In 2001, when I was on a working trip to Paris, a perceptive French sculptor friend recommended an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou by Marlene Dumas —a name vaguely familiar to me, at the time, but unaccompanied, in my mental artists’ file, by an image. The show, mysteriously titled “Nom de Personne (Name No Names),” proved to be a works-on-paper retrospective—the artist’s first.
I was immediately captured by Ms. Dumas’s urgent, broadly handled works in ink and particularly impressed by the “portraits,” each with a distinctive appearance and personality, conjured up by an apparently infinite range of gestures, washes and marks. Despite the artist’s French name, these drawings seemed distinctly Northern, with the bluntness and intensity of German Expressionism, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that their author was born in South Africa, in 1953, that she had Dutch ancestors, and that she had lived in the Netherlands since 1976; she was a Northerner by default. More unexpected was learning that Ms. Dumas’s work was all photo-based, since the heads I admired were so individual that they seemed testimony to the power of direct, unmediated observation.
Fast forward to 2015, Tate Modern and “Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden.” Described in the press materials as “the most comprehensive retrospective survey of the artist’s work in Europe, to date,” the show begins with notebooks kept by a 19-year-old South African student and paintings made a couple of years later when that student enrolled in a Dutch art school; it ends with works made in 2014 by an internationally acclaimed artist with Dutch citizenship. In between, we discover paintings on canvas and ink drawings of larger-than-life heads, full-length nudes, Ms. Dumas’s daughter as a young child, raunchy strippers, political commentary, and more, from early experiments with a variety of conceptually based approaches to an idiosyncratic, continuing series of portraits of “Great Men.” The selection is a tasting menu, offering examples of important groups of works—Ms. Dumas often produces images in series—sometimes presented in multiples that evoke the original conception and presentation.