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Painting/Politics/Photography: Marlene Dumas, Mme Lumumba and the Image of the African Woman
Author(s) -
Garb Tamar
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.12507
Subject(s) - depiction , painting , politics , photography , art , colonialism , trace (psycholinguistics) , art history , relation (database) , order (exchange) , visual arts , history , archaeology , philosophy , law , linguistics , finance , database , political science , computer science , economics
This essay looks at the politics of portrayal, photography and figuration in relation to the colonial/apartheid archive. It focuses on the Dutch/South African artist Marlene Dumas's reworking of a selection images – both personal and public – in order to question contemporary painting's capacity to deal with history, and in particular its spectacular or photogenic trace. By using the painted reworking of both her old school photograph as well as an iconic depiction of Mme Pauline Lumumba, it asks what painting can do when it takes on the photographic past. At the same time, it explores the interpretive filters that have coalesced around the figure of the ‘bare‐breasted African widow’.