Brushing with the world

摘要

For well over a century critics have dismissed painting as dead. Picasso's late flourishing in the 1960s proved them wrong. Then came Gerhard Richter and David Hockney. A generation later, Mar-lene Dumas is keeping painting alive and confounding the naysayers. Now 61, Ms Dumas was brought up in apartheid South Africa on a wine farm near Cape Town. She was the child of an Afrikaner family that belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. Although she left South Africa nearly four decades ago (she now lives in the Netherlands), Ms Dumas's work goes back to the tensions of those years, exploring themes of colonialism, occupation, terrorism and conflict. Ms Dumas makes her political subjects personal by lending them humanity and pathos; she makes her personal subjects political by giving them historically charged titles. Her ability to merge the public and the private, and to link modern history and popular culture with the human condition, is a strong part of her appeal.