William Kentridge

Biography

Every scene in Kentridge’s films is made on a single sheet of paper. He draws in charcoal, films it, erases part of the drawing, adds to it and films again; each change gets between a quarter of a second and two seconds on screen. What is erased never disappears entirely. Grey traces of earlier lines stay on the sheet, and the viewer watches time settle on the paper. After filming, these drawings, reworked many times over, are exhibited beside the film as works in their own right.

He himself calls this “poor man’s animation”.

Kentridge was born on 28 April 1955 in Johannesburg, into a Jewish family of lawyers. His parents, Sydney Kentridge and Felicia Geffen, were advocates who defended in court people whom apartheid had stripped of their rights, and this did much to shape the themes of his work. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand (politics and African studies, 1973–1976) and at the Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–1978). He first drew in charcoal as a boy of about eight, in children’s art classes, gave it up and came back to it many years later. In the early 1980s he went to Paris to study mime and theatre at the school of Jacques Lecoq. He wanted to be an actor; later he recalled, with some irony, that it was there he realised what a bad actor he was and resigned himself to being an artist. From 1975 to 1991 he acted and directed with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg, and in the 1980s he worked as an art director in television.

Drawing and printmaking remained the basis of everything. In 1979 came the series of monotypes “Pit”, in 1980 some fifty etchings, “Domestic Scenes”. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s he made posters, drawings and theatre pieces against apartheid. The triptych “The Boating Party” (1985) is built on Renoir’s painting: the idle company sits calmly at table while everything around it is torn apart and burning. In the print “Casspirs Full of Love” (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) a casspir appears, the armoured vehicle the police used to put down unrest. He released his first animated film, “Vetkoek/Fête Galante”, in 1985, and in 1988 he became one of the founders of the Free Filmmakers Co-operative in Johannesburg.

In 1989 came the film “Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris”, and with it began the cycle that Kentridge later gathered under the title “9 Drawings for Projection”. It has two invented white protagonists: the hard-nosed industrialist Soho Eckstein and the dreamy Felix Teitlebaum, often read as two sides of the artist himself. Then followed “Monument” (1990), “Mine” (1991), “Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old” (1991), “Felix in Exile” (1994), “History of the Main Complaint” (1996), “Weighing and Wanting” (1997), “Stereoscope” (1999) and “Tide Table” (2003), in which Soho finds himself among conversations about AIDS in South Africa. “History of the Main Complaint” was made at the time when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its public examination of the crimes of apartheid. A tenth film, “Other Faces”, appeared in 2011. Apartheid itself is almost never shown directly in these films: what we see is Johannesburg, its mines, mine dumps, offices and empty lots. It seems to me that the erasure technique works here more precisely than any plot, because the sheet shows exactly what the films are about: the past has been smudged over, yet it has not gone.

Since 1992 Kentridge has worked with the Handspring Puppet Company, whose puppeteers stand on stage beside their puppets, in full view of the audience. With the playwright Jane Taylor and Handspring he staged “Ubu and the Truth Commission” in 1997, drawing on Alfred Jarry’s play; linked to the production is a series of eight etchings, “Ubu Tells the Truth” (1996–1997). In “Zeno at 4 a.m.” (2001), after Italo Svevo’s novel, shadow theatre is mixed with film, music and live performance.

Opera came later and kept growing. Monteverdi’s “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”; “The Magic Flute” (La Monnaie in Brussels, 2005); Shostakovich’s “The Nose”; Berg’s “Lulu” at the Metropolitan Opera (November 2015); “Wozzeck” at the Salzburg Festival (8 August 2017). For “Sibyl” at the Barbican in London he received a Laurence Olivier Award in 2023.

He works in three dimensions as well. Since 2001 he has made tapestries: silhouettes cut from torn paper are pasted onto maps from nineteenth-century atlases, and the designs are woven from local mohair at the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Johannesburg. In 2009, together with Gerhard Marx, he put up the ten-metre “Fire Walker” in Johannesburg. His largest public work appeared in Rome in 2016: “Triumphs and Laments”, a frieze 550 metres long along the right bank of the Tiber, with more than eighty figures from mythology to the present day. For the opening he and the composer Philip Miller staged a shadow play with live music.

Kentridge has had solo exhibitions at, among other places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1999 and 2006), and a large retrospective opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008. He has taken part in the Venice Biennale and twice in documenta (1997, 2002); the five-channel installation “The Refusal of Time”, shown at documenta in 2012, was jointly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His awards include the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2008), the Kyoto Prize (2010), the Dan David Prize (2012) and the Princess of Asturias Award (2017). In 2012 he gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, “Six Drawing Lessons”. In 2015 he handed his archive of films and video to the George Eastman Museum.

In his text for “Ubu and the Truth Commission” Kentridge wrote of his mistrust of “good ideas”. In 2017, together with Bronwyn Lace, he opened an interdisciplinary venue in Johannesburg’s Maboneng district called the Centre for the Less Good Idea.