Notes

Throughout much of his early drawing, filmmaking and collaborative theatre practice, William Kentridge grappled with making visual and narrative sense of the tumultuous politics in the period between 1976 and 1994. Strongly influenced by two key German art movements, Expressionism and its politically radical successor New Objectivity, Kentridge’s early work negotiated the strong urge to witness with the need to produce art. Kentridge, who regarded himself as neither active participant nor disinterested observer in the upheavals of the time, determined that the best working solution was to subject the facts of South Africa to the torsions of metaphor. In simpler terms, he refused to be a cartoonist. ‘A political cartoon has to be unambiguous and clear,’ said Kentridge. ‘My drawings certainly have a political view, but it is also a very personal one.’¹ This untitled drawing, part of a grouping informally known as the Deluge series, is a particularly fine example of Kentridge’s early drawing practice. It dates from 1989. In this year of resistance, protest, sanctions and emergency laws, Kentridge released Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris. The animated film, which fully inaugurated his experimental process of using drawing and erasure to progress filmic action, included scenes of disquiet, protest and brutal violence. In one scene, Soho Eckstein, a cartoonish industrialist redolent of D.C. Boonzaier’s Hoggenheimer character and George Grosz’s Weimar capitalists, throws food and table scraps at a procession of black protesters. This lot directly references this damning action, but does not visually materialise the insult. Instead, the viewer is presented with a scene absent of humans. Various fish, a tin can and telegraph pole levitate above a flooded industrial landscape redolent of Johannesburg. The familiar is also surreal.

It bears noting that Kentridge works in a highly iterative mode. Aspects of the mise en scène in this lot, especially the swampish pool, ladder and ramshackle landscape, rehearse ideas from earlier drawings (notably Plunge Pool I & II, 1987). He continued to produce drawings in this style in 1990, changing aspects of the landscape and suspended detritus. He also continued to explore the theme of flood and deluge, culminating in waterlogged scenes of his celebrated 1994 film Felix in Exile.

¹ Michael Auping (2009). ‘Double Lines: A “Stereo” Interview about Drawing with William Kentridge’, in William Kentridge: Five Themes, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art et al, page 236.

Literature

Dan Cameron; Carolyn and Coetzee Christov-Bakargiev, J.M. Coetzee (1999) William Kentridge, London: Phaidon Press, another drawing from the series illustrated in colour on page 44.