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Lot Essay
Alluring yet imposing, Marlene Dumas’s Miss January is the Dutch artist’s towering triumph, standing over nine feet tall. A commensurate masterpiece of virtuoso painterly effect and compelling psychological intensity, the work encapsulates every element of the internationally beloved artist’s iconic style. Radiating confidence, Miss January wears a bedazzled semitransparent top shimmering with a mesmeric display of painterly bravado, specks of black and white impasto suggestively capturing the mesmeric effect of the flashy fabric. The titular subject stands frontally, hands on hips, her commanding gaze straight ahead. The model is bare from the waist down, save for a solitary sock slipped over her proper left foot. Dumas’s incredible versatility is displayed via the oscillation between the luscious application of paint in some passages, notably around the figure’s face and shirt, compared to the minimalist brushstrokes which articulate the legs. Endowed with a hieratic monumentality and painted with an almost sculptural quality, Miss January perfectly encapsulates curator Emma Bedford’s praise for Dumas’s rare talents: “few artists render flesh more tenderly, more seductively, more exquisitely than Marlene Dumas. Much of the seductive power of her art derives from the attention the artist pays to her medium” (E. Bradford, “Questions of Intimacy and Relations,” in Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations, exh. cat., Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2007, p. 42).
Dumas discovers her subjects from printed media, painting from photographs and other found images. For Miss January, the inspiration emerged from a centerfold of a pornographic magazine “of a big-breasted Suzanne Somers look-alike” (“Dutch Master,” W Magazine, June 1, 2008, Online [accessed 4/24/2025]). Commenting on her choice of source image here, Dumas describes, “this feels to me like a creature from outer space. In art there’s always this thing about ‘the other.’ Well, I’m a woman, but this feels to me like some strange creature” (op. cit.). The title is in reference to Playboy’s accolade ‘playmate of the month,’ alluding to the image’s source as a centerfold. She simulates the photographic effects, cropping, blurring, and flattening elements of the composition while compellingly demonstrating the difference between photography and painting, achieving first-hand emotions from second-hand images. Commenting on her subjects, the artist notes that “my people were all shot by a camera, framed, before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them. They didn’t know what names I’d call them… They weren’t paid. They weren’t directed” (M. Dumas, quoted in J. Storsve, “Good Lady, you that have your pleasure in exile,” trans. G. Walker, in Marlene Dumas: Nom de Personne/ Name no Names, exh. cat., Centre Pompidou, 2002, p. 27).
Marlene Dumas has held a deep fascination with beauty contests from a young age. In a drawing executed when the artist was just ten years old, she drew various contestants wearing sashes bearing the names of the countries they represented. Growing up in South Africa in the 1960s, competitions where young women would be judged on their beauty were immensely popular. Dumas captures this competitive atmosphere in her work, forewarning of its damaging results. The drawing was included on an invitation card for the 1998 solo exhibition Miss World held at Paul Andriesse Gallery in Amsterdam, where the present work was included along with a series of other pin-up images of women. Included in the show’s catalogue was Women, a text written by the artist:
I have painted more women
than men
I paint women for men
I paint women for women
I paint the women of my men.
(Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, exh. cat., Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 119).
Dumas’s interest in tackling complicated subjects stems from a spirit of defiance where the artist exercises her right to tackle subjectivities which have long been the preserve of men. Doing so with humor and self-reflexivity, her art is a fearless expression of her view that depicting taboos expose and challenge dehumanizing ideologies, allowing new concepts to develop which identify and address societal rifts. By asserting herself into the art historical tradition of the female nude, spanning from Manet’s Olympia through the erotic figures of Egon Schiele and Otto Dix, Dumas demonstrates how a fresh perspective on the motif potently redirects the original voyeuristic intent of the form into a revelatory discourse on sexuality, guilt and innocence. The forceful stare in Miss January reverses the traditional praxis of viewer as voyeur, undermining the power of the gaze. As Bedford notes, “In tackling the arena of presentation and representation of sexuality, historically the preserve of the male gaze, Dumas subverts the conventional gendered hierarchy” (E. Bedford, op. cit., p. 41).
Dumas probes the relationship between pornography and erotica as well as between notions of exposure versus concealment, situating her practice between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to conceal. Both elements are present in Miss January. Dumas exposes and centers her subject’s unvarnished genitalia, placed in the very center of the composition, and yet covers her torso and arms. She is at once offering up her model as an object of beauty and delight while simultaneously reflecting on processes of viewing and interpretation. The work is not about bodies and nudity, but the relationships latent within these forms, highlighting the erotic conditions of life rather than the nude or posing figure. Dumas states that “the aim of my work… has always been to arouse in my audience (as well as myself) an experience of empathy with my subject matter” (M. Dumas, quoted in op. cit., p. 43).
Miss January is hugely important to Dumas’s oeuvre, its title referentially alluding back to her childhood drawing Miss World, as well as to her first survey exhibition, Miss Interpreted, and her 1998 work Miss Interpreted, a self-mocking self-portrait where the artist places herself within a beauty contest of interpretations. Another work exhibited at the same exhibition, Misinterpreted, holds a shifted meaning as it combines the title into one single word, the painting thus becoming an image in itself, powerfully visualizing a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The present work’s monumental scale and iconic subject matter establish the work as Dumas’s magnum opus, triumphantly mastering the female form while defiantly reclaiming the female nude from its male-centric history. Dumas has one foot in the painterly tradition and the other in conceptual art, admiring figures like Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, and Andy Warhol while inserting her practice into the tradition built by artists like Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger. Her overriding concern is on discerning and depicting intimate relations, articulating through paint how one relates with others at interpersonal and global levels, interpreting issues of gender, sexuality, pleasure and pain through this framework. Dumas aims to make her audience an accomplice in the making of meaning in her works, evidenced explicitly in Miss January by her intentional placement of her subject’s genitalia directly at eye-level.
Curator Emma Bedford acclaims how “few artists have provided in figurative painting such a comprehensive and incisive record of the life of contemporary women,” and Dumas has been rightly hailed as one of the most influential painters working today (op. cit., p. 44). Her Magdalena series, which comprises of similar full-length nude paintings of women, were first exhibited at the Netherlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Dumas’s importance to contemporary art is reflected in her vast exhibition history and inclusion in many institutional collections. She had a celebrated career retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2014, which then traveled to the Tate Modern, London and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. A vaunted retrospective of her oeuvre toured the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston between 2008-2009. In 2022 the Palazzo Grassi in Venice presented Marlene Dumas: open-end, a major solo presentation dedicated to her career. Miss January’s majestic monumentality is testament to the work’s signal importance to both Dumas’s oeuvre as well as to art history writ large. Searingly capturing her subject, Dumas draws upon the long history of the naked female body in art, transforming it into potent, ambiguous metaphor for both herself and her viewer.
Dumas discovers her subjects from printed media, painting from photographs and other found images. For Miss January, the inspiration emerged from a centerfold of a pornographic magazine “of a big-breasted Suzanne Somers look-alike” (“Dutch Master,” W Magazine, June 1, 2008, Online [accessed 4/24/2025]). Commenting on her choice of source image here, Dumas describes, “this feels to me like a creature from outer space. In art there’s always this thing about ‘the other.’ Well, I’m a woman, but this feels to me like some strange creature” (op. cit.). The title is in reference to Playboy’s accolade ‘playmate of the month,’ alluding to the image’s source as a centerfold. She simulates the photographic effects, cropping, blurring, and flattening elements of the composition while compellingly demonstrating the difference between photography and painting, achieving first-hand emotions from second-hand images. Commenting on her subjects, the artist notes that “my people were all shot by a camera, framed, before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them. They didn’t know what names I’d call them… They weren’t paid. They weren’t directed” (M. Dumas, quoted in J. Storsve, “Good Lady, you that have your pleasure in exile,” trans. G. Walker, in Marlene Dumas: Nom de Personne/ Name no Names, exh. cat., Centre Pompidou, 2002, p. 27).
