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Lot Essay
January 4, 2018, 1:04 PM
Hello Marlene,
Your reply exceeded my expectations!
The presentation date is mid-September 2018, but Eric Hermida of the Jan van der Vossen Foundation said:
"I'd rather have a late Dumas than no Dumas at all."
So we're taking the time pressure off.
And working from the negative only triggers me.
I think all good art is never entirely positive.
And what is negative? Sometimes my autistic child is something negative,
sometimes it's the most beautiful thing I have in my life.
Sometimes my skin color is something negative for some,
often it's what's considered part of my beauty.
I believe that love, beauty, truth, and therefore art, are never unambiguous.
I trust you as an artist, without any reservations.
And although this is seen as an official commission,
I see it more as offering myself.
Romana Vrede
Rendered with searing intimacy, Marlene Dumas’ De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) is a brilliant example of her celebrated portraiture practice. In three-quarter profile, Dumas depicts the acclaimed Dutch theater and stage actress Romana Vrede with scintillating proximity, lending the work the psychological intensity which the artist’s best works achieve. Vrede commissioned Dumas to make her portrait after winning the prestigious Theo d’Or award for stage-acting in 2017—winners of the award receive a portrait by an artist of their choice. After several meetings, Dumas was inspired to create not just one but five portraits of her subject, taking Vrede as her muse in a frenzy of creative inspiration. The present work was first shown in Marlene Dumas: Double Takes, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Zeno X Gallery, where the work was reproduced on the gallery invitation. The exhibition included works inspired by Dumas’ reading of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, as well as her portraits of her intimate relations, including portraits of her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) bridges both of the exhibition’s main themes, portraying intimate relationships of the artist while simultaneously relating to several themes explored in Baudelaire’s prose. The portrait was selected by curator Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas for inclusion in the artist’s groundbreaking 2022 monographic exhibition Marlene Dumas: open-end at Palazzo Grassi alongside the 59th Venice Biennale.
Dumas paints Romana Vrede with virtuoso strokes of paint, lavishing detail on the minute transition of shadow across her subject’s eyes and lips and on the careful interplay of light across her prominent cheekbones and chiseled jawline, meanwhile alighting on the careful gradation of skin tone across Vrede’s visage. Turned slightly to her left, Vrede stares knowingly out into the middle distance, seemingly aware of her presence in paint. Dumas composes the image with radical intimacy, cropping her subject at just above the hairline and providing only the mere suggestion of a bust. Dumas’ renowned practice of painting with dry oil paints creates an evocative effect here, the painter’s judicious economy in some areas of the composition centering the visual effect on her sitter’s most prominent features. The eye alights on the oscillation between the luscious paint application against the minimalist application around her ground. Her most worked features are Vrede’s eyes, which pulsate with psychological intensity as the artist layers blues, oranges, purples, pinks, and blacks to achieve an exceptional verism.
As a longtime admirer of Dumas, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1976, the artist was Romana Vrede’s first choice as a portraitist after being awarded the Theo d’Or. Recalling their first meeting, Vrede recounts how “I knew that from the first moment that I would meet her I have to be really honest. I have to be naked, and in full display, honest to her” (quoted in “Romana Vrede on Marlene Dumas,” Fondation Beyeler, YouTube, 18 September 2021). The two went for dinner a couple of times: “it was like a date, almost, because she was looking at me, as if she was taking a bit of me—in loving way—taking, feeling the essence of Romana” (ibid.). Dumas always paints from photography, either found or taken herself. Her resultant paintings mimic the photographic effects of her source images, cropping, blurring, and flattening the composition. In the present work, the artist’s proximity to her subject evocatively demonstrates the comfort, familiarity, and trust built between the two women over the course of the painting project. The resultant tender rendition robustly accords with the art historian Emma Bedford’s contention that “few artists have provided in figurative painting such a comprehensive and inclusive record of the life of contemporary women like Marlene Dumas” (E. Bradford, “Questions of Intimacy and Relations,” in Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations, exh. cat., Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2007, p. 44).
From her first exhibition in 1983, many of Dumas’ portraits have explored the complex subjectivities of race, gender, and sexuality via psychoanalytic discourse—Dumas majored in psychology at university. As Bedford writes of Dumas’ early portraits, “individual subjects are isolated against neutral grounds, highlighting their existential loneliness and alienation” (ibid., p. 35). Vrede celebrates this aspect of Dumas’ work: “it has to be confrontational. Like when I make art, when I make theatre, I want it to be confrontational, I don’t want to be comfortable... no, I want you to experience things, to be shocked and moved, and that’s what she also wants with her art” (quoted in “Romana Vrede on Marlene Dumas,” op. cit.). Vrede’s confrontational notion of art parallels Dumas’ earlier explanation of why she tackles complicated subjects: “You’re not frightened that you may be attracted and repelled. You give yourself permission to work through the complexities, which allows your audience to realize that they too have all these reactions to beauty and ugliness” (M. Dumas, quoted in E. Bradford, op. cit., p. 42).
First exhibited alongside a series of works inspired by the French poet Charles Baudalaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, a collection of short prose poems capturing the beauty of modern urban life, De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) likewise finds correspondence with Baudelaire’s prose. In his “The Desire to Paint,” from Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire writes what could be a vivid ekphrasis of Romana Vrede’s portrait: “She is beautiful, and more than beautiful, she is overpowering. The color black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness” (C. Baudelaire, “The Desire to Paint,” in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith, New York, 1919, p. 124).
