Artists' Artists: Marlene Dumas

ANDY WARHOL
United States of America, 1928–1987
Electric chair 1967

Every museum everywhere should have an Andy Warhol Electric chair on permanent display somewhere. It is one of the best and most uneasy twentieth-century works about the marriage — and tragic state — of life and art. The colours make you happy and the subject makes you cringe. Thinking about the function of chairs in art, I think about how artist’s models on chairs are mostly uncomfortable creatures. Empty chairs like Vincent van Gogh’s poor man’s chair and Henri Matisse’s comfortable chair are beautiful paintings. But Warhol’s electric chairs are the prettiest and the saddest of them all.

SIDNEY NOLAN
Australia, 1917–1992
Drought 1953

Is this a good painting? It’s an effective work: a painting that takes on more urgency as awareness of the global climate crisis increases. This work of paint on hardboard feels as dry as its title: Drought. There is no escape into watery or fluid illusionary brushstrokes. Certain similarities between South Africa, my homeland, and Australia come to mind. Museums in my youth were old places with depictions of boring landscapes; they never reflected the tensions or fearful events of a natural or cultural nature: colonial painters poured on the sugar, without the flies. Nolan painted Drought in 1953, the year of my birth.

OLIVE COTTON
Australia, 1911–2003
The patterned road 1938

At my art school in the 1970s, a photography teacher once cancelled a lecture because he saw what was, for him, the right light conditions happening and he just had to go outside and take photographs. I understood then for the first time photography’s relationship to light. Outside, the position of the sun dictates and inside, the studio artificial light determines where and if the shadows fall. Olive Cotton understood the magical power of shadows. She saw that black and white were tones rather than colours and, when the sun is low on the horizon, the shadows are longer.

It makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s The fisherman and his soul (1891). It’s his ‘little mermaid’ story, in which a young man understands that to be with the mermaid he loves under the sea, he’ll have to get rid of his soul. Eventually a witch tells him how to do it. He has to dance with her and then, to lose his soul, he must cut off his shadow with a viper-skin knife. I tremble with the thought of no shadows, no soul.

TOMMY MCRAE
Australia, Kwatkwat people, 1833–1901
Victorian Blacks – Melbourne tribe holding corroboree after seeing ships for the first time 1890s

Tommy McRae — who was also known as Tommy Barnes, Yackaduna and Warra-euea — recorded Aboriginal life and Indigenous interaction with British settlers. Discovering these works, which are both historical documents and precious works of art, was wonderful. How to draw events in a direct, minimal and lively way as possible has always fascinated me. Drawn using only pen and ink, in a sparse, tense landscape, silhouetted frontal figures gather in front of a single tree, forming strong patterns, performing rituals. At the top left edge of the drawing a solitary form (a ship) approaches from a far-off other world — a sign of trouble coming.

Marlene Dumas' work is on display in exhibition Deep inside my heart from 25 November 2023 to 19 May 2024.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.