The drawings derive from transformative period in Kentridge’s early career. In 1984, at the prompting of dealer Reinhold Cassirer, a family friend, Kentridge returned to the studio following a long absence. In a 2012 lecture series at Harvard University, Kentridge likened the experience of being a young artist back in the studio to Rainer Maria Rilke’s descriptions of a weary panther circling its enclosure in his poem The Panther (1902).1 The lecture series is rich in animal references, both real and artistic.
In the manner of the drawings in the Engen Collection, Kentridge’s drawings from 1984 and 1985 often incorporated charcoal, pastel, crayon, gouache and/or ink. Thematically, Kentridge was interested in human rather than animal behaviour but his compositions often feature animal subjects. The Conservationists’ Ball, a triptych shown in the 1985 Cape Town Triennale, incorporates a cheetah, a rhino, a spotted hyena, an unspecified fish and various animal carcases. Also from 1985, The Boating Party, a triptych based on Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party(1881), includes a woman hugging a warthog. Briefly an editorial cartoonist for the Weekly Mail newspaper in 1985, Kentridge signed his cartoons as “PH Chere” – an allusion to the French noun for warthog, phacochère.
Animals, both land and sea dwelling, continued to appear in Kentridge’s drawingsthroughout the 1980s. The dark tones and polemical bite of these drawings reflected the strong influence of Goya, Daumier and the German expressionists. However, Kentridge’s appreciation for animal subjects, and his accomplished execution of them for the Mobil commission, points to other guiding influences. Kentridge was six when he was gifted Cecil Skotnes’ 1960 woodblock print of a striped cat with arched back and menacing claws. Two profile-cut sculptures atop the motorised gate at his Johannesburg home continue to signal the influence of this formative work.
Notwithstanding their neo-expressionist handling, Kentridge’s wildlife drawings have a basis in academic drawing. Kentridge was 12 when he met artist and educator Bill Ainslie at his family home.3 He first attended his art classes as a high school boy. In 1976, after completing his studies in politics and African studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Kentridge enrolled in Ainslie’s Johannesburg Art Foundation, a non-racial private art school, where he studied until 1978. Ainslie’s classes involved rigorous academic teaching, including life drawing classes – but no animal subjects, adds Kentridge.4 For his research towards this commission Kentridge consulted the great South African library of books on wildlife. Their transformation here is uniquely his own.
- William Kentridge. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pages 150-156.
- Sean O’Toole, “Cartooning no fun for Kentridge”, Mail Guardian 25 February 2011
- Sean O’Toole, interview with William Kentridge, Houghton, Johannesburg, 5 July 2005.
- Email correspondence with William Kentridge studio, 31 October 2025
Johannesburg Flagship Week 2025
LIVE
William Kentridge Drawings
From the Engen Collection
7:00pm Mon, 17 Nov 2025 SAST
Evening Sale: Modern and Contemporary Art
7:00pm Tue, 18 Nov 2025 SAST
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The Starcke Collection of African Art
Closes 2:00pm Wed, 19 Nov 2025 SAST
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