Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern reviewed: 'remarkable'

‘Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting,’ Henri Matisse once advised, ‘should begin by cutting out his own tongue.’ Marlene Dumas — whose work is the subject of a big new retrospective at Tate Modern — has not gone quite that far (and neither, of course, did Matisse). On the other hand, she does not hand out many clues as to what her work is all about.

On the contrary, when Dumas says anything about her painting, it is inclined to be a self-deprecating paradox. ‘I paint because I am a woman,’ she states on her website. ‘(It’s a logical necessity.) If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.’ Fair enough, we don’t expect artists to be linear thinkers; Dumas points out that she is not one of those at the start of the Tate catalogue. Nor should we expect pictures to be easily decoded.

Now in her early 60s, Dumas is one of the most highly regarded painters in contemporary art. She was born in South Africa, but has lived in the Netherlands since 1976. She now probably qualifies as the greatest living Dutch artist. But she has not, up to now, had a major exhibition in a public gallery in this country, so she is a bit of an unknown quantity as far as the British art public are concerned.

It is unlikely that Dumas will score such a resounding hit as Anselm Kiefer did last autumn at the RA. Her art is too elusive, and perhaps too narrow in range for that. But there is plenty of evidence that she is a remarkable and distinctive painter.