Floor 6: William Kentridge: QR Code 620

Wall Text

2006
Charcoal, collage, ink, and pastel on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2006

Kentridge has frequently inserted his own likeness into his work. These drawings derive from projections in Preparing the Flute (on view nearby) in which he appears in silhouette, performing playful sleights of hand that recall the bird-catcher character Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791).

Wall Text

2006
Charcoal, collage, graphite, ink, and pastel on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2006

Kentridge has frequently inserted his own likeness into his work. These drawings derive from projections in Preparing the Flute (on view nearby) in which he appears in silhouette, performing playful sleights of hand that recall the bird-catcher character Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791).

Wall Text

2011
Charcoal on paper
Gift from the collection of Doris and Don Fisher
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2011
** **
This is one of the drawings used to make Other Faces (2011), the tenth animated film in Kentridge’s_ Drawings for Projection _(1989–2020) and the immediate sequel to Tide Table (on view nearby). The drawing depicts a landscape on the edge of the artist’s hometown of Johannesburg, which has been scarred by gold mining. Many of Kentridge’s films explore the relationship between landscape and memory.
** **

Wall Text

2005
Model theater with drawings (charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil on paper) and 35mm animated film transferred to video, with sound, 21:06 min.
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase and promised gift
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2006

This theater model was created to test the projections central to Kentridge’s 2005 production of Mozart’s _The Magic Flute _(1791). The opera stages a conflict between superstition and reason, symbolized respectively by the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, high priest of the Temple of Light. Kentridge set the opera in the mid-1800s, when photography was a new medium, and used positive and negative film imagery. He notes: “As a symbol of the Enlightenment, Sarastro combines all knowledge with all power. In the 218 years since Mozart wrote the opera, we have come to realize what a toxic mixture this is.”

Wall Text

2007
Charcoal, colored pencil, and chalk on paper; double mirror on steel stand
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008

Each of the two angled mirrors in this installation reflects the drawing on the opposite wall. As we approach the mirrors’ center point, our brain combines the left and right images into a single, three-dimensional illusion. This work re-creates the original 1838 mirror stereoscope that was the basis for lens-based stereoscopic viewers like the ones on the nearby tables. Kentridge is interested in how such devices make us aware of the normally unconscious process of vision—how “we don’t just receive but . . . also construct the world.” The rhinoceros features prominently in Kentridge’s work as a symbol of colonial domination**.**

Accessibility note: If you cannot experience this work at its existing height, you can view the photogravure version using a handheld stereoscopic viewer_ _at one of the nearby tables.

Wall Text

2003
Charcoal on paper
Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Doris and Donald Fisher, Patricia and Raoul Kennedy, Elaine McKeon, and Judy Webb, 2004

Wall Text

2003
35mm animated film transferred to video with sound, 8:54 min.
Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Charles Betlach II, Doris and Donald Fisher, Mimi and Peter Haas, Pamela and Richard Kramlich, Elaine McKeon, and Helen Hilton Raiser, 2004
_ _
Tide Table is the ninth installment in Kentridge’s longest-running series of animated films, Drawings for Projection (1989–2020). The setting is a post-apartheid beach near Cape Town, where we encounter Soho Eckstein, a white industrialist and real estate developer who plays a prominent role in many of the films. The beach, populated by frolicking children and racially mixed groups, becomes a stage for South Africa’s larger social and political transformations. Despite the seemingly blissful resort setting, the specter of sickness and death—the AIDS epidemic in particular—surfaces and resurfaces.

**  **

Wall Text

2003
Charcoal on paper
Accessions Committee Fund purchase: gift of Shawn and Brook Byers, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., the Modern Art Council, Helen Hilton Raiser, and Helen and Charles Schwab, 2004

Wall Text

2003
Charcoal on paper
Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Gay-Lynn and Robert Blanding, Shawn and Brook Byers, Pamela and Richard Kramlich, Lisa and John Miller, and the Modern Art Council, 2004

Wall Text

2007
Charcoal, colored pencil, gouache and pastel on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008
** **
Kentridge’s image of a globe perched atop a pair of legs suggests both Atlas, the Greek Titan doomed to carry the heavens on his shoulders, and the burdens of memory and history. Patches of blank paper, made woolly through erasure, are visible beneath layers of black matte color. For Kentridge, such erasures produce a “sense of the news being absorbed and, more importantly, the news being forgotten.” This drawing emerged from a series he created for an Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, and for his 2007 film addressing the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–36), What Will Come (Has Already Come), on view nearby.

Wall Text

2007
Steel table, drawing paper, and cylindrical steel mirror with 35mm animated film transferred to video, with sound, 8:40 min.
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008

** **In this video projection, we are invited to look down on a series of distorted images spinning around a circular table. Only when we see their reflections in the curved mirror at the table’s center do they become recognizable: a fly, an airplane, and falling bombs. Kentridge uses anamorphosis here to make us aware of how our eyes and brain construct what we see. The subject of the work is Fascist Italy’s aerial bombardment of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935–36. By translating this event into a nightmarish carousel of warped images, Kentridge suggests how history can be distorted and repeated.

[separate label/graphic nearby What Will Come (Has Already Come)]
What is anamorphosis?
Anamorphosis is a visual technique in which an image is deliberately distorted so that it is only recognizable when seen from a certain angle or reflected in a specially designed (usually curved) mirror. Chinese and European artists have explored the phenomenon for centuries. The most famous example in Western art is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), in which a mysterious form on the floor is legible as a skull when seen from the correct slanted angle.