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

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Marlene Dumas

Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts. Part Three

Edited by Mariska van den Berg

Second edition, revised and expanded

Londra, Koenig Books, 2014

(Review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

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

Fig. 3) The catalogue of the comparative exhibition on Dumas and Bacon at the Castle of Rivoli, 1995

Go back to Part One - Go back to Part Two

The role of sexuality - not nude, but nakedness and pornography

One cannot talk about Marlene Dumas without addressing the issue of sexuality, even explicit sexuality. The parallel between painting and writing is certainly very important also here, in many ways surprisingly.

“My best works are
erotic displays of
mental confusions
(with intrusions of
irrelevant information)” 

(from: The Eyes of the Night Creatures, 1985) [55]

 “I write because I love words.

Or rather, what is more erotic than a body with sex appeal?
A sentence with sex appeal.” 

(from: Why do I write (about Art), 1992) [56]

The omnipresence of sexuality in the art of Marlene Dumas has also lexical components, difficult to explain in Italian. Referring to the famous essay Ways of Seeing, published by the art critic John Berger in 1972 (and translated in Italian with the title Questioni di sguardi in 2009), [57] Ms Dumas refers to a lexical difference which is hard to translate into Italian. In English the Italian term 'nudo' is expressed with 'nude', a term of French origin or with 'naked', of Germanic origin (naakt in Dutch, nackt in German). The first indicates the classical nude, what you study at the Academy, and is the term used in art history; the second is the bare body, in its materiality of being unclothed. The nude is, in the opinion of Dumas, a general concept and public; the naked is a private and intimate concept. The artist is interested only in the second, the nakedness, nudity in bodily and personal, not-artistic sense: flesh.

In 1986 the artist still has doubts:

“At the moment my art
is situated between
the pornographic tendency
to reveal everything
and the erotic inclination
to hide what it’s all about”

(from: Pornographic Tendency, 1986) [58]

It is of 1987 the painting "The Particularity of Nakedness".

“Some comments from my viewers on the painting   The Particularity of Nakedness: A woman (writer) told me she was very disappointed in seeing this work, she used to enjoy my older, more conceptional work, so much but what was I doing now – painting pictures for gay men. She called it a homosexual painting?! She said my male was too passive. Will we ever get beyond the hetero/homo dualism? A man (museum director) told me that the painting was a failure due to too many horizontals. It was apparently very hard to paint a good painting without any vertical elements. Just recently I saw that John Baldessari did a work Horizontal men (1984). He said it was the obverse of a man vertical, the measure of things. It was a vulnerable alternative. I liked that.

The difficulties with this work made me think of the depictions of the sexual organs of Christ (remember The Sexuality of Christ? [Note of the editor: Leo Steinburg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1983 - 426 pages], although somehow in the reverse. My male image was experienced as ‘not strong enough’. Both parties wanted him erected one way or another.” [59]

Hesitations disappear, and the negative comments on the too passive role of naked figures push her to accentuate the image, now inspired by explicit images, taken from the sex industry. Pornography becomes the ultimate form of figurative art.

Marlene Dumas and the London School

Not surprisingly, the work of Dumas was often associated with the main artists of the London School. Think of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and, among the youngest, Jenny Saville (1970-). Personally, I agree: it is a comparison that draws a linear history of figurative art in Europe. It is from Bacon that came a decisive boost to the revival, in afterwar decades, of the - tragic and desperate - representation of the human body. It is from London (for the first time not from Paris, which was the homeland of the birth of abstract art, nor from New York, the birthplace of abstract expressionism) that came the strongest impulse in Europe to re-center the visual arts on the naked human figure. It is inevitable that Marlene Dumas is approached to this experience and compared with it.

On the other hand, we must not forget that the artist - as mentioned in previous posts - had described Bacon as 'too controlled, mannerist' in 1989, and had placed him in a group of artists for whom her youthful passion had gone out .

