William Kentridge b.1955

The Artist
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Private collection, acquired from the above in 1998
Osborne Samuel, London

Crouching Man is part of William Kentridge’s Ubu Projects, a collection of drawings and etchings, an animated film and a theatre production completed between 1996-1997. The series takes its premise from French dramatist Alfred Jarry’s 1888 play Ubu Roi, a satirical tale of arbitrary power engendering madness, which Kentridge appropriates as a metaphor for apartheid. 1996 was the first year of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which followed the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the projects, titled Ubu Tells the Truth and Ubu and the Truth Commission, explore the recounted atrocities and confessions as symbols of a larger national narrative of reconciliation.

In the present work, Kentridge handles paint and charcoal with distinctive flair, constructing a richly toned and textural scene. The drawing depicts a naked man, crouching low to the ground and illuminated as if by a stage spotlight. Overlayed and roughly drawn, spiralling lines, taken from close-ups of Jarry’s cartoon-like illustrations of Ubu. Kentridge himself studied mime and theatre in Paris in the early 1980s, abandoning his early career as an artist to do so. After working as an art director for television and feature films in Johannesburg, Kentridge returned to drawing in 1984 with poetic, political works that presented an uncompromising view of South Africa during the apartheid regime. The present work embodies the pictorial and material strategies established over the subsequent decade, weaving theatrical elements into a narrative framework for political and social commentary. The art critic Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev writes of “an elegiac art that explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, it also provides a vicious, satirical commentary on that society” delivering an apt description for the enduring power of Crouching Man (ibid., p. 9).

“There is a democracy to drawing, and a certain kind of work ethic. One of the things that attracts me to drawing, and that in some way relates to its politics, is that it is a demonstration of agency. There is something about the act of drawing that reflects a process of labour. You have a sense of work, at least for me.”

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL AUPING, CITED IN: EXH. CAT., SAN FRANCISCO, SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (AND TRAVELLING), WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: FIVE THEMES, 2009, P. 233

Crouching Man was executed as William Kentridge was attracting considerable international critical attention from his inclusion in the 1997 Johannesburg and Havana Biennales and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. Over the intervening years, Kentridge has achieved global acclaim and recognition as one of the most celebrated artists working today. Kentridge was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, which closed in December 2022.

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

William Kentridge Prints, David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg and New York, 2006, p. 66-69.

In 1996 Kentridge embarked on a series of etchings to coincide with the centenary of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. In Ubu tells the Truth Kentridge transposed Jarry’s spiral-bellied comic anti-hero with the figure of a naked man based on photographs of Kentridge performing the part of Ubu in his studio. The series was the basis for a theatre production written and directed by the artist, Ubu & the Truth Commission (1997), which in turn was the genesis of The Sleeper prints. ‘I had worked on a series of messy drawings of a naked man, sometimes enclosed by the white Ubu line drawing, trying to get some feel of the theatre production in them. With the first set of drypoints I had used a thumbprint and printed the heel of my hand to suggest the flesh texture. With the large drawings one has to pull shape and texture into the drawing on a larger scale. I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit it with charcoal-impregnated silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment. The Sleeper prints used a range of materials and objects placed on soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper’ (William Kentridge, in: William Kentridge Prints, David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg and New York, 2006, p. 66)

Purchased direct from the Publisher, David Krut Fine Art Editions
Private Collection, USA

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, p. 66.

The Sleeper series speaks to one of Kentridge’s main themes, the desire to forget or shield oneself from challenging or problematic realities of history and the present day. Works such as the Sleeper series explore the white South African psyche and the relationship to it’s history of exploitation during the period in which the system of apartheid was first contested and then dismantled. Sleep here stands for the state of ‘blissful ignorance’, a preoccupation with the internal and domestic, allowing the public and political world to be forgotten. However a sleeper will always wake, and it is this moment of self-knowledge and recognition that Kentridge returns to in his work.

The ‘Ubu Tells the Truth’ etchings were the starting point for a theatre production ‘Ubu & the Trust Commission’ (1997). The Sleeper prints were made after the theatre production was completed. I had worked on a series of messy drawings of a naked man, sometimes enclosed by the white Ubu line drawing, trying to get some of the feel of the theatre production in them. With the first set of drypoints I had used a thumbprint and printed the heel of my hand to suggest the flesh texture. With the large drawings one has to pull shape and texture into the drawing on a larger scale. I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit with a charcoal-impregnated silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment. The Sleeper prints used a range of materials and objects placed in soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper.