Marlene Dumas likes to talk dirty. She quips about foreplay with her paintings, muses on the similarities between artists and hookers, and insists: “There are no virgins here.”¹ In this last instance, she is referring to the fact that her subjects are mostly recycled from photographs, but her lineup of sluts and hookers, Magdalenas and Miss Januarys, equally fleshes out her claim. Time and again, Dumas has included herself among her tarty company, warding off tiresome defenses of her fraught subject matter with a spirited offensive: by claiming the role of the gritty, grimy woman.
Dumas doesn’t just talk dirty; she paints dirty. Her surfaces—ragged with turpentine, smeared and fingered—betray a painter unafraid to soil her hands when a cloth won’t do. Lodged beneath fingernails, veining palms, Dumas’s medium becomes, in South African writer Marlene van Niekerk’s evocative phrasing, paint as taint.² It stains. It functions as incriminating forensic evidence. Yet if Dumas’s hands are sullied, inked up and ready to be fingerprinted, it is because, like all of us, she is part of filthy histories. But unlike most of us, she doesn’t try to wash herself clean. And so Dumas’s studio has become a crime scene—littered with head shots of her victims, draped in the canvases that have become their shrouds.
Dumas has famously compared the canvas to a grave, her subjects strung within its sepulchral embrace, the stretcher the cross on which they are impaled.³ But here it is less the coffin that interests me than the dirt tossed in after, the soil that covers it. Dumas has exhumed one so-called dirty picture from the vault of art history—the personification of Liberté as a female nude—dusting it off to produce her own spectral and cryptic oil painting Liberty, 1993. This pseudo Liberté is a shifty-eyed column of inscrutability with a face ringed in blue: A bruise? A mask? A trace of painterly capriciousness? Undecidable. What is clear, however, is that the figure’s black, naked, prepubescent body tears at the Western tradition of the art-historical nude. And it is one nude in particular that Dumas confronts: Eugène Delacroix’s forward-thrusting, tricolor-seizing Liberté in his celebrated Liberty on the Barricades of 1830. Dumas’s rendition counters with a wooden pose and broken wings. Turpentine-soaked slashes pin Liberty’s biceps to her trunk; her forearms splay out from the elbows; blocks for wrists end in sprays of talon-fingers. These hands reach for nothing. Haunted, as we shall see, by the twin specters of colonialism and pornography, Dumas’s Liberty peers askance at the vexed convention of inscribing political transition on the nude female body.