Musée d’Orsay, Paris
October 2021
October 12, 2021–January 30, 2022
To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), South African-born artist Marlene Dumas, who has lived and worked in the Netherlands since the mid-1970s, created a series of paintings inspired by the author’s Paris Spleen. This series will be exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay this fall. As a counterpoint, Conversations, a dialogue between three key works by Marlene Dumas with works from the museum's collections, will be presented.
Marlene Dumas's work is nourished by her passionate, fragmentary readings of poetry and literature. This project was born out of her collaboration with the writer and translator Hafid Bouazza (1970–2021), with whom she had previously produced an edition of Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare. Following this collaboration, Marlene Dumas and Hafid Bouazza initiated a new project around the Paris Spleen, resulting in fourteen paintings inspired by Charles Baudelaire. Among these works are portraits of the author and Jeanne Duval, motifs taken from poems—such as the rat and the bottle—and works painted directly in connection with a text, such as The Poor Man's Toy and The Despair of the Old Woman.
The creative inspiration of Baudelaire is palpable in the experience of Dumas's works, proving her status as one of today's greatest living painters. Additionally, the exhibition allows viewers to discover the multiple forms of painting practiced by Marlene Dumas: very precisely painted works—especially portraits—that are controlled and transformed pictorial gestures. The artist is constantly experimenting with new ways of painting, and Le Spleen de Paris represents the poetic core of her creation.