Marlene Dumas. Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts. Part Two

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Marlene Dumas

Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts. Part Two

Edited by Mariska van den Berg

Second edition, revised and expanded

Londra, Koenig Books, 2014

(Review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

Part two. Go back to part one.

[Original version: March 2015 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 2) 'Sweet Nothings': the second edition (2014) published by Koenig Publishing in London

The reasons for painting

"No, they’re not all self-portraits.
No, it’s not always my daughter. No, I had a happy childhood.
No, I've never been in therapy.
No, I never slept with museum directors.
Yes, I find compassion the most difficult thing there is and
not compatible with creativity.
Yes, I find myself the best example of evil. "

(From: Give people what they want, 1993)  [40]

"The title of my selfportrait Evil is banal (1984) relates to these issues too. Everyone is potentially capable of extreme cruelty, if the circumstances feed it enough. The dark-haired stepmother can be a wonderful person, while the soft-spoken blonde mother could be the witch. We don’t know (can’t) know what is going to happen, at the first glance."

(From: The perfect Lover, the absent Lover and the Daughter, 1996)  [41]

Some interpret these words as a reference to the South-African apartheid regime, where also the softest person was a potential accomplice of a racist system. Marente Bloemheuvel and Jan Mot write, in the text “The Particularity of Being Human”, in the catalogue of the exhibition “Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon” at the Castello di Rivoli of 1995: “In the painting The Banality of Evil (1984) the artist used a photograph of herself. She painted out the car interior in the background, isolating the head in an abstract space. The title – which was taken from a text by Hannah Arendt about the bureaucracy of the holocaust – takes this innocent portrait of a radiant young woman and locates it within the racial discrimination debate. Dumas' white skin made her an unwilling part of the oppression in her homeland. She felt a sense of responsibility and a need to justify her position both to herself and others.”  [42]

In the most intimate moments of confession, the artist speaks of herself as a woman who has roots in different continents, has moved from apartheid-dominated South Africa to liberal and tolerant Holland, has a surname of French origin and loves US contemporary art. Precisely for this reason, a woman with a complex and undefined identity.

"Home is where the heart is" (1994) [43]

"My fatherland is South Africa
my mothertongue is Afrikaans
my surname is French.
I do not speak French.
My mother always wanted me to go to Paris
she thought Art was French,
because of Picasso.
I thought that art was American,
because of Artforum.
I thought that Mondrian was American too,
and that Belgium was a part of Holland.
I live in Amsterdam
and have a Dutch passport.
Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist,
because I’m too half-hearted;
and I never quite know where I am. "

Therefore, a woman who loves her own contradictions. Please read some verses of Women and Painting of 1993, a lengthy statement in verses about the reasons for her choice to become a painter.

"I paint because I am a woman.
(It’s a logical necessity).
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then
all women painters are mad and all male painters are
women.

I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse) [...]

I paint because I am a country girl
(Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint) [...]

I paint because I am a religious woman.
(I believe in eternity). [...]

I paint because I am an old-fashioned woman.
(I believe in witchcraft).[...]

I paint because I am a dirty woman.
(Painting is a messy business).[...]

I paint because I like to be bought and sold. [...] "

(From: Women and painting, 1993)  [44]

From abstraction to neo-expressionism

The artist explains that she studied in South Africa in a period of domination of art abstraction. In a collage of 1982, published in "Sweet Nothings", she writes of having lived abstraction with a guilt complex, because it was too far from the reality of life. [45] In 1987, the issue is deepened in a more analytical way:

"I went to art college in South Africa from 1972 until 1975. The painting teachers taught me that the 'illustrative' and the 'literal' were the greatest sins. As I understood it, the subject - whatever it might be – should not be clearly recognizable or, preferably, completely unrecognizable at all. Thus motifs derived from reality, the surface, the outward appearance of things, had to be reduced either by distortion or refinement. Imagination, not imitation. Who could disagree with that? But I was not happy with that situation. Something was gnawing away at me. Pop music, literature and film used subjects that everyone could relate to, but which painting wasn’t (any longer) permitted, able, or willing to tackle." [46]

It is the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (1946-) to bring Marlene Dumas on the path of figurative art. Wall takes pictures of situations that are artificially prepared, as in a movie scene. The large-scale photographs, which are included in light boxes and projected as backlit slides, have a huge success at the exhibition Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. Several of his major works (see Picture for Women) are designed as reinterpretations of art masterpieces of the past (in this case, the painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" by Manet), which he calls "painting of modern life." That of 1982 is also the first Documenta exhibition in which it Dumas, then still unknown, participates. The early writings contained in Sweet Nothings are right of that year: one can therefore say that the discovery of figurative art and the desire to give an authentic interpretation through the intermediation of writing, are marching together.

