oil on board with lace collage

Artwork date: 1974/75
Signature details: inscribed with the artist's name, artwork title, date, a note and "BA F. Art (Michaelis)" on the reverse
Exhibited: Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, Final Year Exhibition, 1975.
Literature: Bedford, E., Dumas, M. (2007). Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, illustrated in colour and in black and white in the preliminary pages.

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108 x 76.5 cm; framed size: 12 x 79.5 x 6.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

Notes:

As one of the most celebrated living artists today, Cape Town-born and Amsterdam-based artist, Marlene Dumas, has produced an extraordinary body of work from her earliest paintings in the 1970s through to her internationally celebrated exhibitions of recent years.

A world-renowned artist, Dumas’ works are highly sought-after and rarely come up at auction. In 2005 Dumas held the distinction of achieving the highest price ever at auction for a female artist when her painting of 1987, The Teacher (sub a), sold at Christie’s London for £1,8 million ($3,3 million) – more than R34 million. The current auction high was set when The Visitor (1995) sold in 2008 for £3,177,250 ($4,2 million) – more than R65 million. Clearly Dumas’ skillful and compelling figurative paintings have captivated collectors across the globe.

Dumas painted Kindvrou in the mid-1970s, a period of intense political and social upheaval in South Africa when artists sought ways to address these challenges, within the strictures of the time. Her early paintings caught the attention of her professors such as painter, Stanley Pinker and theorist, Neville Dubow, and laid the foundation for her career development. Lectures in philosophy at the University of Cape Town with Professor Martin Versfeld, whose work is characterised by the quest for an ethic of humaneness, provided an intellectual and philosophical basis for her thinking. In 1982 Dumas’ work caught the eye of Dutch art historian Rudi Fuchs, who invited her to participate in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, where she was one of the youngest artists.

For Dumas, painting and words are her medium and she remains actively engaged in making meaning: “I want to portray people in all their complexity and never completely definable identity.” Kindvrou depicts a girl clothed in a short, frilled white top, suggesting purity and innocence and underscoring her youth. The three hearts across her chest emphasise the sweetness of childhood. With smeared red lipstick and blurred facial features, Dumas suggests that she is a young girl on the threshold of becoming an adult in a complex world.

Kindvrou is an extraordinary work which, in its painterly treatment and in the intensity of its subject, is comparable to Irma Stern’s The Eternal Child (1916) in many ways. Interestingly, both artists were aged 22 at the time they produced these arresting works of girl children. Dumas’ unique technique, utilising scumbled painting to achieve smudgy contours, accentuates this liminal phase between childhood and adulthood. Moving from a dark space into the bright light, this girl eagerly wills herself forward into the day and, perhaps, into an unknown environment with all its expectations of women. In this coming of age image, she has one hand firmly on the doorway, and her eyes set on the future.

Kindvrou also has much in common with another of Dumas’ works, Love Lost (1973/4), which sold at Aspire Art in 2019 for R7,283,200 on a pre-sale estimate of R3,000,000-5,000,000. Both are early works that focus intently on compelling narratives involving female figures as their central subject. Both employ Dumas’ notable expressive painterly treatment, while relying on cool colouration. The enduring appeal of a woman or a child as subject throughout art history is evident in both these paintings which prefigure the primary direction in which her works were to develop.

In many ways, Kindvrou presages the subjects, concerns and forms of painterly expression in many of Dumas’ mature paintings. Clear comparisons exist between this early work and the following paintings for example: The Futility of Artistic Confession (1983); Die Baba (1985), The Teacher (sub b) (1987); Schaammeisje (1991); Child with lipstick (1992); Helena (1992); The Painter (1994); and Helena 2001 No 2 (2002).

Marlene Dumas is the thinking collector’s artist. In addition to being a great painter with consummate skill, she brings her knowledge of art, philosophy and photography to bear on her works. Her love of the female form is evident and is infused with empathy and a depth of insight into humanity. As an artist, she is well-known as an engaging thinker who brings to her painting the intellectual grounding of her philosophical studies and her profound interest in contemporary culture. As she says, “I’ve always wanted my paintings to be more like movies or other art forms, where the work stimulates discussion in all kinds of directions”.

Emma Bedford

The exhibition Marlene Dumas: open-end will be on view from March 27, 2022 until January 8, 2023 at Palazzo Grassi, Venice as a highlight of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Originally built between 1748 and 1772, Palazzo Grassi was bought by François Pinault in 2005 to house his art collection and to stage major exhibitions of contemporary and modern art.