Floor 6: William Kentridge (exiting City Gallery)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the William Kentridge Gallery. This large rectangular gallery features three partially-enclosed shed-like theatres with video installations, two of them feature slatted wood panels on the inside and cork on the outside. There are also several activity tables and eight 2D pieces on the walls. You will notice a flooring change from wood to carpet when entering the theatre spaces.
You’ve entered from the back right corner of the gallery, facing the far, front wall. Immediately to your left, there is a shed with three walls featuring a projection artwork with a bench in front of the projection screen. The entrance to the space is parallel to, and faces, the front wall.
Moving into the middle of the gallery, there are four tables with a stereoscope activity, books, and a video about William Kentridge. There are stools at every table, and the flooring underneath some of the tables is a mix of carpet and linoleum. Across from that area, set out from the middle of the right wall, is another one of the three-walled shed spaces featuring a multimedia installation. The entrance to that space is parallel facing the back wall.
In the far-back left corner, there is an artwork installation featuring two angled mirrors on a stylized metal tripod, stationed at the center of the room between two large charcoal drawings. The mirrors do not have cautionary barriers surrounding them. A slightly raised platform surrounds the perimeter of the gallery.
In the back front corner there is an enclosed theatre featuring a video projection. The entrance to the theatre is through a short hallway that juts into the gallery space from the right wall. Go down the short hallway and turn left, the artwork is in the center of the enclosed gallery, as well as two benches near the left wall.
The exit to the Anselm Kiefer Gallery is on the right wall near the front right corner of the gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"Forgetting is the natural process, remembering is the unnatural effort one makes."
—William Kentridge, 1998
William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he continues to live and work. The son of anti-apartheid lawyers and activists, he was aware of the brutality of his country's system of racial segregation and discrimination from a young age.
Kentridge first achieved international recognition in the 1990s with a series of animated short films focused on life in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa that he called Drawings for Projection. To create films like Tide Table (2003), on view nearby, Kentridge painstakingly develops, erases, and reworks a single charcoal drawing for each stop-motion animation sequence. Ghostly traces of erased forms remain visible, giving physical expression to individual and cultural memory.
The selection of projects gathered here includes the multimedia miniature theater Preparing the Flute (2005) and two works that investigate the mechanics of how we perceive the world. Whether exploring post-apartheid South Africa, the Italo-Ethiopian War of the 1930s, or the complicated legacy of the European Enlightenment, Kentridge is dedicated to recalling the traumas of the past—fighting collective amnesia by "erecting a beacon against forgetting."
Historical Timeline:
1910–14
Existing British colonies and Dutch republics join to form the Union of South Africa. A white minority holds power and in 1914 forms the National Party, passing laws that prevent Black South Africans from voting or owning land.
1950s
The National Party begins formal apartheid, a government-mandated system of racial segregation. Citizens are divided by race and forcibly removed from neighborhoods like Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town.
1955–61
Artist William Kentridge is born in Johannesburg. Kentridge’s father, a lawyer who defends those targeted by apartheid, represents the accused in the Treason Trial (1956–61).
1964
Nelson Mandela and fellow African National Congress leaders are sentenced to life imprisonment for fighting racial segregation.
1976
Black schoolchildren publicly protest government policy requiring that lessons be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid regime. Police open fire on the students, injuring and killing many, sparking a nationwide revolt that leaves more than 550 people dead.
1986
US Congress imposes sanctions against South Africa through the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. Amid escalating protests, the South African government declares a nationwide state of emergency, enabling mass detentions, curfews, media censorship, and the expansion of police power.
1989–90
F. W. de Klerk becomes president of South Africa and begins negotiations with Nelson Mandela. The following year, he lifts the ban on liberation movements and releases Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison, initiating talks to dismantle apartheid.
1993–94
F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A resolution is passed for South Africa’s first elections in which all races can vote, held the following year. Mandela becomes president and apartheid ends officially.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
William Kentridge at work.
SFMOMA interview (2005)
Excerpts from William Kentridge’s Tide Table (2003)
Studio footage from Drawing the Passing (1999). Directed by Reinhard Wulf, Maria Anna Tappeiner
Single-channel video, with sound, 2:38 min
Transcript
William Kentridge:
There's a sense of animation as a field of transformation, of depicting transformation. That's always been at the heart, and that continues today.
