Marlene Dumas


Gelijkenis 1 & 2 2002
Oil on Canvas 60 x 230 cm
Punta della Dogana, Venice
17th August 2009

This diptych by Dumas is based on the famous Hans Holbein the Younger painting “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”, both of which are now owned by François Pinault and were on display in his new contemporary art space in Venice. They were originally exhibited one above the other, but for some reason his curator has split them onto separate walls. I felt this diminished the concept and made any concept behind the work hard to grasp. Of the two it is the second canvas that is the closest to the Holbein which is in the Basel Kunstmuseum (not seen), and whilst it is only a facsimile or simulacrum, the copy draws a power and melancholic aura from the original.

The painting represents a corpse stretched out on a slab with the loins covered with a white cloth. The painting is life sized and we view the painted emaciated corpse from the side with the right arm in full view with the hand protruding slightly from the slab. The chest shows a blackened wound from the soldier’s spear and the hand the stigmata from the crucifixion. The expression frozen on the face is one of hopeless grief, a man deserted by God without any promise of redemption.

Unusually for a painting for a painting from the 16thC, Holbein leaves the figure alone without the usual coterie of figures immersed in grief but also in the certainty of the resurrection. It is this isolation that endows the painting with its major melancholic burden more so than the limited palette of greys, browns and greens. Perhaps Holbein, himself a humanist on the threshold of atheism, is expressing his religious doubt. There is nothing more dismal than a dead God, and by painting a faithful representation of the dead body of a man taken from a cross with the head thrown back in suffering (rather than with the customary traces of beauty combined with the agony on the cross), Holbein confronts us with that possibility.

So what is Dumas trying to achieve with her copies? As she says “you can’t ‘take’ a painting, you make a painting”[1] and consequently for her it must be a decisive moral act. Perhaps the clue is that the first canvas is also partially based on a tabloid image of Michael Jackson sleeping in his oxygen chamber (in an effort to stave off his own mortality). Clearly the paintings have to be read as a pair and perhaps she is emphasising that we are a culture without the will to seriously examine our own problems. We prefer to be provoked and titillated rather examine our real problems, eschewing issues that are complex contradictory or confusing.

©blackdog 2009


[1] Dumas, Marlene “The Private Versus the Public” Marlene Dumas: Miss Interpreted Van Abbesmuseum 1992. 43

Marlene Dumas

Stern 2004
Oil on Canvas 110 x 130 cm

Frith Street Gallery, London
3rd December 2004

This was my first visit to The Frith Street Gallery; which comprises a group of small rooms on several floors in a terrace house in this street in Soho. Exhibition is titled "The Second Coming" and really works well in the space. Despite the positive religious note struck by the title the predominant aura of the work is one of death.

There is a good reference to the importance of the camera in Dumas work in her introduction in the press release "If we get to heaven and meet the Big Bright Light what will it be - the eyes of the saints or the flash of a camera?"

Six of the twelve paintings were of women’s heads with ambiguous facial expressions. The gallery notes gives the origin of these paintings as follows; Angelique (2004) is an upside down version of an Ingres; Lucy (2004) from is from a Caravaggio; Alfa (2004) is that of a victim of the Moscow theatre siege in 2002; Kim (2004) is from a Dutch newspaper photograph of the 25-year-old Kim Hyon-hui, responsible for blowing-up a Korean airliner in 1987; Ophelia to Medusa (2004) is from the Millais painting; and Stern (2004) is from the photograph of the corpse of Ulrike Meinhof taken from the magazine of the same name.

I found Stern the most compelling of the group, with an almost overpowering emotional sense of melancholia. The strongest perhaps because Gerhard Richter used exactly the same photograph for three paintings in his October 18, 1977 suite of paintings, depicting the body of Red Army Faction member lying dead in her prison cell.

Her version has a very thin wash on face, dark ground behind, eyebrows and lips burnt umber, a couple of white highlights left in thin paint. The face fills the canvas much more than Richter’s version (left), making the space really claustrophobic.

The green under-painting has been left in outline around the face suggesting a deathly glow, and the exaggeration of the open mouth seems to be almost gulping down the darkness above. The paint on the face itself is so sparse, but gives crucial clues to her death by hanging, yet the burn mark from the towel seems to strongly depicted, yet this flaw adds to the freshness of the image. I am sure I would have been tempted to correct it – how wrong that would have been!

I have now seen this painting over a dozen times and whilst it’s melancholic aura is undiminished, the impact in the two settings (Venice Biennale, Tate Modern) have not given the piece the stunning power it had the first time I saw it in the small white rooms in Soho.

©blackdog 2009