William Kentridge

(born 1955)

Walking Man, 2000 unframed

Footnotes

Provenance
David Krut Fine Art, Johannesburg;
Acquired from the above by the current owner in 2002.

Literature
Judith B. Hecker and William Kentridge, William Kentridge – Trace – Prints from the Museum of Modern Art (Verona: Trifolio SRL, 2010) p.25
Milena Kalinovska and Eric Denker, William Kentridge, Oleg Kudryashov: Against the Grain (Washington, DC: The Kreeger Museum, Washington, 2009) p.15
William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Prints, (Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2006) p. 96
Kate McCrickard, William Kentridge: WK, (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p.38
Lilian Tone, Kate McCrickard and William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Fortuna, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), p.270

Walking Man is a fascinating work that explores the possibilities of scale, celebrates South Africa's long tradition of linocutting, and subtly combines the political and the poetical, calling to mind yet not explicitly, anti-apartheid marchers and uprooted communities.

Working together with master printer Osiah Masekoameng at the Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg, on the largest press in South Africa, William Kentridge challenged his technical expertise of the medium with this work, morphing not only a walking man into a tree, but the usually small-scale medium of linocut into a monumental presence of crisp lines, stark contrasts, and captivating patterns. If the latter recall the woodcut prints of Northern Renaissance and German Expressionism artists, the print's impact also lies in the poetical transformation of the man, reminiscent of a tale from Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The industrial landscape across which the figure strides could well be the outskirts of Johannesburg, where the artist was born and continues to live today. South Africa might even be the second character of this print, whose presence is suggested more than obvious, and certainly seems to inform the multiple readings of this important print, encapsulating 'themes of loss, transformation, personal and cultural memory, oppression and conflict'. Interestingly, William Kentridge says of the linocut medium:

In South Africa, linocut is the primary form of printmaking, because linoleum is a very cheap material and the tools to make it are very easy ...And there's also a root to linocutting from the various missionaries who brought the technique to South Africa and a link to the German Expressionists whose style obviously comes back to African masks. And so there's a kind of circularity. It occurred to me that if etching and engraving have to do with the split in northern Europe between the Reformation and other ways of being, then linocutting corresponds to anti-colonialism, certainly in South Africa, to something that comes out of that struggle.

Impressions of this print are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the MoMA in New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. An impression of Walking Man was also included in the landmark exhibition Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now at MoMA in 2011.

Bibliography
Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to now (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011) https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/impressions_from_south_africa/works/walking-man/
Judith B. Hecker and William Kentridge, William Kentridge – Trace – Prints from the Museum of Modern Art (Verona: Trifolio SRL, 2010)
William Kentridge: Walking Man (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales)