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The Painter

Marlene Dumas South African
1994
Not on view
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.
Although based on a snapshot of Dumas’s daughter finger painting on a hot summer day, the child in The Painter is far removed from the little girl in the photograph. Dumas intentionally uses an aesthetic of the indistinct; the thinly painted background and the unevenly colored figure—sketchy in part and incomplete at the feet—reveal the artist’s fascination with the expressive qualities of non finito. The abstract, painterly characteristics of the work, as well as its generalizing title, also serve to displace the subject from any real-life context into an allegorical realm. As such, The Painter speaks to the almost primal urge to leave creative marks on the world.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: The Painter
  • Artist: Marlene Dumas (South African, born Cape Town, 1953)
  • Date: 1994
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 79 × 39 1/4 in. (200.7 × 99.7 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fractional and promised gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, 2005
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2016 Marlene Dumas. Digital Image © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art