Artist William Kentridge: Man of Constant Sorrow

A lot of the most-talked-about art of the past decade or so was shiny, shrill and brazen. Damien Hirst’s diamond-crusted skull, Jeff Koons’ big mirror-steel bling things, Richard Prince’s slutty-nurse paintings: they were all the swaggering output of a boom time. There were plenty of artists working in a different key, but no one could claim that anguished moralists were the representative figures of the age.

Does the financial collapse mean that a hushed and chastened mood will come upon the art world? Don’t count on it. Remember how 9/11 was supposed to usher in the end of irony? That didn’t happen either. All the same, is it too much to hope that a stricken world might have more time for art that’s less declamatory and cocksure? If it does, this will be a very good moment for William Kentridge, anguished moralist.

Kentridge is a South African whose star has been quietly rising for more than a decade, years when his drawings and animated films made him a favorite of the art-festival circuit and he began designing opera productions in Europe and the U.S. But the sober-minded man we meet in “William Kentridge: Five Themes,” a survey of his work that just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will travel to seven cities, seems especially pertinent these days. The question at the center of so much of his work–What do you do when the world breaks your heart?–is one that a lot of people are asking themselves lately.

Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, the “rather desperate provincial city,” as he’s called it, where he still lives and works. His parents were both lawyers active in defending victims of apartheid. Their son took degrees in politics and fine arts from South African schools. For a time he tried acting. In the early ’80s he studied mime and theater in Paris. But by the middle of that decade, back in Johannesburg, he had committed himself to art.

At the center of Kentridge’s work are the hand-drawn animated films he started making in 1985. Some are intended to be viewed one at a time, like the mournful vignettes from the lives of his fictional alter egos: Soho Eckstein, a rapacious South African businessman, and Felix Teitlebaum, a melancholy soul who pines for Eckstein’s sensuous wife. Others are produced as parts of multiscreen installations in which eight or more unfurl simultaneously on all four gallery walls. So in 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, his semicomical riff on the artist in his studio, we see Kentridge climbing a ladder on one screen (and tumbling down), pacing on another and ripping apart a life-size drawing of himself on yet another.

As an animator, Kentridge is a deliberate primitive. He makes his films by the painstaking process of drawing and erasing individual images, always on one sheet of paper, not successive sheets, so that the smudges and wipes survive from frame to frame and the images don’t so much move as morph forward with bumps and stutters, the way they do in Claymation. Nothing could be further removed from the diamonds and stainless steel of the boom years. It’s a style, poignant in its very crudeness, that by its simplicity confers instant legitimacy on Kentridge and his work.

Each of Kentridge’s film projects generates suites of charcoal drawings, most of them descendants of Goya’s desolate readings of human affairs. Charcoal is exactly the right medium for Kentridge. Burnt carbon has a gravity all its own, and it’s perfect for Kentridge’s blasted landscapes, crowds of eternal refugees and monsters that could be the potbellied Will to Power. His world comes in shades of black, white and gray, with just occasional flecks of red or streams of bright blue that suggest water–a cool comfort against affliction but also the stuff of tears. In Felix Crying, a 1998-99 drawing taken from his short film Stereoscope, an inconsolable Felix stands in a rising pool of his own blue grief as it cascades from his pockets.

What are the sources of that grief? You might call it a nonspecific social and personal malaise. It was never Kentridge’s way to tackle South African history head on. As a white South African, he once described himself as living at the “edge of huge social upheavals yet also removed from them.” During the apartheid years, he didn’t make propaganda films about the bitter fruits of the regime. Instead, he contrived melancholy parables about the psychological predicaments of life within a brutal and brutalizing system. You sense he’s a man who would be happy to retreat into his own world if only the larger world weren’t always drumming just outside his door. What James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus say in Ulysses–“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”–could be Kentridge’s working motto.

Just as with the rest of us, his great weakness is hope. He’s attracted to it and deeply suspicious of it all the same. It’s a reason he’s been preoccupied lately by the brief heyday of the Soviet avant-garde in the years right after the October Revolution, before Stalin put his very big foot down and imposed the rule of socialist orthodoxy in all artistic realms. A short episode of utopianism that ended in its own flood of blue tears, those years seem to epitomize for him the absurdity and paradox of politics.

Kentridge has borrowed from the imagery of that avant-garde, the ecstatic and utopian imagery of Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, for a production of The Nose–Shostakovich’s 1930 opera based on the Gogol story about a Russian bureaucrat who awakens one morning to discover that his nose has left his body and begun to pursue its own career up the social hierarchy–that the Metropolitan Opera in New York City will mount next year. The San Francisco show, which was organized by Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., climaxes with a multiscreen gallery of films connected to that production. The nose climbs a ladder in silhouette (and tumbles down); a Cossack dances. On another screen are abject snippets from the 1937 trial transcript of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the multitude of old Bolshevik leaders devoured by Stalin. It’s too soon to know how Kentridge will connect all this into a coherent production. But there won’t be a diamond-crusted skull or a mirror-steel bling thing anywhere near it. That you can count on.

Steady Art Beat To read Richard Lacayo’s daily take on art and architecture, go to time.com/lookingaround