Highveld Landscape ,
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Note : Parallels between William Kentridge’s expressionism and that of Maggie Laubser, Irma Stern and Wolf Kibel have been drawn by leading international art historian and curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.1 She also proposes that his works, grounded as they are in narrative, draw on the works of black artists such as Gerard Sekoto and Dumile Feni and traditions of oral story-telling in Africa.
Challenging the conventions of Arcadian landscapes, Highveld Landscape is populated with throngs of people as well as the detritus of mining and civil engineering, evidence of human agency and the passage of history on the landscape. Made in 1989, the year in which William Kentridge produced his first animated film entitled Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the drawing evokes the central themes of the film in which property developer, Soho Eckstein and the naked dreamer, Felix Teitlebaum, fight for the hearts and mines of Johannesburg, as Christov-Bakargiev put it so acutely. 2
1. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Brussels, 1998, page 26.
2. Ibid. Page 42.
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