Stern 1976
Oil on canvas 110x130 cm
Frith Street Gallery, London
3rd December 2004
This was my first visit to The Frith Street Gallery; which comprises a group of small rooms on several floors in a terrace house in this street in Soho. Exhibition is titled "The Second Coming" and really works well in the space. Despite the positive religious note struck by the title the predominant aura of the work is one of death.
There is a good reference to the importance of the camera in Dumas work in her introduction in the press release "If we get to heaven and meet the Big Bright Light what will it be - the eyes of the saints or the flash of a camera?"
Six of the twelve paintings were of women’s heads with ambiguous facial expressions. The gallery notes gives the origin of these paintings as follows; Angelique (2004) is an upside down version of an Ingres; Lucy (2004) from is from a Caravaggio; Alfa (2004) is that of a victim of the Moscow theatre siege in 2002; Kim (2004) is from a Dutch newspaper photograph of the 25-year-old Kim Hyon-hui, responsible for blowing-up a Korean airliner in 1987; Ophelia to Medusa (2004) is from the Millais painting; and Stern (2004) is from the photograph of the corpse of Ulrike Meinhof taken from the magazine of the same name.
I found Stern the most compelling of the group, with an almost overpowering emotional sense of melancholia. The strongest perhaps because Gerhard Richter used exactly the same photograph for three paintings in his October 18, 1977 suite of paintings, depicting the body of Red Army Faction member lying dead in her prison cell.
Her version has a very thin wash on face, dark ground behind, eyebrows and lips burnt umber, a couple of white highlights left in thin paint. The face fills the canvas much more than Richter’s version (left), making the space really claustrophobic.
The green under-painting has been left in outline around the face suggesting a deathly glow, and the exaggeration of the open mouth seems to be almost gulping down the darkness above. The paint on the face itself is so sparse, but gives crucial clues to her death by hanging, yet the burn mark from the towel seems to strongly depicted, yet this flaw adds to the freshness of the image. I am sure I would have been tempted to correct it – how wrong that would have been!
I have now seen this painting over a dozen times and whilst it’s melancholic aura is undiminished, the impact in the two settings (Venice Biennale, Tate Modern) have not given the piece the stunning power it had the first time I saw it in the small white rooms in Soho.
©blackdog 2009