'Here’s to portraiture, more or less,
used by politicians, martyrs, murderers, 
the military … be my guest'
—Marlene Dumas

Well-known for her provocative and thoughtful examination of human nature and experience, The Believer is highly representative of the unique contribution that Amsterdam-based South African artist Marlene Dumas has made to the figurative canon. Closely focused on the face of an ordinary young, lightly bearded man who stares out beyond us impassively, it forms part of an important group of works made by Dumas between 2005 and 2006 and exhibited in Galerie Paul Andriesse in 2006. Featuring disarmingly intimate portraits of young men drawn from media images and photographs and titled Man Kind, the exhibition eloquently articulated Dumas’s consistent interest in humanity, and her privileging of portraiture as a vehicle for excavating its depths. Speaking to our human capacity for both intense cruelty and empathetic understanding in the face of a deeply alienating fear and suspicion, Dumas cuts right to the heart of what it is that divides and unites us as a species – of the nature of man ‘kind’ itself. 

 

The Age of the Image

'I did this exhibition called Man Kind, in which I specifically looked at people from Moroccan origin. I also looked at pictures of Palestinian young boys, suicide bombers, their last pictures; and the different faces of North Africa, the Mediterranean; and also the attractiveness and the vulnerability of these young faces'. —Marlene Dumas 

With titles such as The Believer, The Pilgrim and The Neighbour, Dumas’s portraits from this series move from the specific to the universal: at once portraits of individuals, they are also representative of larger, fundamentally human experiences or states of being on the one hand, and of the sweeping assumptions that we might make about these young men on the other. Fascinated by certain codes and preconceptions governing our visual culture, Dumas’s portraits generate a porous superimposition of the original source material and the media-governed reception, dissemination and manipulation of that same image, opening up a space where we are forced to confront our own prejudices, political positions and the limits of our humankind-ness. 

 

Working from photographs rather than directly from life in this manner allows Dumas to drill directly down into the condensed strata of contemporary socio-political life, sifting through the images that record and condense our most complex feelings in the face of political, cultural and religious instability as it plays out on a global stage. A point of comparison might be Gerhard Richter’s controversial series Oktober 18, 1977 which took on a similarly loaded topic in its use of images related to the deaths of the extremist left wing Baader-Meinhof group which Dumas has separately responded to in works such as Stern). However, while both used documentary source material in a contemporary take on the genre of history painting, Richter was nevertheless focussing on events that belonged firmly to the recent past, even as he tackled the reverberations of this collective trauma. Executed in 2005 in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the culture of fear, suspicion and religious intolerance that arose in the West against the backdrop of rapidly escalating tensions in the Middle East, The Believer and its sister paintings confront a more active and volatile reality. Confidently executed on a large scale, Dumas’s painting is a strikingly brave and honest statement of portraiture’s unique and vital capacity to forge new visual languages capable of speaking to the complexities of a rapidly changing world. 

 

An Aesthetics of Empathy 

 

Confronting this difficult subject, Dumas at once acknowledges the extreme power of belief and restores the humanity and dignity to her subject that the generic media-perpetuated composite image of ‘terrorist’ has eroded. Selecting and reworking her source material, Dumas’s paintings remain impartial, capable of demonstrating and eliciting ‘emotional involvement with all victims, regardless of the cause of the misery and injustice, apart from politics and religion, within the freedom of art.’ⁱ

 
Well-versed in psychoanalytic theory, Dumas has a keenly developed sense of the communicative and empathic possibilities of ‘the ‘other’ [who] is also a mirror image of ourselves’.ⁱⁱ Distinct from sympathy which Dumas suggests describes ‘an agreement of temperament, and an emotional identification with a person’, empathy demands a more complex inter-personal exchange, which Dumas identifies as the core aim of her entire artistic project.ⁱⁱⁱ 

Selecting and appropriating source material that is already several steps removed from its origins as a snapshot of a young man, Dumas takes the insulating anonymity of the newspaper image and reintroduces a fundamentally human touch, creating a space where we are able to ‘imaginatively engage ideas of difference within a framework of intimacy’.^iv Reworked in this manner, the portraits emerge, not only as human likeness, but as a complex matrix of interactions between subject, artist and viewer. As Dumas succinctly puts it: ‘When I paint a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘freedom fighter’ (the description depends on your point of view) … my painting does not clarify politics or explain a cause. I paint my anxiety’.^v