Charcoal is a fortuitous material to be working with for animation, because its tonal range, kind of, is very good for photographic film, but also because of the speed of its transformability. It's very easy to erase, so you can kind of change it as quickly as you can think. And I suppose it became a way of thinking rather than a physical medium for me.
Films are made without a script or a storyboard. So there are 1 or 2 key images that I know at the beginning of the film, and I'd start with drawing those. And literally that is, it's on day one when I say I want to make a film; usually by the end of the first day, or the end of the second day, there’s film that's gone through the camera.
But a drawing is done on a sheet of paper that's on the wall of the studio, and halfway across the studio is the camera. About four paces away, and I'll draw the first image of the scene and shoot two frames with the camera, then walk back across the studio to the drawing. And on the same sheet of paper on the drawing, not make a whole new drawing, but just erase, for example, the top crest of the wave, and change the shape of the white line, and maybe add some more charcoal below. Walk back to the camera and shoot two more frames, and then walk back to the drawing and maybe make that white line fatter so that, in fact, the foam is getting thicker on the top of the crest of the wave. Maybe it's getting dark underneath. Add more charcoal there. Walk back to the camera and shoot two more frames of my shot—six frames. That sequence would continue with the walk between the camera and the drawing.
If it's four seconds long, that's 100 frames, 50 walks. If it's 20 seconds long, that's so much longer. So there are sometimes many hundreds of alterations on one sheet of paper, and the sheet of paper that is left is the last frame, not of the film, but of that sequence in the film of that shot.
I'm not seeing what's being shot. I have to take it on trust, what is there. All that you see at each moment is the present—in other words, the state of the drawing at that moment. And it's very much in the belief that, in that physical walk between the drawing and the camera, in that physical process—it's not a mental process, it's a physical process—new images and ideas suggest themselves to go before that shot, after that shot, what that shot can develop into.
Label
Invented in 1838, a stereoscope is a viewing device that brings two side-by side photographs together to give the illusion of a single, three-dimensional image. When we look at a slide through a stereoscope, our brain merges the two flat images into one, creating a sense of spatial depth and detail.
William Kentridge explores stereoscopic vision in his installation Larder (2004), on view in this gallery. He is interested in how stereoscopes make us "aware of what we do when we look."
Objects
10 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label 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.
Visual Description
A large vertical work on paper (almost eight feet tall by five-and-a-half-feet wide) in charcoal, colored pencil, gouache, and pastel depicts a tripod-like structure carrying a scarred, globe-shaped form against a smudged gray sky. This central form is a dark, nearly circular sphere positioned in the upper half of the sheet, painted and drawn with dense black and gray marks, white patches, and scattered touches of ochre and pale yellow. Several thick, blunt, black rod-like protrusions stick out horizontally from the sphere—clustered especially to the right side—with one short, vertical nub rising from the top. Across and around the sphere, thin linear elements—some in pale pink and red—trace arcs and looping contours, like diagrammatic paths or orbital lines, intersecting with darker scratchy crosshatching and smeared washes.
Beneath the sphere, two elongated legs splay outward in a wide stance, rendered as angular, open lattice frameworks with heavy black strokes defining triangular truss patterns. The legs meet the ground at two separate points. The right leg extends far to the lower right corner, while the left leg angles toward the lower left. The ground is a narrow band along the bottom, described with stippled black dots, short vertical marks and occasional yellow-green smears. The background sky is uniformly gray with visible horizontal rubbing and grain, overlaid by faint circular and curving guide lines in very light tones.
The piece is in a light wood frame.
Artwork Label 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.
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.
Visual Description
[Visual descriptions forthcoming]
Artwork Label 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).
Visual Description
Four individual square panels with charcoal, ink, and collage on paper show a dark silhouetted figure interacting with birds of various sizes against a light gray background. These are arranged on a mottled gray wall, in one horizontal row, with each panel measuring nearly 16 by 16 inches. Each drawing is outlined by a thin red line.
The far-left panel features a side profile of figure bending far back, almost as if they are mid-fall. One leg is straight, while the other leg is raised in front of the figure. One arm is extended back overhead, and the other arm is extended slightly forward at the waist, partially out of view so only the hand is visible. A large bird, about the size of a hawk, is perched on the hand of the arm extended overhead. The bird is in profile facing left. In the upper left corner of the panel, there is a thick, jagged mark in the same dark silhouette style as the figure and bird. Another bird, this one seemingly mid-flight (or perhaps it has just landed), is perched on the foot of the figure's extended leg.
The left-center panel shows a side profile of a figure. One arm is extended in front, and one arm is extended behind. A large bird, about double the size of a hawk, is perched on the figure's extended arm. There are black circular marks in the background, as well as black and gray smudge marks.
In the right-center panel, a figure stands with the left arm extended out to the side. A small bird is perched on the figure's hand. Another small bird is perched on the figure's head. There is some faint cursive lettering at the top of the panel, with only the letters O and Y legible. On the left side of the panel, there are black and gray smudge marks.
The far right panel panel depicts a human figure, slightly leaned over, with both arms extended from the sides of the body and slightly bent at the elbows. There are several black lines swooping and curving across the background, both horizontally and vertically.
All four works are in white frames.
Artwork Label 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).
Visual Description
Six individual square panels with charcoal, ink, and collage on paper show a dark silhouetted figure interacting with birds of various sizes against a light gray background. These are arranged on a mottled gray wall, in two horizontal rows of three, with each panel measuring nearly 16 by 16 inches. Each drawing is outlined by a thin red line.
The top-left panel features a figure bending over at the waist, facing left, holding a small bird on an outstretched hand. In their other hand sits a giant bird, as big as the human if not slightly larger. The bird's wings are folded in.
The top-middle panel shows a lone figure with their left arm extended and reaching overhead, their right arm at their side. They are positioned on the left side of the panel and bending at the waist toward the right. Filling the center and right side of the panel is a large bird with wide, outstretched wings. The bird's left wing nearly touches the fingers on the figure's extended left arm. Thin, black cursive lettering fills the background behind the figures. Portions of words are visible, such as "natur" and "Schwere."
In the top-right panel, a large bird occupies the center. It is perched on a horizontal line that resembles a stick or branch. The bird looks large because a human figure with long wings on its back is standing on the back of the bird. The figure is hunched over, gazing down, and the bird's head is turned so it appears to be gazing up at the human. Large wings extend from the figure's back.
The bottom-left panel depicts a side profile of a human figure walking to the left side of the panel. The figure is slightly hunched over, and coming off the figure's back are wings or dark cloth that appears to be blowing back behind the figure. There are white and black loops and lines around the figure.
The bottom-center panel features a side profile of a person hunched over, bending toward the left. One arm is extended in front of them, and the other arm is extended behind them; both arms are bent at the elbow. The figure's head comes to a point on the left side and resembles a large beak. A white, chicken-sized bird sits on the hand to the right side of the panel, and a dark, pigeon-sized bird sits on the hand to the left side of the panel. There are two much larger birds above the figure. One on the upper left side of the panel is dark, with gray wings extended back. The other bird, drawn at the top center of the panel, is slightly smaller. Its wings are also tucked back and its head is bowed forward. There is illegible, cursive text behind the figure and the gray background is covered with a pale, slanted grid.
The bottom-right panel shows a figure in a dynamic, unbalanced pose. The figure is leaning back with both arms in the air and one leg raised, as if they are mid-fall. There is a large, owl-like bird perched on one elbow and another, box-shaped bird with pointy, raised wings sitting on the foot of the raised leg. There are some circular lines that appear in the background, as well as darker smudge marks in the upper-left corner of the panel.
The bottom row of three drawings is offset to the right by one panel, so the left panel on the top row extends past the bottom row, while the right panel on the bottom row extends past the top row. All of the drawings are in white frames.
Artwork Label 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."
Visual Description
[Visual descriptions forthcoming]
Artwork Label 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.
