At

home

with

William

Kentridge,

South

Africa’s

greatest

living

artist

On the eve of two major solo shows and as he turns 70, the artist and director opens up his family house in Johannesburg

The streets surrounding William Kentridge’s home in northern Johannesburg are lined with trees of exorbitant beauty: jacaranda, blue gum and London planes arch overhead to form a luminous-green tunnel. The light in “the city of gold”, as it is named for the reefs of mineral on which it is built, is always stunning, but the scenery is usually far grittier. As I round a steep corner in my car, the sun’s rays are so dappled it would give the American “painter of light” Thomas Kinkade a run for his money. I pull over to take a photograph. I’m clicking away when a man barely dressed in rags bangs on my car window and starts screaming obscenities.

It turns out that I’ve stopped right in front of Kentridge’s home, which feels apt. The work of South Africa’s greatest living artist is deeply rooted in the city in which he has lived for most of his life. The contrast between the affluent street submerged in sunlight and the failed promises that have left the metropolis struggling with homelessness and broken services are an ever-present undercurrent in his works, whether in his rough-hewn charcoal drawings of trees or experimental animations depicting post-apartheid South Africa. 

I walk up the driveway to the English arts and crafts‑style house where he lives with Anne Stanwix, his wife of more than 40 years, a rheumatologist. Sitting in the light-filled home studio in his garden, Kentridge tells me the deep political vein that runs through his works isn’t always conscious. It “sort of sinks in . . . in ways that I’m not aware”, he says. White-haired with a shock of white eyebrows and dressed in a crisp white Oxford shirt, he has the air of a professor, at once pensive and appraising. Although he’s “never thought of the work as being a history of Johannesburg, if you put the films next to each other, they become a kind of history of what’s happened in the city”.