Marlene Dumas is now one of the only few living contemporary artists whose work has found a permanent home in the Louvre. And she was born in Cape Town.
Paris, France (10 November 2025) – Dutch-South African artist Marlene Dumas is not finished with making history. She’s just become the first contemporary woman artist to join the world’s largest and most visited museum, the Louvre in Paris!
That’s after she broke the world auction record for a living female artist in May earlier this year. Her painting, Miss January, sold for $13.6 million (nearly R250 million) at Christie’s.
Now, nine of her works have joined the Louvre. That’s where the Mona Lisa lives. The Venus de Milo. A home to art and history that spans many thousands of years and civilisations. And now, a South African-born female painter sits among them.
Only a fraction of artists ever make it in, even fewer from our lifetime, and almost none are living women. It’s an extremely rare, elite acknowledgement that your work matters for future generations.
Marlene’s portraits, ‘Liaisons’ have just been installed in the museum’s Denon Wing, overlooking the Seine. They’re everything her art is known for. Haunting, strange and beautiful.
Dumas grew up in SA and studied Fine Arts in Cape Town before heading to the Netherlands, where she eventually built a career that would take her to Documenta, the Venice Biennale, a MoMA retrospective and, now, the Louvre.
In a recent interview with Le Monde, she explained her connection to the ‘doing’ of art and what it forces out of you.
“To paint is to embark on a battle, with no guarantee of success; it is to wrestle with the elements, with the paint and the canvas, to push your own body to its limits, to resist your own thoughts and preconceptions,” she said.
The Louvre’s president, Laurence des Cars, personally commissioned Dumas’s new works as part of the museum’s effort to diversify its collection and bring more women into its permanent holdings. It’s a long overdue shift.
The timing has been complicated, though. The unveiling happened in the shadow of the recent crown jewels heist. It exposed years of security failures and has left the museum under intense scrutiny for weeks.
Even so, none of that dims the fact that Dumas’s work is now permanently part of one of the most important cultural institutions on the planet.
by 