From devil-possessed Regan in The Exorcist to The Shining’s ghostly Grady Twins, there’s something exquisitely terrifying about little girls in horror films. This creepy, sinister mood pervades The Painter (1994) by contemporary South African artist Marlene Dumas. Stretching to two metres high, the towering canvas features a naked, blonde-haired girl who stands against a pale indeterminable background, staring at the viewer with a sullen expression. The giant toddler’s stomach is a discoloured mottled blue, and her hands are both stained – one red, one blue. Is this paint on her hands, the viewer is left to wonder, or something worse?
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dumas relentlessly explored the theme of childhood in her work, producing paintings of pregnancy scans, newborn babies, toddlers and pre-pubescent teenagers. Rendered in her signature style – using thin washes of paint – these shadowy artworks subvert and challenge the familiar notions of the innocent child, not least in her own daughter, Helena, who was born in 1989. It is Helena, then aged three or four, who is the subject of The Painter; Dumas worked from a photograph of her messily finger-painting while completely naked in the garden.
Right from the start of her career, Dumas has shunned live models, preferring to use photographs, which she refers to as ‘source material’. Her chaotically ordered studio in Amsterdam – she moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s – is filled with images. Artist drawers are crammed full of collected printouts, photographs, film stills and magazine articles, and reproductions of famous paintings cover the studio’s walls. Girl with a Pearl Earring is there, so is Mona Lisa, pasted alongside newspaper cuttings. Around the edges of the room, shelves are stacked with heavy art books as well as dark folders and boxes, which Dumas has neatly labelled.
Dumas’s first-ever folder, labelled simply ‘Heads’, contains pages and pages of clippings, all featuring the faces of women. ‘First, it had heads of men and women. It just said “Heads”. Then it became just “Heads of Women”. I must have taken the men out,’ she has explained. Within this worn folder are photographs of women she admires, such as Simone de Beauvoir, as well as more light-hearted images; one glossy magazine article stars Monica Lewinsky holding a pink poodle in her arms. Throughout them all, it is evident that photographs of the female figure in particular have come to dominate Dumas’s practice.
Dumas very consciously works in a post-photographic world – a world in which stories are shared through visual reproductions: ‘I don’t paint people, I paint images. But this is the age of images, not paintings. People prefer looking at images than paintings. Or the images in these paintings’. Her emphasis on photography as a source of inspiration is also explained, in part, by her upbringing – and growing up in South Africa during a period of apartheid and censorship in which television was banned until the mid-1970s. Only books, magazines and newspapers offered her a window into the wider world, including the history of art.
Many of Dumas’s paintings are layered with deliberate allusions to art and its histories. In The Painter, her unclothed daughter, whose hands are covered in paint, complicates traditional notions of the muse that exist within the artistic patriarchy. ‘Historically… it was always the male artist who was the painter and his model the female,’ Dumas has commented. ‘Here we have a female child (the source, my daughter) taking the main role. She painted herself. The model becomes the artist.’ Embodying the duality – of both passive nude female muse and active painter – Helena makes a mockery of stereotypes, equating creativity with this intentionally menacing image of childhood.
In titling it The Painter, Dumas also seems to be reflecting on her own creative hand. ‘Titles,’ she says, ‘give direction to the way a picture is looked at.’ The viewer is invited to consider who The Painter refers to: Dumas or her daughter, or is she perhaps conflating them both? The artist and her chosen muse are, after all, inextricably bound – they are each other’s flesh and blood.
The artist’s own emotions, including fear, certainly infuse this portrait of her daughter; Dumas’s concerns as both an artist and mother are somewhat mirrored in the painting. A particular sense of dread drips from Helena’s paint-dipped hands, hinting at a murderous act; a feeling emphasised by her hostile expression. Pervaded by such dark and violent undertones, The Painter shows Dumas confronting her own anxieties as a mother: ‘I think if you bring this new person into the world and you don’t have that fear that they may do bad things, then there must be something wrong with you.’
This chilling painting simultaneously carries another of Dumas’s worries: ‘Since Helena was born, the fear that something can happen to this child has been like nothing I’d ever known before. That fear is definitely very much present in the painting.’ Helena’s bluish skin and tainted hands are strikingly reminiscent of livor mortis – the pooling of the blood in the lowest points of the body that sets in just minutes after death.
This death-like quality also infuses Dumas’s closely cropped painting Helena’s Dream (2008), in which the artist focuses on the face of her daughter. With the full, rounded cheeks of a small child and her closed eyes, Helena looks almost heavenly, cherub-like. But there is something ghostly about the artwork, too. The child’s skin is rendered in translucent pinks with accents of grey to highlight her hair, lips and eyebrows and, framed further by a dark, flat void, this layered image evokes the stark contrasts of an X-ray. Dumas’s investigative painting leaves the viewer questioning whether the child is sleeping, or if she has in fact slipped into death.
By using watery washes applied in thin pools of paint and gestural brushstrokes, Dumas always seems to be searching for, and trying to show, the essence of her subjects as something that exists somewhere beneath their skin. While working from photographs, instead of life, Dumas is deeply committed to portraying her muses with truth and authenticity: ‘I deal with second-hand images and first-hand experiences,’ she has remarked. From 1979 to 1980, she studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, which explains her approach to portraiture; above all, she is interested in what she refers to as ‘the psychology of people’.
