In Marlene Dumas's office, a huge space that takes up the ground floor of a Thirties block in a residential district of Amsterdam, are the beginnings of an exhibition. A miniature model of Tate Modern sits on a table, postage-stamp-sized pictures glued to each of its tiny walls. Press clippings and catalogues are arranged in stacks, and three different proposals for show posters are tacked to a low window. Dumas's long-time studio manager - an elegant blonde named Jolie van Leeuwen, who acts as a protector and friend to the 61-year-old artist - is busy at a keyboard, taking enquiries from press and galleries.
Dumas had been speaking animatedly, flicking her apricot-blonde curls from one side to another, when she leapt to her feet and pulled out a silk scarf printed with Damien Hirst pills. The Hirst scarf is a sample of what could be made as a gift-shop item for her own show - a hundred-work retrospective, the scale of which reflects Dumas's stature as one of the most significant painters in the world today. She is clearly amused - flattered? half-horrified? - by such merchandising decisions. "I did think, maybe I'll make a scarf. I mean, I'll never do it otherwise…" She wants to know Vogue's opinion: wouldn't the little droplets on the surface of her work For Whom the Bell Tolls, a super-close-up portrait based on an image of a tearful Ingrid Bergman, make a nice pattern for a scarf?