William Kentridge

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.

Introduction : on the southern tip of Africa -- Process as metaphor : the metaphorics of erasure -- History as process : theaters of politics and Hegel in Africa -- Process/procession : a process of change -- Drawing up, drawing out : drawing as thinking -- Projection : the most promiscuous of metaphors -- Being contemporary up south : world time and other doubtful enterprises

South African artist William Kentridge’s drawings, films, books, installations, and collaborations with opera and theater companies have established him as a world-class star in contemporary art, media, and theater. In 2010, and again in 2013, he staged Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera; after the premiere, the New York Times noted that “Kentridge, who directed this production, helped design the sets and created the videos that animate the staging, received the heartiest bravos.” In this book, Jane Taylor, Kentridge’s friend and frequent collaborator, invites us to take an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at his work for the show. Kentridge has long been admired for his unconventional use of conventional media to produce art that is stunning, evocative, and narratively powerful—and how he works is as important as what he creates. This book is more than just a simple record of The Nose. The opera serves as a springboard into a bracing conversation about how Kentridge’s methods serve his unique mode of expression as a narrative and political artist. Taylor draws on his etchings, sculptures, and drawings to render visible the communication that occurs between his mind and hand as he thinks through the activity of making. Beautifully illustrated in color, William Kentridge offers striking insights about one of the most innovative artists of our present moment.

William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire~ISBN 0-89207-339-X U.S. $45.00 / Hardcover, 10.75 x 8.5 in. / 128 pgs / 97 color. ~Item / January / Art

This visually compelling publication highlights The Museum of Modern Art's unparalleled collection of prints and books byWilliam Kentridge - nearly fifty works spanning the past three decades. The book also features a succession of artistic interventions made by Kentridge especially for the occasion. Kentridge's practice brings together drawing, film animation, books, sculpture and performance. Too little known is the extent to which the artist 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 first forays into visual art in the 1970s to his recent large-scale operas. Kentridge's love of the printed image extends to an embrace of books. He often draws and prints on unbound pages from encyclopaedias, ledgers and the like, the readymade support adding nuance and complexity to his work. He has extended these practices in William Kentridge: Trace, using translucent pages interspersed throughout the book to respond to his prints reproduced between them in a visual dialogue between the past and the present. The book also includes an essay, an annotated checklist, a chronology and the text of a lecture by Kentridge on printmaking, illuminating its relevance to his broader practice. The publication coincides with the Museum's presentation of the touring exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes. MoMA's presentation will be unique in its addition to the numerous collection works, including most of the prints reproduced in this volume.

The exhibition is a general review of the work of Willliam Kentridge (b. Johannesburg, 1955) since the end of the 1980s until now. It highlights the way in which it the various media and disciplines in his work are informed and polluted, an artistic process marked by a continuous fluidity, founded in transformation and movement. Best known for his animated films based on the charcoal drawings, Kentridge also the author of engravings, book illustrations, collages, sculptures, and works within the performing arts. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist and designed especially for this venue, the exhibition "William Kentridge: Fortune" emphasizes the unique artistic process of the artist, as well as the interrelation of media that he uses. The exhibition comprises a selection of works with a total of about 284 works - including 38 drawings, 27 movies, 184 engravings and 35 sculptures created between 1989 and 2014.

South African artist William Kentridge draws on varied sources in his work, including philosophy, literature, early cinema, theatre and opera. This publication began life as a film constructed from a succession of drawings made in 2013 on the pages of old books; a second-hand reading in which books are translated into a filming of books, articulating the relationship between drawing, photography and film-making. It is both a narrative and an acknowledgement of the necessity of repetition, inconsistency and the illogical. Kentridge has made many flip books, but at 800 pages this is his most ambitious. He has also been making animated films for two decades.0.

A luxuriously produced clothbound presentation of Kentridge's formative print series, with previously unseen images This book documents, for the first time, the entire 54 images--as well as an additional 65 plate progressions not previously known to exist--in William Kentridge's important early series of etchings and aquatints, Domestic Scenes(1980). One of today's most respected contemporary artists, Kentridge (born 1955) was only 25 years old and relatively unknown when he made these images, which are pivotal in how they shaped his thinking, studio practice and conceptual approach. Presenting a range of human interactions in domestic environments and revealing influences from Matisse to Francis Bacon, from Giacomo Balla to Niki de Saint Phalle, the prints receive in this book fascinating new commentary from Kentridge, who shares his working methods as well as personal memories of the prints' subjects and creation. Framed by detailed research by Warren Siebrits, the compiler of Kentridge's upcoming catalogue raisonné of prints and posters, Domestic Scenesprovides some of the earliest evidence of the artist "stalking the drawing": returning to the etching plate time and again to make additions and alterations. The book features a tipped-in image and a pull-out poster.