It must be said that at least two elements bind - at least conceptually - the two artists. I would like to examine them from the point of view of the sources of art history, a perspective that is not necessarily that of the comparative exhibition of the Castle of Rivoli, 1995. [60]

First, with Bacon not only the human figure is rediscovered, but also the discussion about art by the painter gains a new ground. Stiles and Pelz write in their “Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings”: “Between 1962 and 1979 Bacon gave seven interviews to the British art critic David Sylvester, which ‘may well have had as great an influence on painting during the last quarter of the present century as the critical writings of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot had on poetry of the 1920s and 1930s.’” [61] Therefore, Stiles and Selz see also in the case of Bacon a strong link between figurative art and poetry.

Second, Bacon - like Dumas - makes use of the camera and printed images as an intermediate tool between reality and painting, although in a different way than Dumas did. As Marente Bloemheuvel and Jan Mot write: “From his first important works in the 1940s until his death in 1992, Francis Bacon painted human beings in situations of conflict and violence. His distorted, dissected figures, locked in abstracted environments suffer and cry out in pain. The source of their suffering is not revealed in the picture and it seems as though life itself is the cause. Photographs of friends, art works from the past and images taken from the mass media were important sources of ideas for Bacon. Well-known examples are the paintings based on the photographs of Eadweard Mutbridge [note of the editor: 1830-1904. He was a pioneering photographer who studied, in particular, motion through photographic images] and the one in which he used a film still of the nurse from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. Bacon never worked these photographs straight onto the canvas. ‘In my case – he said – the photographs become a sort of compost out of which images emerge from time to time’ ”. [62]

In 1995, the comparison for Dumas against one of the giants of contemporary painting was still challenging. For the exhibition at the Castle di Rivoli in 1995 (which had been held before also in Malmö, Sweden), the artist takes the pen. The Italian translation by Lucia Borro, for the catalogue of the exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli [63], is - from a lexical point of view - a free translation of the original (as later published in Sweet Nothings [64]). Several features of the original (which was more oriented to poetry than to prose) have been changed in the text for the Italian public, perhaps to avoid excessive surprise for the use of poetry. This is the English text as published in Sweet Nothings.

“Bacon and Dumas

-  Or the Discomfort of being “coupled” (1995) [65]

The problem with me

And liking somebody,

is that it takes me so long

to acknowledge it publicly

that when I eventually do

it’s mostly no more true.

All artists (have to) participate in GROUPSHOWS,

knowingly or not. Being part of any collection,

and/or art history, the art is constantly placed

in relation to other artists, mostly of their own generation

or those with the so-called same style and concerns.

I’ve been grouped

I’ve been solo,

but I’ve never been ‘coupled’

in an exhibition.

I don’t really like ‘couples’ (which doesn’t mean I don’t paint

them). It is an inevitable part of culture. I believe relationships

exist between everything, yet some are more extreme than

others.

When Dumas writes these lines, Bacon has been dead for three years. She continues:

“(…) Bacon would definitely, if he had a choice,

 have said no to this show (as Marlborough [Gallery. Note of the editor: the London Gallery handles much of the legacy of Bacon] does), because he

would not have liked to be seen in relation to me. He wanted

to compare himself as an artist only in relation to the very best

(Velazquez and Michelangelo). I compare myself to whatever

comes in my way. As Jan Andriesse said: ’The difference

between you and him is: Bacon has a discriminating taste,

while you don’t discriminate’.

Is this a forced relationship? Not really. This was not
initiated by me or him, but arranged by others. Yet saying yes

to this, made me feel (initially) like I was trying to seduce or

make unwanted advances to the Pope, moved by the

aphrodisiac of his authority. But then at the same time: Which

woman of our time wants to be associated with the Pope at the

end of the 20th century?! I had mixed feelings (as usual).

Bacon, just like Picasso, is an artist that deserves a bit of a rest

after his death. Both of them, each of them, each in his own way, got so

type-cast by the media and public opinion, that one forgets

what they’ve really achieved. Picasso simply became Mr.