Dumas is captured by Wall’s art, which places (albeit in different terms) the relationship between photography and painting at the centre of visual art. It is a difficult transition: in the previous years, her myths were the major abstract artists of the first half of the century (Malevich, Mondrian) and abstract expressionism, following the teaching of Clement Greenberg.

The pictorial sources

The knowledge of art history is crucial to the South African painter.

"When I saw the Prado for the first time, I stood in awe in front of Velazquez and I could see why he is considered the greatest European painter.

But I did not cry.

Then I entered into the room with Goya’s black paintings, they put their spell on me. I covered my mouth as if to prevent the devil from entering. The Fates does away with the abstraction versus figuration discussion. Everything is flat and deep simultaneously. The four sexually ill-defined figures are unsympathetic. They are forces, not human beings. It is as if he painted not the screams of humanity, but rather the silence of God.

I felt so alone and yet so at home. I bathed in this sensuous, ominous brew of ritualism and exorcism. I felt the Gypsies, Islam, Christianity and Africa, all at the same time.

And then I cried."

(From: The Fates of Goya, 1996)  [47]

“Dead artists" (1993)

In Europe I eventually discovered the dead artists.

Those who were more alive than most of the living ones,

like Goya, Holbein, Manet, Degas and Courbet. Most

important I could see them in the flesh. It became clear

that (for example) my dislike for Impressionism was based

largely on ignorance and prejudice. What I thought (was

told, read) was not what I saw.

I do not have artists or painters as heroes. I like and use

bits and pieces of many, many artists and non-artists.

I cannot exist without others. They are my audience, my

burden, my inspiration, my subjectmatter and objectmatter. [48]

In her aforementioned lecture at the MoMa of New York in 2005, she confirms it and indeed makes clear that the influence of art history has contributed to her style much more than the fact of her being a woman. However, Dumas is not an essay writer, and perhaps poetry is not suited to explain the pictorial sources. So Dumas realizes in 1989 a scheme, in the form of design, entitled "The paintings of the human figure." [49] Analysing it, there are three strands and you understand a lot of his art.

First, she has a basic passion for the ancient and contemporary 'figurative humanist painting’ (Holbein, Rembrandt, Gericault, Hodler, Nolde, Baselitz) also in order to free herself from the idea - prevalent in European post-war, after Auschwitz - that "men are monsters."

Second, there is a tradition of American figurative painting contemporary (Eric Fischl, Alice Neel, Alex Katz, Robert Longo, Philip Gouston) which is probably an element of comparison for her art.

Third, there are some references to artists with whom the symbiotic relationship has now ceased to exist. First of all, Francis Bacon, because "too controlled and Mannerist" (to him Marlene Dumas was associated among other shows in the exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in 1995), then Willem de Kooning (too elegant) and Francesco Clemente (too sweet).

In search of iconographic references

The reality is obviously very complex, and Dumas plays on a system of cross-references between art, photographic and cinematographic images, dramatic events and pictorial re-contextualization.

The painting that gives the title to the current European exhibitions, for example, is "The Image as Burden" of 1993. From an iconographic point of view, it is clearly a Pietà, although with reversed roles: here is a man supporting the lifeless body of a woman. Although the stretch of the stroke cannot but remember the deposition of Nolde 1915, the picture is however certainly inspired by a sequence in a black and white film in 1936. The meaning of the work, moreover, is different from each of the above mentioned sources. Here the woman is the symbol of the image, of the charm of figurative art; the man sustains it with difficulty; the woman has become a burden for him, and therefore a source of great stress. 

