Уильям Кентридж: Художник, отразивший эпоху ЮАР

South African artist

William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are 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 to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art. Kentridge has created art work 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 in Johannesburg in 1955 to Sydney Kentridge and Felicia Geffen, a Jewish family. Both were advocates (barristers) who represented people marginalized by the apartheid system. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and began taking classes with charcoal at age eight. In 2016 he became perhaps the first artist to have a catalogue raisonné devoted exclusively to his juvenilia. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and then a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the early 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He originally hoped to become an actor, 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." Between 1975 and 1991, he was acting and directing with Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In the 1980s, he worked on television films and series as an art director.

Kentridge believed that being ethnically Jewish gave him a unique position as a third party observer in South Africa. His parents were lawyers, well known for their defence of victims of apartheid. 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 as Francisco Goya and Käthe Kollwitz. Kentridge has practiced expressionist art: form often alludes to content and vice versa. The feeling that is manipulated by the use of palette, composition and media, among others, often plays an equally vital role in the overall meaning as the subject and narrative 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. Aspects of social injustice that have transpired over the years in South Africa have often become fodder for Kentridge's pieces. Casspirs Full of Love, viewable at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, appears to be nothing more than heads in boxes to the average American viewer, but South Africans know that a casspir is a vehicle used to put down riots, a kind of a crowd control tank. 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.

By the mid 1970s, Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, 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's 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 titled Ubu Tells the Truth, based on Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi. These prints also relate to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted in South Africa after the end of apartheid. One of the stark and somber prints from this portfolio, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is illustrated. The Six Drawing Lessons, delivered as part of The Norton Lectures series at Harvard 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. "My drawings don't start with a 'beautiful mark'," writes Kentridge, thinking about the activity of printmaking 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."

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).

In 2009, Kentridge, in partnership with Gerhard Marx, created a 10m tall sculpture for his home city of Johannesburg entitled Fire Walker. In 2012 his sculpture, Il cavaliere di Toledo, was unveiled in Naples. 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.

In 2016, the anniversary of Rome's legendary founding in 753BC, Kentridge unveiled Triumphs and Laments, a monumental mural along the right bank of the river Tiber. 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 composer Philip Miller, devised a series of performances featuring live shadow play and more than 40 musicians.

Kentridge is married to Anne Stanwix, a rheumatologist, and they have three children. A third generation South African of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, he is the son of the South African lawyer Sydney Kentridge and the lawyer and activist Felicia Kentridge.

Kentridge's works are included in the following permanent collections: Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Tate Modern (London). An edition of the five channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), which debuted at documenta 13, was jointly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to the George Eastman Museum, one of the world's largest and oldest photography and film collections.

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". Kentridge is represented by Goodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery and Hauser & Wirth (since 2024). From 1999 to 2024, he worked with Marian Goodman Gallery. The South African record for Kentridge is R6.6 million ($320,000), set at Aspire Art Auctions in Johannesburg in 2018. One of his bronze pieces reached $1.5 million at Sotheby's New York in 2013.