Visual Description
A large charcoal-on-paper landscape (about four feet tall by six feet wide) depicts an open terrain rendered in smudgy grays and deep blacks, interrupted by thin, straight red lines and areas of bright blue. The middle ground contains scrubby fields and low, uneven ground, with scattered leafless bushes and small trees drawn as quick, spiky charcoal silhouettes. Across the right half, looping tracks or rutted paths arc through the bare earth.
Near the center, a narrow band of pale blue-gray marks sits low in the landscape like a reflective puddle or stream segment, surrounded by darker brush. On the horizon to the right, an industrial-looking structure rises above a line of small trees, with additional thin vertical lines. The sky is heavily worked with charcoal, darkening toward the upper left into a stormy haze and lightening toward the center, where erased areas create a washed, foggy glow. Several faint red lines run diagonally and vertically across the sheet, intersecting in the foreground and extending upward. The artist's signature is in the lower right corner in red handwriting.
The piece is in a light wood frame.
Artwork Label 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.
Visual Description
Two mirrors positioned at a right angle to one another and mounted on a four-foot-tall tripod create a single, three-dimensional illusion of two black-and-white drawings that hang on opposite walls nearby. In the black and white drawings, which are large, monochrome charcoal drawings (seven feet tall by nine feet wide), a rhinoceros stands rigidly on a simple wooden table inside a shadowy, brick-walled room, with the ceiling crowded by looping black marks.
The rhino's thick body is covered with line work and small symbols. The space is rendered with strong perspective: bricks recede along the left wall toward a rounded archway opening, while the ceiling and right wall slope inward, creating a boxed, tunnel-like enclosure around the animal. On the floor beneath and around the table lie scattered papers and torn sheets, some partially crumpled, plus several container-like objects: a bottle lying on its side near the table legs and other cylindrical items nearby. Large sack- or label-shaped forms sit in the lower left and lower right corners, each with handwritten text; the lettering is partly obscured, backwards, and difficult to read, but includes fragments such as "larder," the title of the painting (in all capital letters), "what will come" (also in all capital letters) and other short words and numbers. To the right of the rhinoceros, thin, scratchy white lines arc upward like chalk scribbles, contrasting with the darker shading of the room. In front of the rhino, there is an arched window. Anchored on a small stand on front of the window is a large face that seems to be looking directly at the rhino and is nearly nose-to-nose with it.
The mirrors mounted on the tripod are positioned at an angle of 45 degrees to the two drawings on opposite walls.
Both drawings hang on the walls unframed.
Artwork Label 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
Visual Description
This charcoal and pastel drawing on paper, measuring almost three feet tall and four feet wide, depicts a balding man in a dark, pinstriped suit. The man is positioned in the center of the frame, leaning his forearms against a railing consisting of three horizontal bars that span the foreground. He is looking downward, with his head tilted toward his chest, and his hands are folded over the top rail. The piece is rendered in shades of black, gray, and white, with visible charcoal texture and smudging across the background walls and the man's attire.
Vertical and horizontal architectural lines indicating a window (to your right) and the corner of an awning (to your left) define the space behind him. Behind his head, there is a faintly drawn figure—somewhat ghostly in appearance—with visible eyes, nose, and mouth and shoulder. Faint red lines appear throughout the painting, often at boundaries of shapes and planes. On the right side, there is a red vertical lie running from top to bottom; to the right of that line, on the lighter margin of the paper, there are handwritten numeric notations.
The piece is in a light wood frame.
Artwork Label 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.
Visual Description
[Visual descriptions forthcoming]
Artwork Label 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
Visual Description
A roughly four-feet-tall by five-feet-wide charcoal-on-paper drawing in a landscape format shows three darkly rendered, uniformed figures in peaked caps positioned in a row of three recessed window openings, divided by angular, light-toned partitions. Long red lines appear throughout the piece, faintly outlining the window openings. A small vertical row of red rectangles appears in the upper right corner of the piece.
Across the lower third, the composition shows a heavy horizontal ledge, also faintly outlined in red marks. Above this the three bays sit beneath a broad band suggesting an overhang or roofline, all shaded in smeared charcoal grays. The artist's signature is in the lower right corner in red handwriting.
The piece is in a light wood frame.