The apartheid South Africa of Marlene Dumas' childhood was practically devoid of mass media. Newspapers and magazines were censored, so she clipped and saved all the pictures she could find. They seemed more real than her surroundings.
When Dumas moved to Amsterdam as a young woman, she didn't stop clipping, nor did she lose her ability to find life in even the most trivial of photographs. Found pictures from the tabloids and glossies became the basis of her painting. Nearly four decades later, they are the foundation of one of the most absorbing bodies of work by any living figurative artist. A vast retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is fitting tribute to her accomplishment.
In her choice of subjects, Dumas might be mistaken for a Pop artist. Like Andy Warhol, she has depicted celebrities and criminals and victims of assorted calamities, as well as a broad range of current events. But her treatment of similar source materials could not be more distinct. "I use second-hand images and first-hand emotions," she has written, an apt summation of her painterly transformation of pictures devoid of personality.
With his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol made mechanical reproduction his subject. He removed all living substance to make us see the image as an object, the painting as a product. Depicting Naomi Campbell, Dumas imbues a fashion shoot with emotional insight. She perceives more than is revealed by her source. Her painting increases the psychological resolution of the photograph.
Dumas has given similar consideration to people more enigmatic than Naomi Campbell. She has depicted Osama bin Laden and Mary Magdalene and even her own infant daughter. (Her sources aren't limited to mass media.) In each case, the painting takes advantage of the unknown as an opportunity to speculate in paint. The imagination that emerged out of apartheid South Africa has given Dumas an astonishing capacity: Her portraits seem more real than the subjects she depicts.
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