Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for Meaning) (1988), courtesy The Museum of Modern Art

Marlene Dumas seems a chummy sort. At the press preview for “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, she ingratiated herself to sundry journalists and critics. Standing at the podium, Dumas thanked museum personnel, not least of all, the exhibition organizer Cornelia Butler, and referred to MOMA Director Glenn Lowry not by name, but as “the museum guy.” The crowd laughed. Dumas’s lack of pretension was refreshing.

Which proves how wide the gulf between artist and art can be. There’s nothing chummy or unpretentious about Dumas’s paintings and drawings. They’re dour, ghostly, and self-conscious. Dry and silvery black dominates her palette. Her touch is wispy and the surfaces diaphanous, but the pictures are burdened by gravity all the same. D ...

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