One Fine Show: William Kentridge at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The exhibition showcases more than 80 works from the artist’s 35-year career, but it appears made for today.

Welcome to one fine show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

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“There was the belief we all had twenty years ago that rationality and enlightenment were what we were heading toward, and that countries like South Africa needed to be pushed out of their oppressive systems into the world,” the South African artist William Kentridge recently told The Believer, “But what the last fifteen years have shown us is how precarious that idea actually is.”

A man stands surrounded by drawings in a studio
William Kentridge in his studio, Johannesburg,
2016. Courtesy of Kentridge Studio. Photograph: Stella Olivier

Kentridge’s survey In Praise of Shadows has just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While it showcases more than 80 works from the artist’s 35-year career, it appears made for today. So many of the artist’s works concern apparent certainty, depicted in black and white, and its endless re-examination for hollowness and fragility. Hence, shadows. The context for these investigations is chaos, political and personal, and they span visual art, film and theater.

A pastel drawing in black and white on drafting paper
William Kentridge, ‘Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege’, 1988. Courtesy of the artist. © William Kentridge

First and foremost, Kentridge is a glorious draftsman. Let’s begin with Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege (1988), a tryptic that shares a name with an essay and lecture he coalesced as a young artist. It concerns, among other topics, the betrayal of the Russian Revolution under Stalin. The rough scratches of the prints recall Käthe Kollwitz, and the prints could almost be interpreted as her take on the 20th century, which, like the work, feels more and more absurd the longer you think about it.

Five rows of bronze sculptures on white shelves
William Kentridge, ‘Cursive’, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. © William Kentridge

His outreach into other mediums began as early as 1989, with his film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the first of his “Drawings for Projection” series. These continued until 2020 and examined South African history through the lens of a mining magnate named Soho Eckstein. They established his unique style of animation, which shows the erasures from the previous frames. History becomes yet another shadow to follow his characters. Another classic film from the collection of The Broad, which originally staged this show, is Second-Hand Reading (2013). It shows the artist pacing through pages of a rapidly flipping encyclopedia. “WHICHEVER PAGE YOU OPEN,” it tells us. “THERE YOU ARE.” Hard to tell if that’s a warning or a celebration.

An installation of video in a dark museum space
William Kentridge, ‘7 Fragments for Georges Méliès’, installation view, 2003. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. © William Kentridge

It’s only natural that an artist with such deep feelings about our built world and its illusions would also play with theater, creating elaborate sets for Wolfgang Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose. Kentridge envisages Mozart’s battle of good and evil in the context of Europe’s Enlightenment values serving as cover for their imperialism. But this is all getting a little dense. Like the best art, the work is stirring and beautiful even if you go into it with zero context.

William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows is on view at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston  through September 10.

One Fine Show: William Kentridge at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston