Dewey Decimal759.9492
SynopsisIn her painting Marlene Dumas primarily devotes herself to human figuration. She does so by starting with photographic reproductions often basing them on works from art history. In the publication Tronies, i.e., the portrayal of 'heads', Dumas confronts her own art with highlights from 16th and 17th century Flemish/Dutch masters, where her works enter into a dialogue with, among others, works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens and Johannes Vermeer, whose painting Girl with the Pearl Earring is probably the best known example of a 'tronie'. Similar to the Netherlanders, for whom investigating the spectrum of human physiognomy and emotional expression was important, Dumas displays the articulation of emotions, in the works on paper Black Drawings (1991-92), Females (1992-93), Models (1994) or in the faces, e.g., from The Believer (2005) often painted over life-sized. English and German text., South African-born, Amsterdam-based painter Marlene Dumas (born 1953) focuses primarily on the human figure, often making explicit nods to the history of portraiture. In this monograph, she contextualizes her figurative work by placing it in a visual dialogue with paintings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch masters including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens and Johannes Vermeer. This book concentrates on Dumas' "tronies"--that supremely Dutch genre of painting faces and heads to serve as model expositions of facial expressions and character types. These works on paper, which include the Black Drawings (1991-92) and Models (1994), explore facial structure and emotional expression in ways that resonate with and make overtures towards these earlier paintings and the continuum of art history.