Marlene Dumas: The Most Beautiful Ugly Painting in the World

The Palazzo Grassi in Venice is presenting a large exhibition of work by the painter Marlene Dumas (March 27th, 2022—January 8th, 2023), the reflection of a long career that has spanned almost 40 years. The paintings on display confront desire and death, pain, and all kinds of nudity. A portrait through her paintings of an artist who, as Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen writes here, is not accountable to anyone.

The least that can be said about Marlene Dumas’ work is that it does not aim to please. The paintings on display at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice confirm this. The show, the Amsterdam-based South African artist’s largest monographic exhibition in Europe, brings together works painted between 1984 and 2021. It is piercing and provocative. Even the tender canvases are simultaneously tense: works that fill you with emotions and stretch you like a bow. With the complicity of the curator, Caroline Bourgeois, the uncompromising nature of the exhibition is asserted from the very first room. On the most immediately visible wall, a teenager in profile, with a pale body on a black and grey background, observes his penis reaching astonishing dimensions with a hesitant smile. There is no sign warning us to keep children away: painting, that of Marlene Dumas in particular, but painting in general, is not made for minors. Too bad for parents who venture into contemporary art spaces without wanting to understand that. The painting is called D-rection (1999). A strange title that indicates either the direction of the boy’s gaze, whose eyes are hidden by a fringe, or the oblique orientation of the penis, pointing high and erect towards the space beyond the canvas.

CLOSE-UP ON DESIRE

This combination, here and in other paintings, of a subject that might be qualified as difficult and a title that orientates the reading, or rather disorientates it, lightens it or weighs it down, is typical of Marlene Dumas. She paints a woman’s buttocks, her big lips, her thighs? The space between the legs gives the painting its title: The Gate (2001). A painting depicting prostitutes seen from behind, waiting in the dark hallway of a brothel or a peep show?The piece is called The Visitor (1995), although the girls are staring at the yellow rectangle of an empty door. A painting refers to the framing of The Origin of the World, but in black and white and with a curvaceous model? Dumas chose to name it Immaculate (2003), in other words the Virgin Mary. Our last illustration of this discrepancy, which somewhat recalls the puzzles of Magritte, is the painting that represents a hill with a rounded crest covered with a forest. The rather small rectangle of canvas, black and white like the painting of the boy at the beginning, painted in a fluid medium combining oil and water, is called Magnetic Fields (2008). It’s a tribute to Margaux Hemingway. Looking closer, it is indeed a landscape, but an intimate one: a mons pubis covered with pubic hair.

Many of the paintings have sex as a theme. Young people’s solitary practices, the mercantile services of brothels, exhibitionist poses drawn from pornography. But also, more or less explicit oral exchanges— Kissed, Tongues, Kissing (2018)—, rough mating scenes— Hierarchy (1992)—, bodies disentangling themselves— Homage to Michelangelo (2012), based on Pietà Rondanini—, lovers, or more precisely female lovers, who dream or regret— Longing (2018), Lovesick (1994). Regardless of what the titles evoke, sometimes with trompe-l’oeil suggestions, there is no intrigue to be found in the paintings themselves: Dumas does not consent to the beginning of a narrative. To fuel the viewer’s imagination, there would need to be a setting, secondary characters. But the settings are scarce and the canvases most often limited to one body, and even to a fragment of a body: the sexual organs, the face, the mouth. Since she frequently paints naked characters, there are no clothes either to assign the figures to a place, a time or a social class. Only the essential remains: the evidence of their body.

Dumas does not depict these bodies only in terms of the pleasure they desire or are subjected to. Almost as often, she shows them deserted by life and revealing the thingness ( Dingheit, thingness) that characterised them during their lifetime.

In the exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, the only complete or almost complete male nude on canvas, The Particularity of Nakedness, depicts a man lying down.The attitude could be that of relaxation, with the blue colour of part of the background evoking the sea, but it is more reminiscent of a corpse, since the stretched composition recalls The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein. The canvas, one of the oldest on display (1987), is gigantic, a little more than three metres long. The man does not quite fit into it: the toes of one of his feet, the top of his right arm, thrown back, are cut off by the edges.The face is affable, or perhaps awkwardly frozen; the eyes, of the same icy blue as the sea or the background, stare at the painter, and therefore the spectators, or pale as they withdraw from life. The open mouth smiles, unless it is yawning by a reflex contraction. The hair is heavy, the genitals sleep, the perspective of the anatomy is impossible, here in profile, elsewhere almost three-quarters: nothing works, and this is quite deliberate.The man is not just anyone: he was Dumas’ companion and her daughter’s father. He died last year. This painting represents him alive, but in the youth of this beloved body, 30 years before his disappearance, it captures the death that would transform him into an object. Nudity in Dumas’ work has an ontological character. It affirms and deploys the biological reality of life against the illusion of a glorious beauty. In English, nakedness denotes the kind of nudity that reveals weaknesses and witherings: the nudity that Francis Bacon painted, or Jean Rustin, in another way. Despite its beauty, the body of Jan Andriesse, the painting’s model, is “naked” to the highest degree: an image of mortal and therefore tragic life.