Macho, and Bacon Mr. Horror. (…)

Anyway, I got caught between my earlier youthful admiration

for Bacon and the image he had become. I even felt a bit

embarrassed, then for him, then for myself. Yet I don’t know

of anyone of the generation after the Second World War who

ever wanted to paint a portrait of a human figure (whatever

their intentions) who could escape Francis Bacon. Dutch artist

Emo Verkerk mentioned that he started his first drawings after

being inspired by that (now famous and classic) interview of

Sylvester with Bacon.” [66]

A game follows - always in verse - with the reasons for Dumas to say no to a parallel exhibition with Bacon, and the reasons for Bacon to say no to a parallel exhibition with Dumas. The game in verse ends with a prose text, where she eventually turns to the decision to accept the challenge of the comparative exhibition.

“Reasons to Say Yes (In Random Order).

In the end I couldn’t resist the temptation. As Bacon has said: ‘An artist shouldn’t be afraid of making a fool of himself.’ As I say: ‘A female shouldn’t be afraid of being called a fallen woman’. Bacon and Dumas have been accused of different but similar crimes. There is his nihilism and my indifference. There’s our interest in Picasso, cinema, photographs and the cruelty of life. Our dependence on chance. And the accusation that we’ve both been trafficking in images of misery, gothic horror and sensationalistic subject matter. And last but not least, there’s the question of sexuality. He likes men and so do I.” [67]

The above statement of Dumas clarifies a fundamental element of figurative art of the twentieth century: if for Renaissance the human figure and the nude were a function of the centrality of man in nature, if in the Baroque era they were the results of the exultant exuberance of life, the rediscovery of figurative art by the London school mainly aims at certifying the suffering of man, his uncertainties and loss of centrality. In many aspects, there is really continuity between the art of the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (characterised by decadence, symbolism and deformation) and the London revival of human figure in art. After bathing in the abstractionism and conceptualism, painters do not discovers the human body to celebrate its victory against abstraction, but to notify the human kind’s drama, its misery and immersion in a hostile universe. In 1959, Peter Selz held at MoMA in New York one of the first exhibitions on the rediscovery of man in contemporary painting, entitled "New images of man" [68] The catalogue is available on the internet and it is worth browsing its pages, at least electronically. [69] The introduction is by the German existentialist philosopher and Protestant theologian Paul Tillich: “Like the more abstract artists of the period, these images take the human situation, indeed the human predicament, rather than the formal structure, as their starting point. Existence rather than essence is of greatest concern to them.” [70]

It would be really thrilling to have in the future an exhibition to visit, which would really broaden the comparison Dumas-Bacon and document the diverse styles of contemporary figurative art: of course not only with paintings of Dumas and the school in London, but with the many expressions of figuration at least in Europe (the Figuration narrative in France, the Transavanguardia in Italy, the Young Wild Painters in West Germany, the School of Leipzig in eastern Germany and many others). It would be even more interesting to analyse the use which several key figurative artists made of photography and film (not only Dumas and Bacon: think of Gerhard Richter in Germany and Jacques Monory in France, artists who - very differently - also used photography as an intermediate tool between reality and painting). And finally, we should consider the important role that, for many of them (again, also Richter and Monory), writings on art had in the definition of their own artistic identity.

Political engagement

In recent years, the reflection on the events of Africa and the Middle East has captured the attention of Marlene Dumas, in an attempt to address all the terms of the problem. To render it credible, the painter had obviously to depart from the mere genre of portraiture. Instead, it remained customary to make use of print images. It goes without saying that to the painting of clearly politically inspired images also corresponded the writing of texts on the need to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose titles speak for themselves: "The Third World War" (2009), "Against the Wall" (2010) "Against the wall. Letter to David" (2010). These are all pacifist texts, which I share, but discussing their political contents is not the focus of this article. It suffices to say that the South African origin of Ms Dumas and her regret for apartheid are transfigured always into an element of human solidarity with the weaker part of the conflict. 

