William Kentridge | |
|---|---|
.jpg) William Kentridge at theFolkwang Museum,Essen in 2025 | |
| Born | (1955-04-28)28 April 1955 (age 70) Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Education | University of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg Art Foundation |
| Spouse | Anne Stanwix |
| Children | 3 |
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is aSouth African artist best known for his prints, drawings, andanimated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second's to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. Thesepalimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.[1]
Kentridge has created artwork as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations.
Kentridge was born inJohannesburg in 1955 toSydney Kentridge andFelicia Geffen, a Jewish family. Both were advocates (lawyers) who represented people marginalized by theapartheid system.[2] He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and began taking classes withcharcoal at age eight.[3] In 2016, he became perhaps the first artist to have a catalogue raisonné devoted exclusively to his juvenilia.[4]
He earned aBachelor of Arts degree inPolitics andAfrican Studies at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand and then adiploma inFine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the early 1980s, he studiedmime andtheatre at theL'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq inParis. He originally hoped to become anactor, but said later: "I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad at being an actor [... that] I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it."[5] Between 1975 and 1991, he was acting and directing with Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In the 1980s, he worked ontelevision films and series as anart director.
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Kentridge believed that being ethnically Jewish gave him a unique position as a third-party observer in South Africa. His parents werelawyers, well-known for their defence of victims ofapartheid. The basics of South Africa's socio-political condition and history must be known to grasp his work fully, much the same as in the cases of such artists asFrancisco Goya andKäthe Kollwitz.[6]
Kentridge has practicedexpressionist art, whereform often alludes to content andvice versa. The feeling that is manipulated by the use of palette,composition andmedia, among others, often plays an equally vital role in the overall meaning as the subject andnarrative of a given work. One must use one's gut reactions as well as one's interpretive skills to find meaning in Kentridge's work, much of which reveals very little content. Due to the sparse, rough and expressive qualities of Kentridge's handwriting, the viewer sees a sombre picture upon first glance, an impression that is perpetuated as the image illustrates a vulnerable and uncomfortable situation.[7]
Aspects ofsocial injustice that have transpired over the years in South Africa have often become fodder for Kentridge's pieces.Casspirs Full of Love, viewable at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, appears to be nothing more than heads in boxes to the average American viewer, but South Africans know that acasspir is a vehicle used to put down riots, a kind of a crowd-controltank.
The title,Casspirs Full of Love, written along the side of the print, is suggestive of the narrative and is oxymoronic. A casspir full of love is much like a bomb that bursts with happiness – it is an intangible improbability. The purpose of a machine such as this is to instil "peace" by force, but Kentridge noted that it was used as a tool to keep lower-class natives from taking colonial power and money.[8]
By the mid-1970s, Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30monotypes, which soon became known as the "Pit" series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the "Domestic Scenes". These two extraordinary groups of prints served to establish Kentridge's artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.
In 1986, he began a group of charcoal and pastel drawings based, very tenuously, on Watteau'sThe Embarkation for Cythera. These extremely important works, the best of which reflect a blasted, dystopic urban landscape, demonstrate the artist's growing consciousness of the flexibility of space and movement.
In 1996–1997, he produced a portfolio of eight prints titledUbu Tells the Truth, based onAlfred Jarry's 1896 playUbu Roi. These prints also relate to theTruth and Reconciliation Commission conducted inSouth Africa after the end ofapartheid.[9] One of the stark and somber prints from this portfolio, in the collection of theHonolulu Museum of Art, is illustrated.
TheSix Drawing Lessons, delivered as part of The Norton Lectures series atHarvard University in 2012, consider the work in the studio and the studio as a place of making meaning developed. A series of large drawings of trees in Indian ink on found encyclopedia pages, torn up and reassembled, analyzes the form of different trees indigenous to southern Africa. Drawn across multiple pages from books, each drawing is put together as a puzzle – the single pages first painted, then the whole pieced together.[10]
"My drawings don't start with a 'beautiful mark'," writes Kentridge, thinking about the activity ofprintmaking as being about getting the hand to lead the brain, rather than letting the brain lead the hand. "It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.[11]"
Between 1989 and 2003, Kentridge made a series of nine short films, which he eventually gathered under the title9 Drawings for Projection.[12] In 1989, he began the first of those animated movies,Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris. The series runs throughMonument (1990),Mine (1991),Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991),Felix in Exile (1994),History of the Main Complaint (1996),Weighing and Wanting (1997), andStereoscope (1999), andTide Table (2003).
In 2011, Kentridge released a tenth film in the series,Other Faces (2011).[13]
For the series, he used a technique that would become a feature of his work – successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. In this way, Kentridge's videos and films came to keep the traces of the previous drawings. His animations deal with political andsocial themes from a personal and, at times, autobiographical point of view, since the author includes hisself-portrait in many of his works.
The political content and unique techniques of Kentridge's work have propelled him into the realm of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasise the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed duringapartheid either; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed. In a series of ten short films, he introduces two characters – Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. These characters depict an emotional and political struggle that ultimately reflects the lives of many South Africans in the pre-democracy era.
In an introductory note toFelix In Exile, Kentridge writes,
"In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term 'new South Africa' has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new."
Not only inFelix In Exile but in all his animated works, the concepts oftime andchange comprise a majortheme. He conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventionalcel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing akey frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer; as the films unfold, a sense of fadingmemory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed. Kentridge's technique grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten but can easily be felt.
