Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
22 June 2008 - 22 Sept 2008
Museum of Modern Art, New York
December 14, 2008–February 16, 2009
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.”- Marlene Dumas, 1993
Above: © Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, 2003, oil on canvas. Courtesy MOMA
Above: © Marlene Dumas: Dead Marilyn, 2008, oil on canvas. Courtesy MOMA
Above: Installation view. Courtesy MOMA
Marlene Dumas may well be South Africa's most famous art export. Born in a small rural community in 1953, she has lived in Amsterdam since 1975, and was for several months last year the world’s Most Expensive Female Artist, with her painting 'The Visitor' (below) selling to New York private dealer Nancy Whyte for US$6.34 million in July 2008 at Sotheby’s London. The sales figure overshadowed Dumas’ preceding record of £1.8 million in February 2005. Dumas is far better known in Europe than the USA, but the auction result and now this prestigious mid-career review, originating at MOCA LA and now at MOMA NY, will change all that. The exhibition includes approximately seventy paintings and thirty-five drawings, starting with early mature works from the late 1970s. Dumas is well-known for always working from photographs, not from life, and has said “Secondhand images can generate firsthand emotions.”
Above: © Marlene Dumas: The Visitor, 1995, Oil on Canvas
New York seems to be hot for her. Well... some people, anyway. An artworld frisson erupted around a rather scathing review by influential NY Times critic Roberta Smith (The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque, Dec 11 08), which began: "The figurative painter Marlene Dumas has been characterized as an artist who leaves you either hot or cold, but that’s not necessarily so. “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, cuts right down the middle. It left me warm."
While offering some positives, the review compared her unfavourably to the likes of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, suggesting that "Ms. Dumas’s best work may lie ahead..."
Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker was more enthusiastic, yet in his way even more scathing, and much, much funnier, referring to her "punctilious inelegance". Of her heritage he says: "In common with the draftsman and animator William Kentridge, another white South African of political bent, Dumas channels a direly exotic heritage of collective guilt and personally redemptive anger. She adds to it an element of truculent but breezy feminism, often expressed in her lively writing".
Dumas came to international fame on the wave of resurgent interest in painting in the last decade of the 20th century. She was included in the 2005 Saatchi show 'The Triumph of Painting', along with such superstars Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig, and her painting 'Young Boys' (owned by Saatchi, see below) created a considerable media stir at the time.
Above: Marlene Dumas: Young Boys, 1993, Oil on Canvas. Courtesy Saatchi Gallery London
LF thinks she's a very interesting painter, but the veneration and prices she now inspires are puzzling. There are many excellent artists working in this genre, and of this quality, and as some have pointed out, Dumas has been doing much the same thing for several decades without much apparent progression. Perhaps this is her special quality - a resolute determination not to grapple with complex conceptual conundrums, and just keep on doing faces?
Having said that, it's a large and varied show, and the top floor may be the most interesting, showing some very early drawings and collage works. It's on till mid Feb, so go see if you can.
A toute a l'heure
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