Seven years ago, Marlene Dumas briefly became the world’s most expensive living female artist, a dizzying upward move that was reported, somewhat breathlessly, in newspapers from New York to Tokyo (her 1995 painting The Visitor was sold by Sotheby’s for £3.1m; previously, her prices had stood at around the £50,000 mark). Yet her name remains, here and elsewhere, relatively unknown. She is, you might say, the world’s most un-famous famous artist, beloved of curators and collectors, but lacking any of the tinny razzmatazz – the self-publicity, the production lines – we’ve grown accustomed to when it comes to 21st-century art. Thanks to this, the huge retrospective of her work at London’s Tate Modern next month – it will include more than 100 of her provocative and intensely dark paintings, drawings and collages – is, at this point, a hot ticket only for those in the know.
As I walk to her studio – she works on the ground floor of a tall, gabled house in an area of Amsterdam popular with both hipsters and immigrants from north Africa – I wonder about this. At first sight, it’s confounding. Dumas’s work is every bit as outrageous as that of, say, Tracey Emin, and about 50 times more interesting (unlike Emin, she looks outwards, her interest in the human body extending beyond her own to those of other people). But then I meet her, and it’s suddenly less of a mystery. Two things about her are immediately apparent. The first is her prodigious energy, which comes at you like a gale force wind. She is, quite simply, unstoppable: garrulous, clever, curious, enthusiastic. The second – this is the important part – is her modesty, her uncertainty, her artistic humility. She takes her work very seriously indeed, but herself not at all, and the jokes and self- deprecation come thick and fast. “When I start work on a painting, it’s total kitsch!” she wails at one point. “When I painted myself pregnant, I couldn’t do the legs, and the blond hair made it look like a bad Klimt!” she cries at another. No other artist I have interviewed has ever come close to making statements like these. Their acceptance of their own brilliance was simply part of the deal.