In the ten films that follow Soho Eckstein's life, an increasing vehemence is placed on the health of the individual and contemporary South Africansociety. Conflicts betweenanarchic andbourgeoisindividualistic beliefs, again a reference to the duality of man, indicate the idea ofsocial revolution bypoetically disfiguring surroundingbuildings andlandscapes. Kentridge states that, although his work does not focus on apartheid in a direct and overt manner, but on the contemporary state of Johannesburg, his drawings and films are certainly influenced by the brutalised society that resulted from the regime.
As for more direct political issues, Kentridge says his art presentsambiguity,contradiction, uncompleted movements and uncertain endings,[14] all of which seem like insignificant subtleties but can be attributed to most of the calamity presented in his work. In amixed-mediatriptych entitledThe Boating Party (1985), based onRenoir's painting of asimilar name, the havoc caused by a seemingly-uninterestedaristocracy is perhaps his most severe comment on the state of South Africa during apartheid. The languid diners sit at ease while the surrounding area is ravaged, torn and burned, a contrast that is reflected in his style and choice of colours.
In 1988, Kentridge co-founded Free Film-makers Co-Operative in Johannesburg. In 1999, he was appointed a film-maker by Stereoscope.
"Purely in the context of my own work," he wrote in a published playscript of his celebratedUbu and the Truth Commission, "I would repeat my trust in the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. I would repeat my mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas. And state a belief that somewhere between relying on pure chance on the one hand, and the execution of a programme on the other, lies the most uncertain but the most fertile ground for the work we do [...]. I think I have shown that it is not the clear light of reason or even aesthetic sensibility which determines how one works, but a constellation of factors only some of which we can change at will."[15]
In 2001, Creative Time aired his filmShadow Procession on the NBC Astrovision Panasonic screen inTimes Square.[16]
Kentridge has been commissioned to create stage design and act as a theatre director in opera. His political perspective is expressed in his opera directions, which involves different layers: stage direction, animation movies, and influences of the puppet world. He has stagedIl ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Monteverdi),Die Zauberflöte (Mozart) andThe Nose (Shostakovich). Following the last work, he collaborated with the French composerFrançois Sarhan on a short show calledTelegrams from the Nose, for which he made the stage and set design for the performance.[17]
In November 2015 his "provocative and visually stunning new staging"[18] of Berg'sLulu, premiered at theMetropolitan Opera in New York, a co-production with theEnglish National Opera and theDutch National Opera.[19] On 8 August 2017, William Kentridge'sWozzeck (Alban Berg) premiered at theSalzburg Festival and received enthusiastic reactions.[20]
In 2023, Kentridge received theLaurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera for the production of 'Sybil' at theBarbican Theatre, London.[21]
Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper; he made a collage of these with the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps. To adapt these figures as tapestry, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, mapping cartoons from enlarged photographs of the drawings and hand-picking dyes to colour the locally spun mohair (goat hair).[16]
In 2009, Kentridge, in partnership withGerhard Marx, created a 10m-tall sculpture for his home city of Johannesburg entitledFire Walker. In 2012 his sculpture,Il cavaliere di Toledo, was unveiled inNaples.[22]Rebus (2013), referring in title to the allusional device using pictures to represent words or parts of words, is a series of bronze sculptures that form two distinct images when turned to a certain angle; when paired in correspondence, for example, a final image – a nude – is created from two original forms – a stamp and a telephone.[23]
In 2016, the anniversary ofRome's legendary founding in 753BC, Kentridge unveiledTriumphs and Laments, a monumental mural along the right bank of the riverTiber. The 550m-long frieze depicting a procession of more than 80 figures from Roman mythology to the present is Kentridge’s largest public work to date. To celebrate its launch, he and his long-time collaborator, the composerPhilip Miller, devised a series of performances featuring live shadow play and more than 40 musicians.[24]
Kentridge is married to Anne Stanwix, arheumatologist, and they have three children. A third-generation South African ofLithuanian-Jewish heritage,[25] he is the son of the South African lawyerSydney Kentridge and the lawyer and activistFelicia Kentridge.
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Kentridge's films were shown at the 2004Cannes Film Festival.[26]
Kentridge's works are included in the following permanent collections:Honolulu Museum of Art, theKalamazoo Institute of Arts, theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, theMuseum of Modern Art (New York), and theTate Modern (London). An edition of the five-channel video installationThe Refusal of Time (2012), which debuted atdocumenta 13, was jointly acquired by theMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York and theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[42] In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to theGeorge Eastman Museum, one of the world's largest and oldest photography and film collections.[43]
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Kentridge's Five Themes exhibit was included in the 2009Time 100, an annual list of the one hundred top people and events in the world.[48] That same year, the exhibition was awarded First Place in the 2009 AICA (International Association of Art Critics Awards) Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally category.
In 2012, Kentridge was in residence atHarvard University invited to deliver the distinguished Charles Eliot Norton lectures in early 2012.[23] That same year, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[49]
In 2017 Kentridge founded a cross-disciplinary incubator called The Centre For The Less Good Idea along with Bronwyn Lace. The centre is located in Maboneng, Johannesburg alongside the artists studios and is currently led by Impresario, artist, musician Neo Muyanga.[50]
Kentridge's artworks are among the most sought-after and expensive works in South Africa: "a major charcoal drawing by world-renowned South African artist William Kentridge could set you back some £250,000".[51] Kentridge is represented byGoodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery andHauser & Wirth (since 2024).[52] From 1999 to 2024, he worked withMarian Goodman Gallery.[52]
The South African record for Kentridge is R6.6 million ($320,000), set at Aspire Art Auctions in Johannesburg in 2018.[53] One of his bronze pieces reached $1.5 million atSotheby's New York in 2013.[54][52]
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