Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.
Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”
Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms―and deceptions―through which we construct meaning in the world.

Six Drawing Lessons (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

Arts & Photography

Kentridge, William

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment’s legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now. For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation. “That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (The Africa List)

Morris, Rosalind C.

Seagull Books

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created and as a visual epitaph to a history of disappearances. For her part, Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Reading down and across the columns of the pages as though they were themselves shafts in the earth, she draws together the stories of migrant laborers and charts the flows of capital and desire, overwriting the text of the book to give us a palpable sense of the world that gold mining created.

Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 (The Africa List)

Individual Artists

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment’s legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now. For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation. “That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

That Which Is Not Drawn: In Conversation (The Africa List)

In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, published in 2015, renowned artist William Kentridge and scholar Rosalind C. Morris brought us an unprecedented collaboration, taking pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation in South Africa and transforming them into something entirely new. While Kentridge contributed breathtaking landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created, Morris plumbed the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. &nbsp; Now, they revisit those ruined mines, with a visual and verbal addendum that provides an account of the ongoing metamorphosis of the world that gold mines created. Kentridge works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, while Morris mines the unsaid in order to make it understandable. Together they've created a landmark book that chronicles the exploitation of African communities and sheds further light on global Black history. With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world. &nbsp;

Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book (The Africa List)

William Kentridge's art brings together drawing, film animation, sculpture and performance. He also applies his astonishing draftsmanship to the techniques of printmaking, including etching, screenprinting, lithography and linoleum cut. In fact printmaking has always been essential to his work, from his earliest forays into artmaking in the 1970s to his recent operas. “Printmaking has been not just an edge to or a side journey from the work that I've been making over the last 30 years or so,” the artist has said, “but is very much a key to it.” Kentridge's love of the printed image extends to books, and he often draws and prints on unbound pages from encyclopedias, ledgers and the like. In Trace, both a catalogue of prints from the Museum's collection and an artist's book, Kentridge uses translucent pages interspersed throughout the book to respond to his prints reproduced beneath them, in a dialogue between past and present. The book also includes a lecture by Kentridge on printmaking, illuminating its relevance to his broader practice.

William Kentridge: Trace. Prints from The Museum of Modern Art

Hecker, Judith

Reference

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Catalog for exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 12, 2007-April 6, 2008. Illustrated throughout. Essays by Gabriele Guercio, Ekwui Enwezor, and Ivan Vladislavic. Measures 11.75x10.75 inches. Explores an extraordinary series of seventeen large-scale tapestries woven between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that resonate with his collages of itinerant characters set against the weblike backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg.

William Kentridge: Tapestries

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Artwork by Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Fred Wilson. Edited by Lynn Herbert. Contributions by Rick Lowe, Dana Friis-Hansen. Text by Paola Morsiani, Marti Mayo.

Outbound: Passages From The 90'S

WILSON, FRED

Gober, Robert

Mayo, Marti

Morsiani, Paola

Neshat, Shirin

Hamilton, Ann

BARNEY, Matthew

Antoni, Janine

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist. &nbsp; Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. And these phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have been put to work in many of his artistic projects. Kentridge has often begun a project by paging through the notebook, waiting for a phrase to claim its place in the new work. The text excerpts come from many sources: Aimé Césaire, Yehuda Amichai, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Setswana proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto, and a range of eastern European poets. This volume presents a selection made from the notebook, with phrases arranged neither randomly nor with a clear agenda but finding a space in between. Cleverly designed by the artist and beautifully produced, Words is a thought-provoking collection that provides a window to the mind of a contemporary creative genius. &nbsp;

Words: A Collation (The Africa List)

The White Horse (1819) by John Constable (1776-1837) depicts a tow-horse being ferried across the river Stour in Suffolk, just below Flatford Lock at a point where the tow-path switched banks. Constable, who described the scene as "as placid representation of a serene, grey morning, summer," went on in later years to comment: "There are generally in the life of an artist perhaps one, two or three pictures, on which hang more than usual interest-- this is mine." A scholarly essay by Frick curator Aimee Ng, is paired with a piece by artist William Kentridge, who writes about finding inspiration in Constable's nostalgic world. The painting was well received when it was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1819, and it was purchased by Constable's friend Archdeacon John Fisher. Constable bought back the painting in 1829 and kept it the rest of his life.There is a full-scale oil sketch for The White Horse in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Constable's White Horse (Frick Diptych)

Ng, Aimee

GILES

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