William Kentridge - Nose series no. 14 "Official police portrait"

48/50
The "Nose" Series explores a number of intaglio techniques, relying primarily on Kentridge's strong drypoint marks, softened by sugarlift aquatint and punctuated, in several plates, with red. The series arose out of Kentridge's preparation for his 2010 production of the Shostakovich opera with the same name for the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Shostakovich's opera is based on Nikolai Gogol's iconic story "The Nose" (1837), following the pompous government official Kovalyov who wakes up one day to find that his nose has left his face and gone walking around St. Petersburg. In his interpretation of Gogol and Shostakovich, Kentridge has projected the story forward to the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Russian avant-garde, and then into the twentieth century to include allusions to Stalin's purges of the 1930s. But he has also cast his eye back to consider some of the literary influences on Gogol, such as Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and even Cervantes's Don Quixote. Drawing on these and other texts, including excerpts from Russian newspapers, clips from Russian films of the 1920s and 1930s, pages from Russian encyclopedias, and parts of a transcript of a 1937 meeting of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in which the theorist Nikolai Bukharin is being interrogated, Kentridge created not only his opera production but several other works, including this suite of etchings. In this series Kentridge follows the nose through leisure activities and art history as it defines its owner. The prints reflect on music, ballet, the history of Western art and the various fortunes of the Communist parties in South Africa and the Soviet Union. Subsequent prints were completed which for various reasons Kentridge did not consider to be a good fit for inclusion as part of the suite of 30 etchings, and were thus published as standalone images.
The series were printed at David Krut Workshop. Embossed with the David Krut Workshop chopmark in the margin.
Backside contains 3 small strips of sellotape from framing.


The text below by William Kentridge appears alongside the illustration of this print in William Kentridge Nose: Thirty Etchings, edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen and published by David Krut Publishing in 2010.

"Based on a drawing by Picasso, the double breast seen under the armpit. When drawn onto the plate, the condensed milk and Indian ink mix is the same tone for all sections of the drawing. The difference between the body and the head is only a question of time. The first bite of the aquatint—which gives the light gray body—took approximately four minutes. The black head was 'bitten' in the acid for about an hour. The white eye was protected from the acid by a permanent felt-tip marker. Initially I had thought The Nose would be contemplating Picasso's odalisque. But this was not sufficient."

Image size: 20x14.5