To the difficult emancipation of Africa are dedicated two paintings, entitled "The Widow", both of 2013. It is the story of Pauline Lumumba, who in 1961 crossed in vain, walking topless in the street (a sign of mourning, according to local customs), the town of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) hoping she could get back the body of her husband, the first President of the independent Belgian Congo, after he had been murdered by anti-government rebels of Katanga and his body had been hidden. In a conversation with Theodora Vischer in single catalogue for the exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, the Tate Modern and the Foundation Beyeler, Ms Dumas says that she saw the photo for the first time in the Netherlands, and that she had already created another work based on it, in the form of a collage, in 1982.

“The fact that I come from South Africa did not really help me understand the cultures of other parts of Africa. On the contrary, when I was growing up the Whites of South Africa were only interested in American or European culture. They even talked about South Africa’s Europeans and Non-Europeans. I was called a European although my generation had never been to Europe; I, my father, and my father’s father were born in South Africa. The political system placed you in a history which you didn’t know much about and which you hadn’t experienced directly (…)

My first use of that picture was in this 1982 collage. I used three women: Mandela’s wife, Winnie, Malcom X’s wife, Betty, and Lumumba’s wife, Pauline, so you had a South African, an American and a Congolese woman. When this work was shown, whether in America or in Europe, people would always say that it’s about Apartheid in South Africa. But is actually involved American history, the Congolese past and the history of South Africa. The collage was about all three women. They were all dark-skinned but they were from different places and their men had either just been put in jail for almost an eternity, as in Winnie Mandela’s case, the second one had just been assassinated, and the third one had also been brutally killed. These were public images from the 1960s, press pictures that had been taken shortly after the events. The women had just gone through a very traumatic experience but – being the wives of three controversial political leaders, men too honest for their times – they were immediately asked to comment on it. (…) [71]

“I first made the bigger painting. In this painting I specifically placed emphasis on the contrast of the colours black and white: the men wearing these ultra-white shirts that produce this very bright light, and, on the other hand, the dark pants, the black legs. The rest of the painting is all in blues, bluesy tones, her dark face and their light-blue faces … the smaller painting has all these artificial greens, while the whites are more pinkish. In the collage the picture is used as a document. I didn’t try to make it warmer or more expressionistic. In the painting I try to make it more touching through the use of colour. It has a completely different impact, due to the colours and brushstrokes.

I’m not saying that every painting has to be gestural, but it still use it very much, which, in a way, is quite old-fashioned. It’s old fashioned in the sense that – like in a Rembrandt or Frans Hals – it likes quite realistic or illusionistic from a distance, but when you move closer it becomes almost abstract.” [72]

To the Algerian War refers the “Woman of Algiers” in 2001 and the “Trophy” of 2013. Also in this case, the reference image, published in France in 1960, is known: as a mark of disdain, two French soldiers show a completely naked Algerian girl, as their prisoner. Once again, it is a photographic image of the first part of the 1960s.

It is of 2008 the accompanying poetic text in Sweet Nothings:

“North Africa (Woman of Algiers)

Home of the striptease.

Home of the dance of the seven veils.

Home of the ancestors of Abraham,

forefather of the Jews, Muslims, and the Christians.

Home of a God that does not want to be reproduced.

About Algiers, Nelson Mandela had military training there,

learned lessons of guerilla [sic] tactics from their liberation war.

Delacroix made a painting called “The women of Algiers” (1834),

women relaxing in a peaceful female harem.

In 1954, Picasso made one (one of the many) sensuous paintings

inspired by this French-African source.

Little did he know when this orientalism would later go.

In 2000 I saw a photograph of a young girl standing naked

held by – ‘exhibited’ between – two posing French soldiers.

It was taken in 1960 in Algiers.

I painted my Woman of Algiers in 2001.”

(2008)

Marlene Dumas and Italy

At the beginning of this series of posts about Marlene Dumas, I wrote of her exhibitions in Italy, at the Castle of Rivoli (1995), the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice (2003), the Galleria Civica Montevergini of Syracuse (2004), and the Fondazione Stelline in Milan (2012). To these exhibitions must be added the regular appearances at the Venice Biennale (1995, 2003, 2005).