Anna Magnani, in Pasolini's film Mamma Roma of 1962, is quoted in the homonymous painting of 2012. It is not impossible, however, to find here even the most expressive traits of Flemish painting from the Golden Age of the Low Countries.

The series of cadavers of 2003 proposes - through different quotes from Swiss painters (Hodler, Valloton) – a reference to the body of the dead Christ in the grave by Holbein, in Basel.

The work Stern (this is a reference to the German weekly) has also a multiple junction, encompassing both a work by Gerhard Richter on the death of the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (derived from a photo published by Stern in 1976), the famous image of a victim in Moscow (either a Chechen terrorist or an hostage victim of the reckless action of the security forces who used poison gas to try to free the hostages) and paintings again by Hodler on companion Godé-Dare on the deathbed (Hodler is cited by Dumas in his drawings on the history of art, already mentioned above).

The model for Lucy is a painting by Caravaggio (The Burial of Saint Lucia): a clear homage to the Italian painter, since the painting of Dumas was exposed for the first time in Syracuse, where exactly is located the work of Michelangelo Merisi.

And it is a tribute to the Pietà Rondanini in Milan the Tribute to Michelangelo exhibited for the first time at the Palazzo delle Stelline in the same city, for the exhibition of 2012.

The critical sources

In his paper "Blind spots" (one of the few that is entirely conceived in an essay form) Marlene Dumas gives a peremptory order to the reader. If you want to understand my concept of writing on art, there are two texts that must be read. We followed that order.

The first text is a classic of the sources of the history of Dutch art, by Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931): "The fundamental principles of the fine arts" published in Dutch 1919, translated in German by the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1925 and read in a facsimile reprint of the German version in 1966 [50]. It is the fundamental text of the De Stijl art movement, and thus the bible of contemporary Dutch art. Fundamental is the reference to the obligation for the artist to explain the work of art, making an orderly use of the word. "Of the many criticisms that are raised against modern art, one of the most important is that it refers to the public not only with the work of art but also with the word. Those who make this reproach to the artists forget in the first place that in the artist's relationship with the society there has been a shift (and indeed first of all a shift in social awareness), and secondly that the writing and the speaking of the artist about his work are a natural consequence of the inability of the general public to understand the revelations of professional modern art. Since the works are located beyond the borders of the awareness of many contemporaries, the latter ask the artist for an explanation.” [51] On van Doesburg Dumas notes: "He’s extremely lucid about his basic principles. I like clarity: at least as far as it’s possible to be clear in this tragic profession. It’s quite unnecessary, especially these days, to pile on every more layers of ambiguity. We already know that, by definition, art can never be unambiguous. But that doesn’t mean that we have to succumb to Duchamp’s ‘as stupid as a painter’. Gradually you’ll realize I’am after something other than an exact artwork, although I can’t (as yet) uphold my views with the same lucidity as he." [52]

The second text is the book Transparencies by Jeff Wall, already cited as one of the inspirers of Dumas. [53] The Canadian artist recovers the concept of "painting of modern life" of Baudelaire, as a fundamental form of art, but decides to turn it into a technology - the slide in a light box - which is combined with photography, film, and advertising.

Dumas writes: "He demonstrates that a narrative motif doesn‘t necessarily have to produce an anecdotal image, or that socio-political interest doesn’t perforce immediately lead to Agitprop, so long as there’s enough visual intelligence present." [54]

End of Part Two

Go to Part Three 

Notes

[40] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 71

[41] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 106

[42] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milano, Edizione Charta, 199 pages. Quotation at page 20.

[43] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 84

[44] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 pp. 76-77

[45] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 20

[46] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 42

[47] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 105

[48] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 75

[49] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 pp. 52-53

[50] Van Doesburg, Theo – Grundbegriffe der neuen gestalden Kunst (Fundamental principles of new fine arts), with a contribution of the editor H.M. Wingler and an afterword by H.L.C. Jaffé, Mainz, Florian Kupferberg Publishers, Series: The new books of the Bauhaus, 1966, 75 pages

[51] Van Doesburg, Theo – Grundbegriffe (quoted, p. 5)

[52] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 42

[53] Wall, Jeff – Transparencies, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel Publishers, 1986, 111 pages

[54] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 43