One measure of genius is the life force — what Harold Bloom has dubbed, referring to Samuel Johnson, “Falstaffian vitalism.” The South African-born artist Marlene Dumas has such astonishing vitality. On the occasion of our recent meeting in Amsterdam, she gave me her full, intense attention for the better part of nine hours and several bottles of wine between us (“I always think some wine is nice, don’t you?”) before bundling me into a taxi to my hotel, while she calmly strolled back to her studio in the midsummer twilight for a couple more hours of hard work.
Her airy office and studio are shaded by leafy vines on the ground floor of an apartment block in a residential neighborhood to the south of the city center. On the corner are a Turkish greengrocer — as I passed, the owner impressively halved a watermelon with a machete — and a modest beauty salon obscured by dusty windows. So warm was her welcome that I almost remember her hugging me (she didn’t). In her rapid, digressive speech punctuated by laughter and tinged with an Afrikaans accent — she often interjects “nee” or “and so” — she offered me an early aperitif and we sat down to chat for what was supposed to be a few minutes before heading over the road for lunch in a local cafe.
I was interrupting the preparations for her upcoming major retrospective, which opens at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam next month, before going to Tate Modern in London and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, and which represents the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in her adopted home country to date. Dumas, a rare visual artist who also writes — “a dual talent, like Van Gogh,” her partner of nearly 30 years, the painter Jan Andriesse, said — likes to participate in the dialogue about her own work, and wanted to revisit as many critical texts as possible, both her own and others’ writing, for the exhibition catalog, which is being produced in three languages. “This was probably the wrong book to do it in,” she mused in her office, its large tables covered in papers — proofs, copies of articles and reviews of her work, news clippings as yet unfiled in her room-size source archive. “It has caused an enormous amount of problems, and an enormous amount of work.”