After attaining her bachelor’s degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 1975, the talented young art student Marlene Dumas left her home country of South Africa in 1976 to study painting further at the Ateliers 73 art academy in Haarlem, Holland (now de Ateliers in Amsterdam), a renowned independent institution run by visual artists. Love and work kept her in the Netherlands, and Dumas has lived there ever since, maintaining a studio in Amsterdam. Today she is recognized as one of the world’s leading painters, with a string of major international shows on her calendar. In all the years she has been away, however, the acute political consciousness born of living in apartheid South Africa has remained strong. The imperative to make work that sometimes ambiguously, sometimes directly, illuminates issues of public concern and the politics of sex and race on a universal level is one that has continued.
Her oil painting Snow White with a Broken Arm (1988) is a case in point. In this skewed version of the fairy tale the heroine lies, eyes closed, in her coffin. Her body is not hidden from view, however, but extends voluptuously across the width of the canvas, her translucent, softly marbled blue and pink flesh rendered with Dumas’s acknowledged mastery. Behind the lid of the coffin a line of seven malign “dwarfs” gaze intently at her body.
Snow White’s eyes are closed and her right arm appears to be broken and bandaged, yet out of sight of the staring onlookers, her hand still tightly clutches a camera emitting images—an act that might be read as compulsively continuing to bear witness under almost impossible circumstances.
Taken under duress by photographers like Ernest Cole, the images that emerged from South Africa during the apartheid years were critical in alerting the country and the world to the inhumane acts taking place in the name of state security. Far from sleeping passively, it seems, Dumas’s Snow White could be seen as a maiden with a social conscience.
Snow White with a Broken Arm 1988
Oil on canvas
140 x 300 cm
Photographer: Peter Cox
Private collection, the Netherlands
© Marlene Dumas