Dumas is not merely motivated by uncovering the psychology of her muses; she also seems concerned with the thought processes of her viewers – their reactions become a vital element of each artwork. To involve her audiences fully, Dumas creates deliberate ambiguity in her paintings, particularly those featuring children. In The Cover-Up (1994) a young child, who stands in a dark unknown space, lifts her pale blue dress over her head to reveal matching knickers. There is something disquieting about the girl’s act of undressing, which simultaneously exposes her body while concealing her face. This intentional uncertainty raises questions: what photograph was Dumas working from this time? Where is the action taking place? Is the child alone or is someone just out of sight? Speaking about this painting, Dumas declared, ‘It’s suggestive, it suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on at all.’
Created on an enormous scale, just like The Painter, this canvas confronts viewers with the vast expanse of the child’s naked body. This is an image that bears implications, almost accusations, of criminality. The provocative title of this work further admonishes us: this is a picture you shouldn’t be looking at. In The Cover-Up, Dumas seems to suggest that it is the viewer’s own perspective that places unsettling narratives and erotic assumptions onto the naked body of the child, although she does somewhat direct this point of view.
Provocative paintings such as this recall the controversial photographs which American photographer Sally Mann took of her children. In her photobook Immediate Family (1992), an intimate series of sixty-five black-and-white photographs focuses on her three young children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, who were all under the age of ten at the time. Against the backdrop of the family’s woodland summer home in Virginia, they sleep, play and pose unreservedly for their mother’s camera.
In thirteen of the images the children are naked and, when the book was published, accusations of exploitation and child pornography were levelled against Mann. The artist defended herself, arguing that her work was ‘natural through the eyes of a mother’ and that context was essential: ‘There was no internet in those days. I’d never seen child pornography. It wasn’t in people’s consciousness. Showing my children’s bodies didn’t seem unusual to me. Exploitation was the farthest thing from my mind.’
Nevertheless, when the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed critiquing Mann’s work, they censored the printed photograph Virginia at 4 (1989) by placing black bars over the four-year-old’s eyes, nipples and pubic area. ‘It felt like a mutilation, not only of the image but also of Virginia herself and of her innocence,’ wrote Mann. This editorial choice suggested indecency in the mother’s images of her children. Similarly, when the Museum of Modern Art promoted Dumas’s 2008 solo show they decided against using a full image of the artist’s most iconic work, The Painter, on their posters, instead opting for a cropped detail of Helena’s face.
In many ways, Dumas already censors her images of children. In contrast to Mann’s factual family photographs, Dumas deliberately blurs portrayals of her subjects through her expressive and abstracted manner of painting, removing the viewer from mimetic representations and demonstrating that the viewer is looking at a constructed artwork, not a photograph of a child: ‘All this information is simply the beginning of a piece. But, of course, the source is not where it ends. That’s a very important point.’
It’s unclear if the child represented in The Cover-Up is Helena or not; having obscured her face, Dumas leaves us guessing. At a gallery talk, when one viewer asked the artist, ‘What is the age of the child?’ in reference to another painting of a small naked girl, Dumas retorted, ‘It’s not a child. It’s a painting.’ By creating a distance between her subject and audiences, Dumas erects a protective barrier around Helena, denying viewers direct access to her. But this detachment between viewer and depicted muse does also allow the artist to be deliberately provocative with her contrived paintings.
Where Mann says her work has been misinterpreted, and that context is everything, Dumas deliberately removes context. She makes viewers decipher her images without all of the necessary information and, directed by the artist’s unnerving titles, audiences inevitably see sinister stories. Dumas places a level of responsibility on her audience, while guaranteeing that they will think such inappropriate things – in the case of The Cover-Up, Dumas invokes feelings of guilt and shame associated with the act of looking upon the naked body of a child. In contrast to Mann, Dumas’s paintings purposely reveal the problem of releasing images of children into the world, particularly in the post-internet age. She once commented, ‘My daughter shows me her body without posing to please. She shows me the cruelty and magic of innocence.’ Her paintings of children demonstrate this duality of innocence, which is both gentle and painful to see, while placing accountability on the onlooker.
In a later work, Helena 2001 no. 2 (2001), Dumas’s daughter is seen moving away from the openness of childhood. Now a teenager, she clutches a white towel to her body, pulling it in closely. Although facing the viewer, she glances away; it becomes clear that she is also aware of onlookers and her role as a muse. She looks uncomfortable – a feeling which resonates with viewers. This painting was exhibited in Dumas’s 2015 solo show at London’s Tate Modern, which was tellingly titled ‘The Image as Burden’.
As an adult, Helena has continued to pose for photographs taken by her mother, which are then worked up into paintings. In the 2018 painting Birth, Dumas portrayed Helena as a pregnant woman, now expecting her own child. Echoing The Painter, the full-frontal, naked Helena is again represented on a monumental scale: she stands at nearly ten feet tall. She is holding her arms above her head, and the focus is on her swollen stomach. But this is far from a sentimental account of approaching motherhood – behind Helena’s pale body is a sheen of blood-red paint. According to Dumas, ‘There is no beauty, if it doesn’t show some of the terribleness of life.’ Her daughter seems to agree; Helena thinks The Painter is ‘one of the best paintings I’ve done’, the artist has disclosed.
Dumas’s canvases, like great horror films, toy with viewers’ suppressed fears, dark thoughts and preconceptions. Emerging as a ghostly apparition in her mother’s paintings, Helena destabilises all sentimental notions of childhood. Instead, she invites viewers to complete the unsettling and ambiguous narratives around her, showing that images always require interpretation and ultimately involve artist, muse and viewer; who is who amongst these roles is also deliberately hazy and unresolved.