There is a painting in this show of the man who murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, shooting him repeatedly before slashing his throat. It is delicate and pale, materialising in beautiful veils. There is another of Osama bin Laden in the glowing stained-glass hues of a Rouault. Should they be quite so gorgeous, these canvases? Should these men get such lavish treatment? Who should appear in a painting?
The art of Marlene Dumas, born in South Africa in 1953, is painterly and provocative in about equal measure. You notice the method – fluent, sumptuous, the paint sinking into the canvas in translucent stains, the brush carrying its licks and swipes with gliding expertise – at exactly the same moment as the subject, which is always human, often vulnerable, violent, suffering or dead. That’s the first disjuncture, a sort of double take that forces the viewer to think twice about why the subject has been painted in this way. The second question is more primitive: simply, who’s in this painting and why?
Dumas has been painting lone heads – and occasionally bodies, naked – for more than 30 years. The isolating focus gives a certain grandeur to each image. A damaged face floats in black watercolour on white paper, puckering the surface so that the pain seems redoubled. A heavy head thickens around the eyes, which hold a strange light, particularly in the self-portraits, so often her strongest works.
Her way of painting can appear rhetorical: those vague attenuations around the neck that make you wonder what happened to the rest of this poor person; those coloured auras that seem to emanate from certain faces; those seeping blurs that allow for extraordinary ambiguities in a face – seeing or sightless, unconscious or dead? Shapely masks – chalk white, pale blue, tinged with fading pink or magenta – are superimposed on heads for an immediate sense of misfit or detachment. Her people seem to wear their faces.
But that puts it too strongly. Dumas’s people are not doing anything at all. Her paintings are representations of photographs, not of actual people. Photographs of victims, martyrs, madonnas and supermodels; of babies and soldiers, assassins and lovers, of dead Pasolini and his grieving mother, occasionally of people the painter knows. The subject is trapped in the frame; the image is fundamentally inert. But then Dumas remakes it in her own idiom. They look like pictures, she says, but they act like paintings.
The swither between the two is her special contribution to what is now a very old tradition of photo-based painting from Sickert to Richter onwards. You go back and forth between the image and the brushwork: how moribund is this opaque grey body (is it dead at all?), are we looking at coagulated blood or paint, why does this porn close-up have the same smooth to-and-fro lubricity as this corpse? To take it further, her paintings act like questions.
But Dumas has been painting the same way almost from the off. Her works are instantly recognisable, catnip to collectors and regularly on display in museums. It may be that this is the best way to see them too – come across one on its own and you are more likely to feel the raw force of it. For Dumas’s paintings can have exceptional graphic register and tenacity. One of the best works here is The Painter, who turns out to be a toddler with a wary or defensive look, standing vulnerably naked. She is partly drawn – in the manner of Ingres, sinuous and precise – and partly painted, her face the white of greasepaint, her torso carrying a pale blue haze like a Degas pastel. The child’s hands are thick with paint, one violet, the other blood-red as if caught in the act. Perhaps the punishment is to become both a painting herself, and its reluctant model. That The Painter is female and naked seems to be at least part of the point.
To see more than 100 paintings at once, however, is to see the idiom stretched too far. It never changes; it will do for schoolgirls, infants and terrorists. Dead Girl is a case in point. The girl is bleeding, the paint bleeds, it’s a cancellation; the picture (and its subject) loses impact. Here are 22 Great Men, all gay, all painted in black ink that blossoms like a Rorschach blot. The singularity of each man is entirely lost in terms of images, and only just preserved in the written captions below. The paintings are inarticulate compared to the words.
It is rare to find a show quite so dominated by an artist’s personality; Dumas’s writings are almost as much a presence at Tate Modern as her paintings. She has always been a writer’s painter, admired by poets and novelists and fiercely eloquent herself. Early on, she speaks of being torn between clear definition and “a reasonless disappearance into formlessness”, which perfectly puts across one effect of her work.
But she also talks impatiently about the crisis in representation, the way everyone is looking for “meaning” (this was the 80s, high times for theory; one of her paintings is even titled Death of the Author). Yet of course her own work courts meaning all the time – sex, death, politics, the violence of sexism, racism, apartheid, the decline of privacy, the complexities of representation – only to sidestep it. Why paint Theo van Gogh’s murderer? You find the answers.
It is not quite true to say that the depiction is even-handed all the way through this show. The sloppy pastiche portraits – Diana, Naomi Campbell, Amy Winehouse – are awful by any standards, whatever they may communicate about icons of icons. Phil Spector twice over – with and without wig – is melodramatically creepy, though so are the courtroom shots on which the paintings were based. And towards the end the paintings just get bigger, not better; one mistrusts their slickness. Their chief characteristic – their chief aim, almost – is to resemble works by Marlene Dumas.
But to witness the strongest works in this show is to realise that though her source material is modern, Dumas is an old-fashioned expressionist. The Black Drawings from the 90s are as devastating as they should be: 112 heads, cropped at the neck, that look like thwarted portraits where the human being has been denied, all individuality blocked. Which is exactly what had happened to the original subjects, black Africans photographed by ethnographers. Dumas’s paintings are alive with sympathy.
The best is in the opening gallery: the ongoing series of Rejects – a wall of botched and bockled faces in black and white paint, eyes skewed, noses bashed, heads broken and awkward. The features are out of register, out of whack, sometimes a replacement face has been added to the one below – the eyes and mouth cut out like a burn mask – to keep on trying for something better. The images are delicate yet damaged, by life, it seems, as much art.
It feels as if Dumas has changed her mind, changed their faces, understood these people differently as time passes. There is a sense of movement, of open-endedness and restless thinking that you don’t see elsewhere. And it is here that these heads – these rejected individuals – are granted true personality. They are works in progress, like all of us.
The Observer
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