I met for the first time, rather exuberantly, at a dinner in Amsterdam about a year ago. If some of our exuberance came from wine, part at least was from the knowledge that we had known of each other for a long time and now, at last, we were meeting. That knowledge came from old friendships that each of us had with Dimitri Nicolas-Fanourakis.
Dimitri lectured in photography at Michaelis Art School, Cape Town, in the 1970s. Marlene was a student. She and Dimitri were friends. Although photography was not one of her subjects, he gave her insights into photography and to bodies of work such as that of Diane Arbus that were to be a major influence in her artistic development. She went to study and live in Holland and he went to England and, although they seldom see each other, their friendship has endured.
During the 1970s I occasionally went to Cape Town on photographic assignments. I met Dimitri and gave two or three crits to his students. We became friends and had intense discussions about photography, imagery and meaning.
After he moved to England we had an irregular correspondence and rare meetings, but the dialogue continued and in it, from time to time, he spoke of Marlene. I know that he spoke of me to her. Although there was never any deliberateness to it, I think he tried to convey to each of us that in our different ways we shared certain qualities to do with our attitude to work and to independence.
I have to admit it has not been easy for me to engage with the art of Marlene Dumas. Some months ago I began to look at books with reproductions of her paintings and found this to be exceedingly frustrating.
I felt no contact or intimacy with the pictures on the page notwithstanding that her subjects are so immediately human and seem so readily accessible.
While I found her way with words intriguing and delightful, I had difficulty relating what she wrote to what she painted, or rather, to the reproductions of what she painted.
While in England in August this year, I went to see Dimitri hoping he would somehow lift me into another dimension in regard to Marlene, but he seemed to have insights to which, although he tried, he could give me no convincing key.
At his suggestion I went to Tate Modern where there were two of Marlene’s pictures hanging. This was my first contact with the real thing rather than its reproduction. Hung among a lot of work by others these large heads seemed out of place; they seemed to come from and need a context that was missing.
When I told Dimitri of my response this is what he wrote:
‘I hope you find a way with Marlene’s work— she has ended up frighteningly free to look, to ask, to show, to question, to mock, to risk, to take the piss — big heart, big gifts, brave mind — and if you look closely she’ll really piss you — off with her unwavering gaze and refusal to answer to anyone but herself — she is desperately serious in what she’s trying to do but I doubt has ever taken herself ‘seriously’ in the manner that makes one want to kick the behind of far too many ‘artists’.â€
I didn’t doubt him, but I knew that if I was to find a way with Marlene’s work it would have to be by a kind of osmosis through immersion in the real thing. So I waited for this exhibition to arrive. I can only hint at the stirrings, captivations, provocations, delights and mysteries I have felt while experiencing her work in the past 10 days.
I am in awe of her ability with what seem like a few sweeps of the brush and hardly any paint not only to delineate but to make present the flesh and spirit of her subject. Seen close up her people’s eyes are simply blobs of paint. Step back and they are filled with life and in some with the immanence and imminence of death.
I went back again and again, beginning to learn something of the layerings and intricacies of the work. Perhaps the one that fills me most with wonder is the portrait of Elisabeth Eybers. Almost cartoonlike in its seeming simplicity, it evokes the lucid precision of Eybers’ vision and even the terrible clarity of the Witwatersrand light in her poem Wespark.
One of the smallest paintings in this exhibition, and easily overlooked, depicts a woman seen from low down and between her legs. A lover’s perspective.
Her belly and breasts recede into the top of the picture, the nipples are in the upper corners. Below are the tops of her thighs and in the middle, her sex. It is called Immaculate. I would like to read you the text that accompanies that painting. There are two voices, a man’s and a woman’s, presumably Dumas herself. It starts with the man:
‘I’m not moved,†he said. ‘It’s too static.â€
‘It’s too sad,†I said. ‘As if no one ever entered here. As if no one ever returned from there. As if it has never been used. As if all colour has gone from the inside, has been drained. This is not the origin of the world. This is the end of the world. I’d like my paintings to be very bare. To be as minimal as a figurative work could possibly be, without being dead.
‘With the image forever resisting the physical limitations of its frame, its material conditions as a painted thing. The paleness of the skin with the black-nippled corners.â€
‘The playing at the edges gives it scale. Without the edges it would be nothing,†he said. ‘If a painting needs a wall to object to, an image needs edges to belong to.â€
‘She brings no news. The only secret she hides, is that you don’t love me anymore.
‘But why should I burden you with that? Maybe it’s better to look at her without trying to get to the First Cause. Because then we’re back to square one.
‘Is that what we call inaccessible?
‘There’ve been times when I invited you. There’ve been times when I confronted you. There’ve been times, but not this time.â€
Like Dumas’ paintings, so her words and, indeed, herself when you speak to her: direct, unaffected and full of unexpected, seemingly tangential changes of direction that are in fact part of the richness that she so generously gives.
Marlene Dumas’s Intimate Relations is on show at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town until January 13.