Linda Yablonsky finds the Marlene Dumas show at MoMA, “more hypnotic than depressing.” And points to subject of “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave” as an artist who “is not afraid to be explicit on the subject of sex or racial differences. It’s hard to think of another contemporary painter who regularly elicits so intense a response from her public. That’s one reason she is among the very few living female artists whose paintings command upwards of $3 million at auction”

Roberta Smith takes a different tack in the New York Times:

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism [ . . . ]

The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount.

On New York’s Vulture, curator Connie Butler explains Dumas’s interest in pornography:

Porn is “something that has always been in her work in various ways,” said MoMA curator Connie Butler, who organized the show. “I think in Marlene’s case, her interest is in the gymnastic quality of those bodies in the coldness of pornography. I think she restores a kind of vulnerability and humanity to those subjects.” She noted that Dumas never painted from live models, only from snapshots. “If you’re the painter of a figure and you don’t use a model, in the end you have to end up with pornography because you’re always looking for new source material. And in pornography you do have the figure doing very strange things, gymnastic things. You have the body doing things that they don’t do anywhere else. If you’re going to paint the figure, you’re going to look at porn.”

But let’s leave the final word to painter Alex Katz, also on Vulture:

“I mean, look at this,” he said. “It’s like there’s no paint on the canvas at all. There’s so much restraint, and the details are all so beautiful. Just look at the nipples. The work is so careful.” Katz, who deemed the show “first-rate,” was impressed by the daring of the subject matter — “there’s a lot of explicit stuff that I wouldn’t have the nerve to do,” he said. “It’s sexy and not vulgar,” enthused the painter, who’s currently working on large-scale portraits of overlapping faces for a show in Calabria. “Like Titian’s nudes are very sexy, and Titian’s drawings, you know? A lot of tits in your face. This goes to the edge of pornography.”

Marlene Dumas Ponders Lust, Death in Hypnotic MoMA Show: Review (Bloomberg)

The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque (New York TImes)

Marlene Dumas Retrospective Stays Just This Side of Pornography (New York/Vulture)