William Kentridge at the Pulitzer
March 22nd, 2011South African artist William Kentridge talks about Max Beckmann’s manipulation of physical space and its influence on his work. Max Beckmann’s The Dream is on view in the exhibition Dreamscapes.
On March 2, in the Pulitzer galleries, the Pulitzer and Washington University hosted a panel discussion for graduate students on the artistic practice of William Kentridge. Panelists included: William Kentridge, Artist; John Hoal, Chair of the Urban Design Program and Associate Professor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at Kemper Art Museum; and Francesca Herndon-Consagra, Senior Curator at the Pulitzer.
If you view some of Kentridge’s animated films, you can see how fitting it was to discuss his art amidst Dreamscapes, which is filled with recurring dreamlike and hallucinatory imagery. In an Art21 video, Kentridge explains that his characters Felix and Soho came to him in a dream and he later found that they were actually self-portraits, as if not he but his distinct dreaming-self had planned it that way. Most of Kentridge’s works are not intentionally connected to dreaming, though they lend themselves to conversations about topics, such as trauma, memory and the ephemeral, which arise in the current exhibition.
Listen to the rest of this fascinating panel discussion on the Pulitzer’s YouTube channel.











