Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Painter
Marlene Dumas South African
Not on view
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.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
