PROFILES

Her painting is like a biography, all movement and colour. An intimate testimony, socially aware and engaged, from the first woman to own mines in South Africa.

She could be the heroine of a novel, so individual and unusual has been her life's path enmeshed with contemporary issues. A life recounted in the book Franka, Mrs Gold by Hélène Fincker. The life of a woman who started from nothing and became one of the 10 richest people in South Africa, but whose passion for painting drove her to eventually devote herself solely to that, on the Côte d’Azur where she now lives. Back in the beginning there was a little girl, born in 1942 in the Italian Tyrol, who loved drawing people. She grew up so lovely she might have made a career from her looks but had already realised that beauty fades. "A friend invited her down here and she was voted Miss Film Festival and met Picasso who drew her," Fincker says. But that was not the young woman's destiny, instead she moved to Denmark with the man she married, Steen Severin, and took art classes in Copenhagen. Then in 1979 Franka Severin embarked on a new and important chapter in her life, in South Africa and Namibia where she would tenaciously force doors open for herself.

A self-taught businesswoman
"Initially Franka organised French Coal Board exports to Denmark, then quickly decided she would jettison the intermediary role and in a few short years bought a score of coal, gold, platinum and diamond mines," Fincker continues. A woman of character, Franka Severin campaigned too for women's equality with men in South Africa, and during the apartheid era helped set up the country's first non-racial foundation, the Johannesburg Art Foundation where she frequented great artists such as Bill Ainslie. She also opened the Amakhono Art Center on the edge of Soweto and later supported Nelson Mandela's bid for presidency.

Abstract painting that speaks
1992 brought a new departure when Severin decided to make her lifelong passion her sole activity. She now lives in Monaco and has a studio in Beausoleil packed with boxes of sketches and huge canvases. Her artworks speak of South Africa, where she developed a pronounced taste for colour along with precise, forceful lines. Additionally she uses all sorts of found objects, stones and wood. The subjects of her work are extremely diverse, ranging from grandiose landscapes through intuitive portraits illustrating miners' everyday lives and native Africans' struggles. Unclassifiable in both business and art, Franka Severin communicates her life experiences and points up society's flaws through her oeuvre, initiating an intimate dialogue with her era.

Par Tanja Stojanov