Marlene Dumas has held a deep fascination with beauty contests from a young age. In a drawing executed when the artist was just ten years old, she drew various contestants wearing sashes bearing the names of the countries they represented. Growing up in South Africa in the 1960s, competitions where young women would be judged on their beauty were immensely popular. Dumas captures this competitive atmosphere in her work, forewarning of its damaging results. The drawing was included on an invitation card for the 1998 solo exhibition Miss World held at Paul Andriesse Gallery in Amsterdam, where the present work was included along with a series of other pin-up images of women. Included in the show’s catalogue was Women, a text written by the artist:
I have painted more women
than men
I paint women for men
I paint women for women
I paint the women of my men.
(Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, exh. cat., Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 119).
Dumas’s interest in tackling complicated subjects stems from a spirit of defiance where the artist exercises her right to tackle subjectivities which have long been the preserve of men. Doing so with humor and self-reflexivity, her art is a fearless expression of her view that depicting taboos expose and challenge dehumanizing ideologies, allowing new concepts to develop which identify and address societal rifts. By asserting herself into the art historical tradition of the female nude, spanning from Manet’s Olympia through the erotic figures of Egon Schiele and Otto Dix, Dumas demonstrates how a fresh perspective on the motif potently redirects the original voyeuristic intent of the form into a revelatory discourse on sexuality, guilt and innocence. The forceful stare in Miss January reverses the traditional praxis of viewer as voyeur, undermining the power of the gaze. As Bedford notes, “In tackling the arena of presentation and representation of sexuality, historically the preserve of the male gaze, Dumas subverts the conventional gendered hierarchy” (E. Bedford, op. cit., p. 41).
Dumas probes the relationship between pornography and erotica as well as between notions of exposure versus concealment, situating her practice between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to conceal. Both elements are present in Miss January. Dumas exposes and centers her subject’s unvarnished genitalia, placed in the very center of the composition, and yet covers her torso and arms. She is at once offering up her model as an object of beauty and delight while simultaneously reflecting on processes of viewing and interpretation. The work is not about bodies and nudity, but the relationships latent within these forms, highlighting the erotic conditions of life rather than the nude or posing figure. Dumas states that “the aim of my work… has always been to arouse in my audience (as well as myself) an experience of empathy with my subject matter” (M. Dumas, quoted in op. cit., p. 43).
Miss January is hugely important to Dumas’s oeuvre, its title referentially alluding back to her childhood drawing Miss World, as well as to her first survey exhibition, Miss Interpreted, and her 1998 work Miss Interpreted, a self-mocking self-portrait where the artist places herself within a beauty contest of interpretations. Another work exhibited at the same exhibition, Misinterpreted, holds a shifted meaning as it combines the title into one single word, the painting thus becoming an image in itself, powerfully visualizing a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The present work’s monumental scale and iconic subject matter establish the work as Dumas’s magnum opus, triumphantly mastering the female form while defiantly reclaiming the female nude from its male-centric history. Dumas has one foot in the painterly tradition and the other in conceptual art, admiring figures like Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, and Andy Warhol while inserting her practice into the tradition built by artists like Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger. Her overriding concern is on discerning and depicting intimate relations, articulating through paint how one relates with others at interpersonal and global levels, interpreting issues of gender, sexuality, pleasure and pain through this framework. Dumas aims to make her audience an accomplice in the making of meaning in her works, evidenced explicitly in Miss January by her intentional placement of her subject’s genitalia directly at eye-level.
Curator Emma Bedford acclaims how “few artists have provided in figurative painting such a comprehensive and incisive record of the life of contemporary women,” and Dumas has been rightly hailed as one of the most influential painters working today (op. cit., p. 44). Her Magdalena series, which comprises of similar full-length nude paintings of women, were first exhibited at the Netherlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Dumas’s importance to contemporary art is reflected in her vast exhibition history and inclusion in many institutional collections. She had a celebrated career retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2014, which then traveled to the Tate Modern, London and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. A vaunted retrospective of her oeuvre toured the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston between 2008-2009. In 2022 the Palazzo Grassi in Venice presented Marlene Dumas: open-end, a major solo presentation dedicated to her career. Miss January’s majestic monumentality is testament to the work’s signal importance to both Dumas’s oeuvre as well as to art history writ large. Searingly capturing her subject, Dumas draws upon the long history of the naked female body in art, transforming it into potent, ambiguous metaphor for both herself and her viewer.