This week, the Museum of Modern Art opened a much-anticipated show of contemporary painting by South African-born Marlene Dumas, whose midcareer retrospective of 70 paintings and 35 drawings has been preceded by two years' publicity. Much of it was devoted to the artist's impressive prices -- $3.34 million at auction for "The Teacher," the most ever paid for a picture painted by a living woman.
Dumas does not see any auction money -- those stratospheric prices are resales by early buyers -- but she does now sell her work straight out of the studio for as much as $300,000 a canvas, if you can manage to cut in line ahead of the throngs of willing buyers.
That's unusual, but so is the fact that every picture Dumas paints is based on a photograph, often a news photograph, or a combination of two or three. That helps make her art somehow about the ambiguity of media interpretations of reality, as well as about feminism, violence, apartheid and all the other subjects (death, torture, racism, sexism -- really, Dumas is not a sunny painter) she has made her own. Much of her work takes the form of portraiture, often focused on a single face staring directly at the viewer, and yet it trails clouds of uneasy meanings in its wake. Dumas can mingle the personal and the political in a way that reminds you of early feminist protest.
In reproduction, her work can look flat and even derivative of past masters, perhaps Alice Neel or Edvard Munch, famous for his oft-tchotchke-tized "The Scream." But what makes this show so unusual is just how good the pictures look in person.
Dumas, who was born in 1953, is a very idiosyncratic painter. She has a remarkable gift for putting living, seeing eyes in her faces that pull a viewer's heart into her work with great sympathy. She describes her own awkward and difficult goal as searching for "a way to make an art about being in love," which must somehow mean accepting all the failures and corruptions of the human form.
One suspects that women are better at that than men. Dumas quotes Susan Sontag in one of her many India ink brush drawings here, saying, "Pornography is like science fiction."
And in fact, women carry most of the emotion in Dumas' work. She does pictures of strippers and her Amsterdam hometown "window girl" sex performers, innumerable paintings of babies, often nude, and even a portrait of a dead female member of the Baader-Meinhof gang (a revolutionary cell in 1970s Germany) that has already been interpreted by that other great news photo reproducer, Gerhard Richter.
In every case, the artist seems to identify with her subject. One piece here is a triple portrait of Winnie Mandela (ex-wife of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela), Betty Shabaaz (late wife of African-American human rights activist Malcolm X), and Pauline Lumumba (wife of murdered African anti-colonialist Patrice Lumumba) with the title, "Three Women and I."
Politics seem, as they do with most South African artists, to have always been key to Dumas' life and work. When she was first thinking of emigrating from her riven country, she considered moving to New York, but decided American racial politics were too reminiscent of Johannesburg for comfort and chose Holland instead.
Once there, in the center of the great tradition of depicting a Calvinist inner individuality, she found herself on the fault line of the war on terror. The murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (a direct descendant of Vincent Van Gogh's brother) by a Dutch-born Moroccan man for insulting Islam in 2004 exposed the tensions in Dumas' adopted country, and suddenly it was South Africa all over again. Dumas paints the blindfolded victims, the mug shots of the terrorists, even Osama bin Laden himself ("The Pilgrim"), looking quite soulful.
As you might expect of portraits without sitters, there is an internalized aspect to Dumas' work. This is an artist searching for icons of her own emotions, so she simplifies form, creating a rapid notational style for the figure itself. Pictures of the full body tend to be slapdash, and more about the body as a commodity or dead fact, but the faces get Dumas' full attention. She hangs no drapes before the windows to the soul.
It's tempting to end a discussion of Dumas with a sign she hangs, in English, in her studio that reads "Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Get to Go Everywhere." When you meet Dumas, there is a kind of swagger to her, and a mordant sense of humor, but the work is really more despairing than that. Humanity never gets better -- that's a lesson South Africans often try to teach.
The title work of "Measuring Your Own Grave" was done in 2003, and shows a woman bent teetering at the middle with her arms stretched from canvas edge to edge. Dumas accompanies it with a poem: "I've been told that people want to know/ why such a somber title for a show?/ Is it about artists in their midlife careers,/ or is it about women's over-50 fears?/ No. ... For the type of portraitist like me/ this is as wide as I can see."
How much: $20; $16 seniors; $12 students. Call (212) 708-9400 or visit moma.org