The tribute that the painter has made to Italy is threefold. First, some important works were shown for the first time in Italy: among those included in the posts in this blog, I remember, for example, the number of dead bodies in 2003 , Lucy in 2004, and Pasolini, Mamma Roma and Homage to Michelangelo in 2012. Many others could be listed.

Second, for these exhibitions Ms Dumas has also always prepared new lyrics. She entitled the exhibition in Venice "Suspect" and focused it on the theme of death. Both the death of any trust in the works of art as well as the man's physical death. Here are two poems composed for the occasion for the exhibition catalogue.

"Suspect

Looking at images does not lead us to the truth,

it leads us into temptation.

It‘s not that a medium dies.

It’s that all media have become suspect.

It’s not the artists’ subject matter that’s under fire,

but their motivation that’s on trial.

Now that we know that images can mean whatever,

whoever wants them to mean, we don’t trust anybody anymore,

especially ourselves. [73]

The drawing room

We are not God(s). Everything we draw,

we draw after (the fact).

A dead image is never as dead as a dead person. [74]

Finally, there are texts of Dumas on the inspiration that she drew from Italian art, in particular for the exhibition of the Fondazione Stelline in Milan, in 2012, titled "Fate". The "little stars" (stelline) were the orphans, and the building that hosted the exhibition was the orphanage: an occasion for Dumas to deal with the fate, intended in the old sense of 'fatus' (as the English name of the exhibition etymologically shows). The text is not included  in Sweet Nothings and is quoted from the English text in the exhibition’s catalogue.

"Written in the stars

Fate is a sad word. Destiny is slightly better.

Freedom is stuck between the two.

The older you get, the more you move towards last chances.

In Milan you can see the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci and also the last sculpture Michelangelo worked on before he died, the Pietà Rondanini. A struggle with a subject he could not complete.

In 1993 I made a work called The Image as Burden. A metaphor, a pietà for the artist carrying the weight of his or her subject matter.

Last year I painted crucifixes inspired by religious Gothic sculptures. It was not the actual sculptures themselves, but the thoughts about them and the images of them that inspired my paintings of the cross. It was the last words of Christ that moved me: "At the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani’, which means  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mt. 27 v. 46).

Which brings to mind another Milanese related artist Maurizio Cattelan (Padua 1960), who understands the relationship between sculpture and a picture of a sculpture very well. His controversial work of the Pope struck down by a meteorite, is titled The Ninth Hour (1999). Often Cattelan’s work seems to look for magical words to change bad luck or tries to help us to escape from fatalism,... or the prison that art can become. [...]

Trying to combine  Michelangelo’s unfinished pietà and the orphans of Stelline, I came to three b/w film classics of the Italian cinema: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964), his Mamma Roma (1962) and Vittorio de Sica’s La Ciociara (Two Women) (1960)

I tried nights on to paint a portrait of Sophia Loren in Two Women, crying about her violated daughter. But it did not work (She said once – a quote from another context: "If you haven’t cried, your eyes cannot be beautiful"). I also tried to paint Pasolini’s mother in her role as the elderly Maria in the Gospel According to St. Matthew, but that did not work either.

Eventually  Anna Magnani as ‘Mamma Roma’, screaming, expressing the grief of a mother that has lost her son, became my model. Most pietà’s are about mourning and acceptance. In the painful Pietà Rondanini the mother is trying to lift up the body of the son. Trying to resurrect him from the dead. Not wanting to accept the unacceptable." [75]

Conclusions

Writing in the catalogue of the itinerant exhibition between Amsterdam, London and Basel, Marlene Dumas opens its reflections with the phrase "I am not a linear thinker." [76]

This is all the charm, but also all the trouble of her attempt to write on art and on herself as an artist, without resorting to any of the usual tools (treatises, essays, interviews, letters, memoirs) of art literature, but by making use of an unusual means for our times: the poetry as a means of narrative on art.

It is almost automatic to think about the Baroque age, when rhyming poems on art were not uncommon. Even the choice of method of painting, all focused, with the exception of politically-driven art works, on one single genre (portrait) and one single method (the appropriation from  photography), seems to follow a refined and unique taste.

