Artist touts ‘primacy’ of images
William Kentridge, the South African artist, animator, sculptor, drawing master, opera designer, and mime, can now add poet to his list of credits, since he is Harvard’s 2011-12 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. That makes him the latest in a long list of great artists, writers, composers, and poets who since 1926 have delivered Harvard’s Norton Lectures, sponsored this year by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. (Among past lecturers — all charged with advancing the understanding of “poetry in the broadest sense” in at least six lectures — were T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein, and Umberto Eco.) The 56-year-old Kentridge, who is gray-haired, funny, and still the supple mime, calls his lecture series “Six Drawing Lessons.” He roamed the stage at Sanders Theatre last Tuesday to deliver “In Praise of Shadows,” the inaugural talk. (The next, “A Brief History of Colonial Revolts,” is in Sanders at 4 p.m. on...