Learn the ABC

Medium: Three colour lithograph with collage, staining and hand colouring
Size: 228.3  x 112 cm (made up of 4 panels 10 x 27.7 cm and 36 panels 23.7 x 27.7 cm)
Edition size: 20

With Learn the ABC, Kentridge makes a larger-than-life gesture to a recurrent motif in his work. The coffee pot figure in the lithograph is a central motif from his ongoing production, The Great YES, The Great NO. The phantasmagoric show, mixing history and fiction, re-imagines the historic 1941 journey of the Capitaine Lemerle ship from Marseille to Martinique, carrying refugees escaping Vichy France. In a surrealist juxtaposition, actors obscure their faces with masks of coffee pots, becoming representations of the French bourgeoisie on board the ship. As Alain Berland writes in a stellar review of the show: “A mask representing the metal top of a coffee pot becomes the metonymy of a product, coffee, whose prosperity has been ensured by the slave trade since the early 17th century.”

From early animations to his quintessential processions, previous lithographs, and a video series, “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot”, Kentridge turns this everyday object into an evocative symbol with self-referential ingenuity. Reflecting on his creative processes Kentridge says: “So you start thinking of a picture of the whole universe and you end up with a…coffee pot.”

This large print, an assembly of forty panels, took us more than eight months of intensive work to edition.

There are a few essential features of Kentridge’s studio: inky red and black notebooks, a table scattered with soft charcoal dust from an in-progress animation, a smooth fountain pen, a bizarre, fantastical moving contraption and almost without fail, a drawing of a coffee pot pinned up the wall.