allowed her the confidence to create, armed as she was with the support of Sjoerd, the then arts editor for the KZN’s Daily News, who encouraged her to find and replenish her own unique energy and enthusiasm for the arts, over the years. “One of her early solo shows was an exhibition of apple paintings which she painted on huge canvases making us look again at the ‘secret life’ of apples and their meaning,” says Brown.

Meijer was deeply invested in the arts in KwaZulu-Natal. In the 1970s, she served on the then NSA (Natal Society for the Arts) council, she was chairperson of the Friends of the Durban Art Gallery, served on the board of the African Art Centre; and was assistant editor of D’Arts Magazine, a publication put out by the Durban Arts Association.

It was a time of her life of immense energy. Not only was she involved in decision-making and leadership in the Durban arts community, she was making art as well. From this time, she mounted at least six solo exhibitions. According to Brown, “Marianne had a strong and determined character and always stood up for what she believed in and fought the good fight whether it was access to art for all during the apartheid period or fairness and high standards generally.”

Curator Bren Brophy says, “Her works have a confidence, a clarity of focus and a vision that is hewn from a lifetime of dedicated art making. The paintings are as simple or as complicated as the viewer makes them. Meijer’s works are evocative rather than descriptive of a familiar subject. Her works give voice to a collective ethos we call life.”

At the time of her 80th birthday, Brophy curated a solo exhibition of Meijer’s Rembrandt works, created over a period of three years, analysing and deconstructing Rembrandt’s portraits, in a quest to find out just what it is that makes him so great a painter. The exhibition was hosted by the Durban Art Gallery. Said Brophy: “Her artistic career continues to develop and chart new territory … it is difficult to think of anyone other than Marianne who has had such a strong impact on Durban’s art community. She has consistently promoted, defended, encouraged and kept alive the arts in Durban in a manner which has been both generous and brave.”

Brown stated that “… [the exhibition] consisted of her acrylic versions of the Rembrandt works with which she had grown up in the museums of Amsterdam. It was a joyous occasion where Durban people came out in droves to celebrate her birthday.”

Speaking about her love affair with Rembrandt, Meijer once said: “As a young person growing up in Amsterdam, I was continually being told how great Rembrandt was and we visited museums regularly mainly to see the Rembrandts which were the pride of Dutch heritage. The Night Watch was a great attraction but so were his portraits. However, for most of my life I made paintings inspired by the things around me — the sea, feminism, still lifes, portraits of friends.”

Other than painting, Marianne had an aptitude for writing, and worked as an arts columnist for several papers such as the Natal Mercury, Northglen News and Daily News. Her art columns were consequential as they gave critical exposure to artists in her area. According to Billy Suter, who was her editor for over 30 years in the print media, she was an ‘absolute honey’.                                          

Meijer’s beloved husband Sjoerd died in 1994 at the age of 59; she is survived by one of her twin sisters, Erica; her daughter and son-in-law Gwynne and Daniel Goldberg, and their children Jesse and Zoey who live in London; and her son and daughter-in-law, Eric and Kim Irving and their children Caitlin and Alex who live in Sydney. She is also remembered and honoured by the arts community of KZN, as one of its true doyennes, a good friend and a wonderful woman.

Beck Glass, in 2023, was a first year Fine Arts student at the University of Pretoria. She took part in VIT-101, a course which focused on arts writing, given by Robyn Sassen.