“NAMING OUR PAIN”

The real dead began to appear in Dumas’ work the 2000s. In Venice, there are five of them on display: Death by Association (a Palestinian boy killed by an Israeli shooting) [2002], The Death of the Author (here Céline) [2003], which was shown at the Musée d’Orsay in the autumn of 2021, The Martyr (200204), Canary Death (the body of a migrant washed up on the shore) [2006], Dead Marilyn (2008). Men and women famous for their work, their beauty, their singular destiny, or anonymous people, whose equally precious lives were snatched away before their time, all similarly reduced to the vanity of flesh from which the red has withdrawn and which displays the colours of an ice floe.

In four of these five paintings, Dumas depicted only the face. For The Martyr, the initial version, which featured the entire silhouette on a canvas more than two metres long, was cut to leave only the face. This may be because although death can express itself throughout the whole body, it is only the face that marks the fact that the corpse had an identity: that it was a person. Marilyn, the icon celebrated by Warhol, metamorphosed into this flabby blue mask, stained with grey spots? The relatively small size of the canvas (40 cm by 50 cm) does not make the vision less unbearable: this head of a woman, prematurely aged by the absence of makeup and the onset of decomposition, could be that of a mother, or that of Marlene Dumas herself. Marlene Dumas has painted faces all her life. The oldest ones visible in the exhibition date from 1985 ( Die Baba, The White Disease). They are painted in small or larger formats, up to 1.30 metres high for two versions of De acteur [2019] (the male is assumed), a portrait of the

Dutch actress from Suriname, Romana Vrede. Each model occupies a single canvas—no group portraits—but sometimes several canvases are intended to be presented together. This is the case of the triptych or, one is tempted to write, of the trilogy around Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pasolini himself, his mother Susanna Colussi and, under the title Mamma Roma (2012), the actress Anna Magnani in the film of the same name, screaming her pain at having lost her son. A man caught between the oppressive love of two mothers, painted by a woman who was a mother herself at the time, always in a fluid medium like watercolour, in close-up and in black and white like the photographs and photograms that inspired the paintings, but also with slightly dirty shades of yellow.

The faces, painted in black ink and on paper in this case, are also often organised from the outset into series. Might this be the subverted influence of Warhol, whom Dumas willingly quotes and whose rebellious daughter she would thereby seek to become? A legacy, also, of the tronies of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, since Dumas was trained and lives in the Netherlands? It is not illegitimate to evoke these filiations and encounters, but no doubt it is somewhat futile. Because these series of faces—faces rather than portraits, since there is no indication that real individuals are represented each time—many of which were painted in the 1990s, have a political significance that is linked to the artist’s South African childhood. In Venice, the most spectacular series is Betrayal— a title that is obviously not neutral. 28 sheets, four lines of seven faces, are arranged in a grid and associated at the top with another sheet of the same format depicting, again in black ink, a frog. Why this animal?The artist does not say. But in 1994, the same year as Betrayal, she made a painting entitled The Crucifixion— also present in the exhibition—in which a similar frog was martyred like Christ. Betrayal alternates between the physiognomies of white people and coloured people.The work mixes what were still called “races,” as was the policy of the country that had broken with apartheid seven years before. But through this recording of faces, three-quarters, frontal or in profile, like simulacra of police classification photographs inherited from the nineteenth century, the piece reminds us that the reality of discrimination continues to prevail. Another series of faces, begun 30 years later and still in progress, makes a striking impact on the visitor. In a large room, ink and pencil drawings are arranged in two lines along the largest wall. These are real portraits, not anonymous heads: men whose names and short biographies are written on the paper. Scientists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, composers, or soldiers, they were prosecuted for their socalled deviant sexuality. The series is called Great Men, an unambiguous title this time. It was designed and exhibited in St Petersburg in 2014, after Russian laws criminalised the promotion of homosexuality.

OPEN-END

The fact that Great Men is exclusively devoted to men is only initially surprising and should not be off-putting. At the age of 68, and with a career that has spanned almost four decades, Marlene Dumas has painted enough female bodies and faces and sufficiently imposed painting as an essential and militant gesture in the third millennium as to no longer be accoun

De gauche à droite from left:

The Particularity of Nakedness. 1987. (Coll. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). The Painter. 1994. (Coll. The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Vue de l’exposition show view Open-end, Palazzo Grassi, 2022. (Ph. Marco Cappelletti con Filippo Rossi ; © Palazzo Grassi ; © Marlene Dumas) table to anyone, particularly with regard to her feminism. Is that why she chose to name this exhibition Open-end? Because the maturity gained and the beginning of what could be called her late work (the end) opens up a greater freedom? In any case, one is struck by the place occupied in this exhibition by a child: her daughter Helena. Born in 1987, she did not become an artist, but her mother has always symbolically passed on the baton to her. In a narrow room that evokes a womb, she projects a film that shows Helena as a child, sleeping near a skull: the beginning and the end, once again. She exhibits her own drawings completed with colours by the little girl that Helena was at the time ( Underground, 1994-95), and above all, she represents her as a baby, naked, with an almost transparent body and hands smeared with red pigment, facing the spectator with an austere air and advancing towards the future without asking for consent.

The painting is called The Painter (1994), “la peintre” because you have to specify the gender in French. A form of allegory of the need to paint, and in reality an allegory of painting which is now inevitably feminine.

Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen is a professor of art history at the École normale supérieure. A Renaissance specialist, she is also interested in living art.