 

Marlene Dumas discussing her image archive as she prepared for her Image as Burden retrospective for the Stedelijk Museum

 

Death and Glory: 
'I wondered if one could paint death, death as an abstract thing, like the way you paint love or loss.'
—Marlene Dumas 

With his calm, even stare and almost beatific smile, The Believer seems to occupy another, spiritual dimension, also reflected in Dumas’s treatment of paint here. Working with a deliberately reduced palette dominated by chromatic variations of blacks, whites, yellows and greens, Dumas focuses colour and brushwork into a heightened level of emotional and psychological intensity. Building her watery whites over layers of blues and yellows, The Believer’s skin glows with a quasi-spiritual luminescence that magnetically draws the eye, standing out starkly against the darkened and denuded background. Lending a ‘provocative unease to the way the paint sits on the surface of her canvases’, her water-saturated colours suffuse the figure with a ghostly pallor, somehow making strange the whole history of figurative painting that Dumas nevertheless sits within.^vi  

Immediately prior to the Man Kind exhibition Dumas had been dealing directly with particularly brutal images of violence and death, including unflinching close-ups of the head and shoulders of deceased  individuals closely modelled on her careful observation of Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ. While Dumas’s portraits of the dead are deeply shocking, there is a calm, contemplative quality to The Believer that comes from the empathetic twinge that the artist elicits from us. Floating between life and death Dumas presents the unrepresentable, the presence of death in the midst of life, the believer who would die for their faith. 

 

This aspect of the work was beautifully drawn out in a small but significant exhibition held at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague in 2016, where The Believer was taken out of its socio-political context and reconsidered in light of modern and contemporary responses to questions surrounding faith and superstition. Hung next to Piet Mondrian’s stunning Copy After the Pieta of Villeneuve-Les-Avignon by Enguerrand Quarton, the present work speaks powerfully to our very human drive to look to higher forces to give our earth-bound lives spiritual meaning and significance. 

 

A testament to the significance of this series within Duma’s oeuvre, The Believer was previously on a long-term loan to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where its sister work, The Neighbour, now resides permanently. As well as its inaugural exhibition in an important North African survey of Dutch contemporary art, and its prominent inclusion in the 2006 Man Kind show, The Believer was also included in the landmark monographic exhibition Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and organised in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from June 2008 – February 2009. Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, this is a rare opportunity to acquire an exceptionally important work from one of the most significant contemporary artists working today. 

 

'You've got to have Faith': Dominic van der Boogerd looks beyond the gaze of Dumas' enigmatic portrait to uncover the cultural legacies that inspired it.

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

•    One of the most influential painters of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, South African painter Marlene Dumas is best known for her challenging figurative works. 

 

•    Notable figures depicted by Dumas include Princess Diana, Alan Turing, and Barack Obama, as well as a wide range of friends, family, and anonymous subjects. 

 

•    Over the years Dumas has been the subject of several, major institutional exhibitions, including the travelling retrospectives ‘The Image as Burden’ (2014-2015) and ‘Measuring Your Own Grave’ (2008-2009). 

 

•    Marlene Dumas is one of the most expensive living female artists at auction with her first work selling for over $1 million in 2004, The Pilgrim, a sister work to The Believer, came to auction with Phillips in 2018. 

ⁱ Marlen Dumas: Man Kind, (exh. cat.), Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 31. 
ⁱⁱ Marlene Dumas, quoted in Measuring Your Own Grave, (exh. cat.), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008 p. 44.
ⁱⁱⁱ Marlene Dumas, ‘The Eyes of the Night-Creatures’ (1985), in Sweet Nothings, p. 25
^iv Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ‘The Binding Factor: The Maternal Gaze of Marlene Dumas’, in Measuring your Own Grave 
^v Marlene Dumas, quoted in Richard Shiff, ‘Less Dead’, in Measuring Your Own Grave, (exh. cat.), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 153. 
^vi Ara H. Merjian, ‘Marlene Dumas, Museum of Modern Art: Review’, Frieze, 1 April, 2009, online