ROBERTA SMITH
ART REVIEW


The figurative painter Marlene Dumas has been characterized as an artist who leaves you either hot or cold, but that’s not necessarily so.“Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,’’a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, cuts right down the middle. It left me warm.

Ms.Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photodependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original.

Ms.Dumas’s stained and brushworked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; monstrouslooking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Some of the paintings go for sensationalism.“Dead Girl”shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms.Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Born in South Africa in 1953, Ms.Dumas has lived in the Netherlands since 1976. Although a regular on the lists of collectors everywhere, she is more widely known in Europe than in the United States. This show is her largest in the United States and only her fifth solo show in New York. It was organized by Connie Butler, the Modern’s chief curator of drawings.

“I paint because I’m a woman,’’she has said, in a tone that echoes the macho claims of male painters. And in quotations and poems in the catalog she seems just as self-involved and even pompous as many of her male counterparts.

Sometimes Ms.Dumas can be articulate about painting’s physicality and its psychological effects, yet saying it doesn’t make it so. Remember Robert Longo’s twisting figures and the endless conjecture of whether they were dancing or being shot- The text panel at the front of the show invites viewers to participate in the process of constructing meaning. I thought that’s what we always do.

Still, one viewer’s stasis could be another’s relentless perseverance. Ms.Dumas’s emphasis on the naked or otherwise vulnerable bodies of women can read as retribution for centuries of less attuned representations by men and also for the supposed neutrality of abstraction.

Ms.Dumas’s best work may lie ahead, and in the direction of greater variety. There are hopeful signs in recent works like the“Moshekwa”portrait (2006); the frowsy“Self-Portrait at Noon”from this year; and“Immaculate”(2003).

This last, a compact and foreshortened image of a woman’s genitalia and torso, goes beyond stain painting and allows for a more textured, controlled buildup of paint. To our benefit, Ms.Dumas has made several major themes her own, but she has yet to do the same with her beloved metier, painting.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARLENE DUMAS“Self-Portrait at Noon,”part of Marlene Dumas’s exhibition “Measuring Your Own Grave,” named for the oil painting above.