Notes

Artwork accompanied by original clam-shell box.

A celebrated printmaker, William Kentridge has collaborated with a number of respected master printers, among them Mark Attwood of The Artists’ Press in Mpumalanga. In 2019–20, Attwood helped Kentridge realise two ambitious multi-panel lithographs based on ink drawings depicting cut flowers. The present lot shows a vase containing garden hyacinth, a non-indigenous plant revered for its fragrant purple flowers.

Kentridge has increasingly devoted himself to still-life ink drawings of flowers over the last decade, so much so that the artist’s 2022 career survey at London’s Royal Academy included a discrete section of these compositions. Kentridge’s interest in floral subjects partly derives from the transformative pleasure of rendering them, but flowers also reference the artist’s fascination with French painter Édouard Manet.

A 2017 ink drawing, The Execution of Maximilian, juxtaposes a vase of cut flowers with a reference to Manet’s iconic suite of paintings of the same name from 1867–69. Kentridge has praised Manet’s capacity to move between the studio and the world, flowers and politics.¹ The present lot extends on the formal arrangement of Kentridge’s Manet drawing, similarly juxtaposing floral beauty with hints of the turbulent social world.

Kentridge’s hyacinths are flanked, at right, by a printed statement reading ‘Wait Once Again for Better People’. This enigmatic phrase is from Kentridge’s chamber opera Waiting for the Sybil (2019), commissioned by the Rome Opera. The opera draws on Greek myth to explore contemporary themes of certainty and uncertainty. At left, another printed phrase reads, ‘God’s Opinion is Unknown’. The aphorism derives from writer and political activist Solomon T. Plaatje’s 1916 book of 732 Setswana proverbs. Kentridge referred to Plaatje’s writings during research towards his multi-format theatrical spectacle The Head and the Load (2018), which explores Africa’s involvement in the First World War and the paradoxes of colonialism^.2 An edition of this print was favourably reviewed when it appeared in a 2021 exhibition in New York. Kentridge has used the phrase ‘God’s Opinion is Unknown’ in two other prints from 2019.

^1. William Kentridge, in William Kentridge: Thick Time (2016), Iwona Blazwick and Sabine Breitwieser (eds), London, Whitechapel Gallery, page 198; and Nicholas Wroe (2016) ‘Out of South Africa: how politics animated the art of William Kentridge’, The Guardian, 10 September.
^2. William Kentridge (2020), ‘Thirty Thoughts on The Head & the Load’, in W. Kentridge, H. K. Bhabha, D. Olusoga, P. Miller and T. Sibisi, The Head & the Load Paris, Éditions Xavier Barral, pages 284–5.