Brushing with the world

FOR well over a century critics have dismissed painting as dead. Picasso’s late flourishing in the 1960s proved them wrong. Then came Gerhard Richter and David Hockney. A generation later, Marlene Dumas is keeping painting alive and confounding the naysayers.

Now 61, Ms Dumas was brought up in apartheid South Africa on a wine farm near Cape Town. She was the child of an Afrikaner family that belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. Although she left South Africa nearly four decades ago (she now lives in the Netherlands), Ms Dumas’s work goes back to the tensions of those years, exploring themes of colonialism, occupation, terrorism and conflict.

Ms Dumas makes her political subjects personal by lending them humanity and pathos; she makes her personal subjects political by giving them historically charged titles. Her ability to merge the public and the private, and to link modern history and popular culture with the human condition, is a strong part of her appeal.

Her raw canvases—sometimes fuzzy, often with large blank areas—project a powerful presence. Works like the self-portrait of 1984 (above) have led to museum shows in New York and elsewhere. Ms Dumas’s work fetches seven-figure sums at auction. Now, Tate Modern in London is staging its first retrospective of her work, taking an exhibition that was first shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The 14-room exhibition offers a loosely chronological overview of Ms Dumas’s career. From the start she plundered media imagery, assembling press clippings of dead figures such as Steve Biko, a South African activist, and painting over magazine photos. Her earliest canvasses are larger-than-life-size portraits of her family and friends, which are also based on photos. Then come depictions of her young daughter, grumpy and mercurial.

After her mother’s death in 2007 she turned to weeping film stars for inspiration: Anna Magnani wailing over her son’s death in “Mamma Roma” and Ingrid Bergman becoming tearful in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Ms Dumas’s human subjects are painted in a messy style, suggestive of expressionism. Like the paintings of Edvard Munch, they often have a deathly pallor about them.

Ms Dumas likes to infuse her art with religious themes. In “The Image as Burden” Greta Garbo lies in her lover’s arms in the manner of Michelangelo’s “Pietà”; Ulrike Meinhof, who co-founded the militant Red Army Faction and died in 1976, is shown in the pose of a Christian martyr. Ms Dumas produces poignant crucifixion scenes.

Another important subject is pornography. Ms Dumas was struck by the sex industry when she first arrived in the Netherlands, and she has used it to revisit the nude and to explore hidden aspects of human existence. These works range from the erotic to the voyeuristic, and Tate has given them their own room.

As she has grown older Ms Dumas’s paintings have become increasingly political. The show includes work from a series done in 2009-10, drawing attention to new areas of conflict. In “The Wall” she shows a group of Orthodox Jews from the back, preparing for prayer. They stand before what looks like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but is actually the security wall separating Israel and the West Bank.

Violence related to the Middle East is a continuing leitmotif. “Osama” (2010) is a portrait of the al-Qaeda founder, inspired by a magazine cover in which, to Ms Dumas, he looked Christ-like. She gives him a benevolent air that is unsettling to viewers who are accustomed to thinking of Osama bin Laden solely as evil.

The artist continues to revisit Africa for inspiration. “The Widow” (2013) shows the wife of Congo’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, shortly after he was assassinated in 1961. She is in the street, her arm covering her naked breasts. Although two men (both clothed) support her on either side and she is surrounded by followers, she looks quite lost—Ms Dumas’s vision of an African martyr.

She first gained global attention in 1995 when she and two other artists represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. Since 2008 she has been represented in America by the David Zwirner Gallery, where she showed the series on the West Bank security wall. Her work has been bought by François Pinault, a French billionaire, and by American collectors, including Howard Rachofsky from Dallas, and Don and Mera Rubell, who have built a private museum in Miami.

In 2005 Ms Dumas briefly became the world’s most expensive living female artist when a painting called “The Teacher (Sub A)”, dating from 1987, sold for £1.8m (then $3.3m) at Christie’s in London. Ms Dumas is not unhappy about her auction results, but she resents being defined by them: “You want to be recognised for something that you’ve done,” she says. She need not worry about failing on that score. Many artists grow stale as they grow older. Like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud before her, Ms Dumas is one of the exceptions.

^{“Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden” is at Tate Modern until May 10th}