Untitled (Man Reading and Anthropomorphic Figures)

Provenance

Acquired from the artist.

The Linda Givon Collection.

Notes

The early career of William Kentridge is closely tied to two influential Johannesburg art dealers: Reinhold Cassirer, a family friend of the Kentridges, and Linda Givon, founder of Goodman Gallery and the recipient of these drawings (lots 349, 351, 352 and 355). Givon had known Kentridge since childhood, through his parents, who were regular visitors to her gallery, but her formal professional relationship with the artist developed long after his uncertain beginnings in the 1970s.

Cassirer, the scion of a distinguished Berlin art-dealing family, played an important role in encouraging Kentridge to revive his stalled artistic practice. The artist’s first exhibition with Cassirer, in 1985, included mixed-media drawings, and he continued to exhibit with the dealer until Cassirer’s retirement in the early 1990s. It was Cassirer who arranged the luncheon with Givon at which Kentridge, then aged 36, was formally introduced into the Goodman Gallery stable.¹

Kentridge’s move to Goodman Gallery did not bring immediate commercial success, owing in part to the recessionary climate that accompanied South Africa’s democratic transition. In 1995, Givon temporarily closed the gallery. The period between the first and second Johannesburg Biennales, held in 1995 and 1997 respectively, marked a decisive shift in international interest in contemporary South African art. David Bowie praised Kentridge and Doris Bloom’s collaborative presentation as the “white-heart high point” of the first Biennale.²

Givon reopened Goodman Gallery in October 1996 at its current Parkwood premises. The gallery thrived, in part owing to Kentridge’s remarkable international ascendancy in the late 1990s. One of Givon’s defining memories from this period was Kentridge winning the 1999 Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie International, the longest-running international survey of contemporary art in North America, for his film installation Stereoscope (1999). In 2007, she sold her interest in the gallery to Liza Essers, under whose stewardship Goodman Gallery continues to represent Kentridge. Linda Givon died in 2020.

^1. Sean O’Toole (2007) personal interview with Linda Givon, Johannesburg, 25 May.

^2. David Bowie (1995) Modern Painters, 'The Cleanest Work of All', vol. 8, Summer, page 45.