Exceptional Works: Marlene Dumas

“Dumas’s work is almost always driven by the world in which she lives, with its injustices and iniquities, pleasures and absurdities.… Her responses to those provocations are hard to forget.”

—Karen Wilkin, “Review of Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden at Tate Modern,” The Wall Street Journal, 2015

Marlene Dumas

The Schoolboys, 1986-1987

Oil on canvas

63 x 78 3/4 inches (160 x 200 cm)
Framed: 66 1/2 x 82 1/4 inches (169 x 209 cm)

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The Schoolboys (1986–1987) is part of a small group of portraits made in the late 1980s by Marlene Dumas. Primarily depicting schoolchildren, these works were included in the artist's earliest solo exhibitions and demonstrate her singular approach to the human form, exploring the complexities of identity and the shifting boundaries between her figures’ public and private selves.

The 1980s were a time of transition for Dumas. Having moved from her native South Africa to the Netherlands in 1976, she had begun to establish herself in the Dutch art scene, exhibiting several collages and works on paper at group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Fodor, Amsterdam. By 1985, the artist had resumed painting on canvas with a renewed focus, quickly gaining attention for her distinctive figurative works, many of which are derived from photographs.

Marlene Dumas. Photo by Anton Corbijn

While most of these works show young children posed for class photos or walking in line as part of the orderly formalities of primary education, The Schoolboys depicts a group of teenage boys posing casually outside of school. The portrait is based on an image of students from an all-white school in South Africa as they wait for a bus to take them home.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Syndics, 1662. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

This group of works recalls the format and structure of seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age group portraits—reinforced by the visual parallel between the black Protestant clothing of the old master paintings and the dark school uniforms of the children in Dumas's portraits—mixed with the incidental and contingent qualities of the photograph.

As Ernst van Alphen observes, “In [these] group portraits … Dumas portrays classes of schoolchildren in uniform. Uniforms are common in South Africa.… Yet uniforms make uniformity. They abolish distinction. In the context of South Africa this portrayal emphasizes how Apartheid culture fixed identities on the basis of the most superficial exteriority. Dumas elaborates on this literal meaning of the word ‘uniform’ and its political context-specific implications.”

Marlene Dumas, The Turkish Schoolgirls, 1986. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Marlene Dumas, The Teacher (Sub B), 1987. Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany

Among related works by Dumas, The Turkish Schoolgirls (1987) is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, and The Teacher (Sub B) (1987) is part of the collection of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany.

The Schoolboys was acquired by the Museum Gouda in the Netherlands in 1988. It remained in the collection until 2011, when it was controversially deaccessioned and sold publicly at auction to benefit the museum’s collection fund.

Marlene Dumas, The Schoolboys, 1986–1987 (detail)

“The tough guys in The Schoolboys look as if they refuse to be outdone by their comrades. Their uniforms evoke the public school atmosphere in which only collective ideas and behaviour are tolerated and the individual is suppressed. And doesn’t this in turn stand for the society in which we now live?”

—Selma Klein Essink, “Introduction,” Marlene Dumas: Miss Interpreted, 1992

Marlene Dumas, The Schoolboys, 1986–1987 (detail)

Even while the figures may be attempting to look tough or assertive, they can’t help but appear boyish and jocular as they mug for the camera, underscoring the tensions Dumas explores in this work between public persona and private self, and between conformity and defiance.

Dumas presented this group of paintings in her solo exhibition The Private versus the Public at Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam in 1987.

Invitation, Marlene Dumas: The Private Versus the Public, Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam,1987

Installation view, Century 87: Kunst van nu ontmoet Amsterdams verleden, 1987, Amsterdam Historisch Museum, with (from left to right) Marlene Dumas, The Training Course, 1987-1990 (early version); Frans Badens, Civic Guardsmen from a company of the Crossbow Civic Guard, 1603-1618; Marlene Dumas, The Teacher (Sub B), 1987; Marlene Dumas, The Schoolboys, 1986-1987; and Marlene Dumas, The Turkish Schoolgirls, 1987.

The Schoolboys was also included in Century 87: Kunst van nu ontmoet Amsterdams verleden (Today’s Art Face to Face with Amsterdam’s Past) a major exhibition organized at several venues throughout Amsterdam celebrating the European Economic Commission’s designation of the city as a European Capital of Culture in 1987. The Schoolboys was hung in proximity to Frans Badens’s Civic Guardsmen from a Company of the Crossbow Civic Guard (1603–1618) from the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, formerly the Amsterdam Historical Museum.

Marlene Dumas, The Schoolboys, 1986–1987

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