Notes

Might William Kentridge have thought about the sumptuous nudes of Max Beckmann, or the graphic ones of Otto Dix when he drew the present lot. Kentridge is well-known for referencing other artists in his work, from such old masters as Albrecht Dürer, to such Baroque artists as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, such early 19th century artists as Francesco Goya, and late 19th century Impressionists as Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Georg Grosz. The resemblance to the dancing couple in the centre of the central panel of Otto Dix's magnificent drawing, a triptych titled Großstadt (1927) is uncanny. In Dix's, the nude figure of a woman dances with a male figure in a dress suit; in Kentridge's, one naked and one dressed woman, one with cat-eyed shaped glasses, dance in an empty, yet lofty space. Says Carolyn Christov-Bakariev, 'The sketchy drawings [from this period] present charged, haunted settings, rarely the open, barren landscapes of his later works. By entirely filling the paper with different scenes, Kentridge presents multiple points of view, close to the Expressionist and post-Cubist structure of Max Beckmann's satires. They are inhabited by women in pearls and men in evening dress - recalling a decadent Weimar-style bourgeoisie and carefree café society. By alluding to these socially engaged art movements in works that evoke a far off, distant past, Kentridge presents a paradoxical approach to modernism, implying a nostalgia for these utopias, while suggesting that they are gone for good, that they have failed'.¹

The drawing forms part of a series of mid-1980s subjects, such as The Conservationist Ball, Dreams of Europe and Tropical Lovestorm in which Kentridge grafts representations of Johannesburg's high society onto high European art. Says Kentridge in this regard 'The artists working in Weimar were working in a state of siege …the subject matter was about the possibility of failure, of attempts to transform the world, and the project is similar to mine … but there is also, obviously, a danger of being lost in a wonderful nostalgia for that era. What can one say about that? It was the last great flowering of political art'.²

It is almost as if Kentridge is sifting through the most topical of European art in order to come to terms with what was happening politically in South Africa at the time. A work from the same period, Flood at the Opera House, symbolically negates such a state of siege in which the country found itself, and suggests a ritual purification of society, sardonically dancing their way into a new political dispensation.

¹ Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (1998) William Kentridge, Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, page 15.
² Willaim Kentridge (1987) Interview with ADA magazine, no 4, page 6.