The windows of Fortnum & Mason should be brilliantly shining after this polishing ... I was actually across the road at the Royal Academy for the amazing William Kentridge show: for those of you who don't know his work, he's a South African artist who makes, above all, huge charcoal drawings, which in his own invented technique he reworks and reworks and reworks and reworks, leaving traces - adding figures - subtracting, erasing - and photographing them each time, and then turning them into films. But he also produces free standing drawings and tapestries and collages and set designs - South African history - going back to the C19th - apartheid, cruelty, capitalism, profiteering, history, memory - incredibly powerful stuff. It also made for an extremely interesting point of comparison with the Anselm Kiefer that I saw in Venice last week: huge, intellectually and historically informed work that also makes an emotional, visceral impact which for me - in both cases - mingled beauty and despair and grief.
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