collage of Indian ink drawings on dictionary pages, mounted on Vélin d’Arches
106.0 x 160.0 (cm)
41.7 x 63.0 (inch)
Alban Berg's opera "Lulu", written in part in 1937 and completed after Berg's death by Friedrich Cerha in 1979, is widely regarded as one of the great operas of the 20th century". Philip Hensher, of the The Guardian, describes the ill-fated protagonist, Lulu, "as a woman of limitless sexual allure, who takes one man after another, rising in the social scale while killing them or driving them to suicide in turn. She is arrested for the murder of one husband, Doctor Schön, and so begins her descent. By the end, she is prostituting herself in a London garret; her last client is Jack the Ripper, who murders her and her lesbian lover, Countess Geschwitz." ( 1 June, 2009) In June 2015, the Dutch National Opera presents the complete version of Lulu, in a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera New York and English National Opera. William Kentridge was inspired for his staging by the silent films from the 1920s and ‘30s, the time in which Lulu was composed.