Hello Marlene,
Your reply exceeded my expectations!
The presentation date is mid-September 2018, but Eric Hermida of the Jan van der Vossen Foundation said:
"I'd rather have a late Dumas than no Dumas at all."
So we're taking the time pressure off.
And working from the negative only triggers me.
I think all good art is never entirely positive.
And what is negative? Sometimes my autistic child is something negative,
sometimes it's the most beautiful thing I have in my life.
Sometimes my skin color is something negative for some,
often it's what's considered part of my beauty.
I believe that love, beauty, truth, and therefore art, are never unambiguous.
I trust you as an artist, without any reservations.
And although this is seen as an official commission,
I see it more as offering myself.
Romana Vrede
Rendered with searing intimacy, Marlene Dumas’ De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) is a brilliant example of her celebrated portraiture practice. In three-quarter profile, Dumas depicts the acclaimed Dutch theater and stage actress Romana Vrede with scintillating proximity, lending the work the psychological intensity which the artist’s best works achieve. Vrede commissioned Dumas to make her portrait after winning the prestigious Theo d’Or award for stage-acting in 2017—winners of the award receive a portrait by an artist of their choice. After several meetings, Dumas was inspired to create not just one but five portraits of her subject, taking Vrede as her muse in a frenzy of creative inspiration. The present work was first shown in Marlene Dumas: Double Takes, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Zeno X Gallery, where the work was reproduced on the gallery invitation. The exhibition included works inspired by Dumas’ reading of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, as well as her portraits of her intimate relations, including portraits of her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) bridges both of the exhibition’s main themes, portraying intimate relationships of the artist while simultaneously relating to several themes explored in Baudelaire’s prose. The portrait was selected by curator Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas for inclusion in the artist’s groundbreaking 2022 monographic exhibition Marlene Dumas: open-end at Palazzo Grassi alongside the 59th Venice Biennale.
Dumas paints Romana Vrede with virtuoso strokes of paint, lavishing detail on the minute transition of shadow across her subject’s eyes and lips and on the careful interplay of light across her prominent cheekbones and chiseled jawline, meanwhile alighting on the careful gradation of skin tone across Vrede’s visage. Turned slightly to her left, Vrede stares knowingly out into the middle distance, seemingly aware of her presence in paint. Dumas composes the image with radical intimacy, cropping her subject at just above the hairline and providing only the mere suggestion of a bust. Dumas’ renowned practice of painting with dry oil paints creates an evocative effect here, the painter’s judicious economy in some areas of the composition centering the visual effect on her sitter’s most prominent features. The eye alights on the oscillation between the luscious paint application against the minimalist application around her ground. Her most worked features are Vrede’s eyes, which pulsate with psychological intensity as the artist layers blues, oranges, purples, pinks, and blacks to achieve an exceptional verism.
As a longtime admirer of Dumas, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1976, the artist was Romana Vrede’s first choice as a portraitist after being awarded the Theo d’Or. Recalling their first meeting, Vrede recounts how “I knew that from the first moment that I would meet her I have to be really honest. I have to be naked, and in full display, honest to her” (quoted in “Romana Vrede on Marlene Dumas,” Fondation Beyeler, YouTube, 18 September 2021). The two went for dinner a couple of times: “it was like a date, almost, because she was looking at me, as if she was taking a bit of me—in loving way—taking, feeling the essence of Romana” (ibid.). Dumas always paints from photography, either found or taken herself. Her resultant paintings mimic the photographic effects of her source images, cropping, blurring, and flattening the composition. In the present work, the artist’s proximity to her subject evocatively demonstrates the comfort, familiarity, and trust built between the two women over the course of the painting project. The resultant tender rendition robustly accords with the art historian Emma Bedford’s contention that “few artists have provided in figurative painting such a comprehensive and inclusive record of the life of contemporary women like Marlene Dumas” (E. Bradford, “Questions of Intimacy and Relations,” in Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations, exh. cat., Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2007, p. 44).
From her first exhibition in 1983, many of Dumas’ portraits have explored the complex subjectivities of race, gender, and sexuality via psychoanalytic discourse—Dumas majored in psychology at university. As Bedford writes of Dumas’ early portraits, “individual subjects are isolated against neutral grounds, highlighting their existential loneliness and alienation” (ibid., p. 35). Vrede celebrates this aspect of Dumas’ work: “it has to be confrontational. Like when I make art, when I make theatre, I want it to be confrontational, I don’t want to be comfortable... no, I want you to experience things, to be shocked and moved, and that’s what she also wants with her art” (quoted in “Romana Vrede on Marlene Dumas,” op. cit.). Vrede’s confrontational notion of art parallels Dumas’ earlier explanation of why she tackles complicated subjects: “You’re not frightened that you may be attracted and repelled. You give yourself permission to work through the complexities, which allows your audience to realize that they too have all these reactions to beauty and ugliness” (M. Dumas, quoted in E. Bradford, op. cit., p. 42).
First exhibited alongside a series of works inspired by the French poet Charles Baudalaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, a collection of short prose poems capturing the beauty of modern urban life, De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede) likewise finds correspondence with Baudelaire’s prose. In his “The Desire to Paint,” from Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire writes what could be a vivid ekphrasis of Romana Vrede’s portrait: “She is beautiful, and more than beautiful, she is overpowering. The color black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness” (C. Baudelaire, “The Desire to Paint,” in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith, New York, 1919, p. 124).