If the attitude is driven by a Baroque inspiration, the style is an intimate expressionism, driven by a love for minimalism both in terms of pictorial means as well as choice of language used.

There is a clear correlation between the use of language (poetry) and painting (portrait): Sweet Nothings starts in 1982 when the artist - under the influence of American art - choose to abandon abstract expressionism and starts relying on figuration.

Despite the use of unusual narrative instruments, Dumas' intention to use written language as an indispensable element for her to escape the control of external criticism is steadfast. So, by her own admission, she may well not be a linear thinker, but she is an autonomous thinker, who wants to use the chance of writing about herself.

There are two reasons why making a steady use of the language is essential for her. First, the artwork itself does not contain a complete and unique message that can self-reveal itself. In fact, painting is emancipating from any inspiring images, whether from press or photographs, thereby acquiring new meanings that require clarification. Second, by choosing a preferred language tool, any artist can select his or her language and communication style, also in accordance to the own art style.

The eighties are confirmed to be a revival period of the centrality of art literature, based on a bi-directional  combination between word on the one hand and figurative art on the other, a long tradition opened by Bacon in the years 1950-1960 with the interviews to Sylvester and still very much alive. At a time when art rediscovered the painting and the human figure, it also revived the centrality, for the modern artist, of the ability to write (or discuss) about art.

The result is not only a new episode of figurative art, but in parallel a new experience of production of art literature. The new round of figurative art displays the profound drama of the human condition; in full synchrony, art literature does not have the reassuring form of the essay but the questioning one of poetry.

It is no coincidence that abstract art, inspired by a deep spirituality (the fundamental text is "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Kandinsky of 1910), had its culmination in the post-war years of reconstruction: years of great energy and almost unlimited faith in progress. Abstraction is optimism about the capacity to understand the deep essence of things. Figurative art, to the contrary, regained centrality in the decades in which the limits of economic development and the difficulties of global governance emerged.

Today, figuration dominates. However, it is not the sign of a recovery of confidence, but of a new crisis.

Notes

[55] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, Second edition, revised and expanded, 

2014. Quotation at p. 27

[56] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 11

[57] Berger, John - Ways of Seeing, 1972, (Penguin Modern Classics), 1972

[58] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 p. 33

[59] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 pp. 64-65

[60] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castle of Rivoli, Milan, Edizioni Charta, 1995, pp. 199. The exhibition was held from June 5 to October 1, 1995. It had previously held also at the Malmö Konsthall, between 18 March and 14 May.

[61] Stilles Kristine and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2012. The quote is on page 192.

[62] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, (quoted) p. 19

[63] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, (quoted) p. 19

[64] Dumas, Marlene – Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), 2014 pp. 176-177

[65] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, (quoted) pp. 35-39

[66] Marlene Dumas Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, (quoted) p. 36

[67] Marlene Dumas. The Image as Burden, London, Tate Publishing, 196 pages.  The text is at pages 178-179

[68] Selz, Peter - New Images of Man, New York, Museum of Modern Art Publications, 1959, 160 pages. The exhibition was held between September 30 and November 29.

[69] https://archive.org/stream/newimagesofman00selz#page/n7/mode/2up

[70] Also in Stiles Kristine e Selz Peter, Theories and documents (quoted), p. 192

[71] Marlene Dumas. The Image as Burden (quoted), p. 169

[72] Marlene Dumas. The Image as Burden (quoted), pp. 169-170

[73] Marlene Dumas, Suspect, edited by Gianni Romano, Ginevra-Milano, Skira, 2003. The quote is on page 35 (in Italian and English). The English text is also published in Dumas, Marlene - Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), p. 134.

[74] Marlene Dumas, Suspect, (quoted). The quote is on page 80 (in Italian and English). The English text is also published in Dumas, Marlene - Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, (quoted), p. 134.

[75] Marlene Dumas. Fate, edited by Giorgio Verzotti, Milano, Silvana Editoriale, 2012, 120 pages. The exhibition was held between March 13 and June 17, 2012 at the Fondazione Stelline.

[76] Marlene Dumas. The Image as Burden, (quoted), p. 11