I first met Marlene Dumas in the summer of 2017 in Amsterdam, where she has lived for the past 43 years. I had come to talk to her about contributing to an exhibition I curated celebrating the writer James Baldwin. For my show, Marlene expanded on her fascinating “Great Men” series, a dramatic group of ink portraits she began in 2014. In her images of Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Jean Genet, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among many others, Marlene created heartfelt works about gay or bisexual cultural figures seen from a different perspective—Marlene’s perspective—that made those familiar faces somehow more intimate. Their aliveness was palpable.
After that, Marlene and I stayed in touch. When Interview called to mark the publication of her recent book, Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals, based on a suite of ink wash and oil paintings that she recently showed at David Zwirner in New York, I welcomed the opportunity to talk. I particularly wanted to hear about the amazing trajectory that her life had taken: from growing up under apartheid in South Africa to life among “Europeans”; the development of her skills as an artist; and the rewards and challenges of being a working mother and now a grandmother.
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HILTON ALS: Darling Marlene, are you in your studio?
MARLENE DUMAS: I am in the studio, but I’m not painting at the moment. I’m preparing for all of these lectures I’ve been asked to give. I’ve been going through my notes and newspaper clippings from recent years that I’ve cut out.
ALS: When you make a book of your paintings, as you’ve just done with your Myths & Mortals monograph, do you feel it’s a chance to get intimate with the work?
DUMAS: Yes, because before that, the paintings are really just in my head or how I remember them or the experience of making them. Growing up in South Africa, I mainly saw paintings in books. Art history came from books. When I first arrived in Europe to see certain works, be it van Gogh or Rembrandt or modern art, I’d never seen them in the real before, and suddenly I saw how small Girl with a Pearl Earring is, or that it’s really about scale and color. When I’m in the studio with my paintings, I’m almost sitting on top of them. Some of that intimacy gets a bit lost when they go into a gallery. The gallery can be a cold space, not a home space. And I do think, “Oh, these poor little things, can they still survive?” So that’s scary and alienating. But a book has an intimacy in that you can hold it in your hand. Of course, in a book, it also happens that the big, tall paintings become small, and the small paintings start to look bigger.