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William Kentridge: The Lulu Plays, a book and an exhibition

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Marian Goodman, New York shows the 67 drawings that went with the Lulu opera (from November 2 until December 19, 2015). Recently the book on Kentridge’s Lulu was published.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About:

On the very day that we are fortunate to have the South African multimedia artist William Kentridge visiting Princeton University as our 2015-16 Belknap Visitor in the Humanities, we also received our copy of his new artist’s book The Lulu Plays. (Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), The Lulu Plays,
with sixty-seven drawings by William Kentridge (San Francisco: Arion Press, 2015).
Described in the prospectus as “one of Arion’s most ambitious artist books, this limited edition contains 67 drawings by William Kentridge bound into the book.

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The text is the original telling of the Lulu story by playwright Frank Wedekind, which inspired the silent cinema classic Pandora’s Box and the Alban Berg opera Lulu.”

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The images are derived from brush and ink drawings for projections created for Kentridge’s 2015 production of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, which was based on the two Wedekind plays from the turn of the century, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.

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The artist drew with brush and ink directly onto dictionary pages. The definitions are in the background but the opening and closing words, in larger type, can be read.

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Often, after drawing, Kentridge moves the sheets, rearranging elements of the drawings so that they become collages and can resemble moving pictures. The appearance of the drawings on pages of the book is very different from the much larger versions in the opera set, where sometimes only a detail is used and images can be altered by the surfaces on which they are projected, as well as fractured or distorted by the planes and interfering elements of the scenery. (text Princeton University)