William Kentridge

This exhibition, curated by Carlos Basualdo, might have had as its subtitle “Ubu Roi Does a Matisse.” The articulate South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio, has conjured pretty patterns from paper silhouettes, just as Matisse did at the Vence Chapel. But, as a self-professed disciple of Alfred Jarry, Kentridge cannot refrain from making the metamorphosis grotesque, as the series of torn-paper collages (“Puppet Drawings,” 2000) exhibited in the adjoining room makes clear. Replace Matisse’s elegant multicolored cutouts with chunks of black construction paper unartfully shredded and pinned together and you will capture something of Kentridge’s perversity. Upwardly mobile dancers fall back to earth; contours formerly lithe and free are now broken up and bound to monstrous man-machine hybrids trudging across the page; and ethereal space gives way to the messy world of maps, pins, and tape.

Enlarged first as cartoons and then as finished tapestries, these monolithic compositions evoke Kentridge’s stage designs. The return to the theater (and to outmoded visual technologies evident in other recent work exhibited in New York) demonstrates the appeal of the nineteenth century in his work. Now it has also given him a taste for the monumental. So despite claims for their contemporary relevance—artistic, political, or otherwise—the tapestries reach back to that last great moment in modern art when one could still aspire to represent labor on a public scale. Kentridge may be an anti-Matisse, but perhaps the real question is, “Is he a neo-Courbet?”