RONALD B. KITAJ

 

kitaj self portraitR. B. Kitaj was born in 1936, Cleveland, Ohio. Since 1957, he has been generally active in Great Britain. First sent to Europe as a member of the United States military, after studies at the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford he attended the Royal Academy of Art (1959-61) where he became friends with classmates Adrian Berg, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and especially David Hockney, with whom he established a close and enduring friendship. Kitaj, who had already had the chance to come into contact with contemporary Western art in the United States during a year of study at Cooper Union in New York and during a year abroad at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, made an important influence - "for better or worse" (Kitaj) - on his fellow students at the RCA.

Kitaj was influenced by the work of fellow American, Robert Rauschenberg. "By grafting ordinary objects onto his early paintings he was pivotal in sparking the birth of British Pop Art." Although initially labeled a Pop artist, rather than borrowing elements from popular culture, Kitaj used a variety of sources including history, literature, and politics for the inspiration of his paintings, prompting critics to frequently evaluate his works as being intellectual. "Kitaj has always been immensely complex, wide-ranging and allusive in his cultural and political references; his intellectualism, however, is always balanced by a sensuous appreciation of his materials."

In 1965, Kitaj met and became close friends with fellow Ohian, Jim Dine; they exhibited together at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1973. In the mid 1970s they were both drawing intensely from the human figure. During the eary 1970s Kitaj met Avigdor Arikha, Lucian Freud and became close friends with Frank Auerbach, whom he had met in the early 1960s while teaching at Camberwell. Since the mid-1970s Kitaj "has shown an increasing preoccupation with the question of Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world." (Alistair Hicks)

Kitaj's preference for figuration, related him to the art of Francis Bacon (to whom he was introduced by Hary Fisher in 1962), Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1976, Kitaj selected figure paintings and drawings by 48 artists for exhibition in "The Human Clay," at the Haywood Gallery; sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain. He wrote the catalog essay, The School of London, for the exhibit: ". . . The bottom line is that there are artistic personalities on this small island more unique and strong and I think numerous than anywhere in the world outside American's jolting artistic vigor. If some of the strange and fascinating personalities you may encounter here were given a fraction of the attention and encouragement reserved in this barren time for provincial and orthodox vanguardism a School of London might become even more real than the one I have construed in my head . . . with potent art lessons for foreigners emerging from this odd old, put upon, very singular place." The phrase, 'School of London', stuck.

Since 1997, after decades of living in London, Kitaj has been a resident of California. "He is increasingly reclusive." notes Alistair Hicks in his book on the Saatchi Collection, "Yet through the written word, the telephone and meeting people for lunch, he has frequent contact with many fine minds. He observes the world with a frightening clarity."


"I have only fond memories of the RCA - of drawing in the life-rooms, of my very gifted colleagues, of the Young Contemporaries and a certain excitement in the air, of much time spent in the V and A through a secret door, of Mrs Buckett and her tea-trolley, of a taste of another England. I regret never speaking with my grandparents about their life in Russia. In a similar way, I regret not engaging the teachers like Weight and Spear more than I did for their painting expertise, and for another London milieu going back to Sickert and Spencer." - R. B. Kitaj

Exhibition Road, Painters at the Royal College of Art
edited by Paul Huxley, Phaidon/Christie's/Royal College of Art, 1988

Image above:
    SELF PORTRAIT (Cold in Paris), 1983
    softground etching   Marlborough Fine Arts, London

bacon by kitaj

Left panel: "SYNCHROMY WITH F. B.," 1968/69
(click title above to enlarge)
Right panel: "GENERAL OF HOT DESIRE," 1968/69
Diptych: oil on canvas, 152.5 x 91.5 cm per panel
Private Collection, London

"Synchromy with F.B. - General of Hot Desire (1968-9) . . . contains certain conjunctions of image, the meanings of which are not readily apparent, but these serve to embellish what in the first instance is a clear statement of homage to a painter Kitaj has long admired, Francis Bacon. One needs only the most basic familiarity with Bacon's work and its homosexual eroticism to appreciate the mischievous inclusiion of a disturbingly disjointed and overtly sexual female nude. What continues to come over most powerfully is the massive presence of the figures themselves, nearly life-size and enveloped in an environment of luscious colour." (Marco Livingstone)

 

 

auerbach and fisher

"TWO LONDON PAINTERS, FRANK AUERBACH AND SANDRA FISHER," 1979
pastel and charcoal on paper, 33" x 30.25"

 

 

the jew

"THE JEW, ETC." 1976-79
oil and charcoal on canvas, 152.4 x 122 cm

"The Jew, Etc. is the first picture that is about Kitaj's fictive figure Joe Singer. He is Kitaj's metaphor for the survivors of the Shoah. The historical event is turned into a current issue. The traumatic experiences are transferred into the present. The picture of the Jew in a train compartment visualizes the physical and mental restriction of the Diaspora. The crampedness of the compartment is passed on to the introverted person in the picture. The hearing aid stresses the isolation. Being on the move, in this case traveling on a train, is in Kitaj's sign system a symbol for the state of restlessness Jews were in. The picture of the wandering Jew who is driven from one place to another. The only safe place to escape to is the world of thoughts."

The Legacy Project

 

 

The Jew, Etc. 1976


I have long since resolved to be a Jew . . .

I regard that as more important than my art. SCHONBERG

"I've seen people wince at this title; sophisticated art people, who think it's better not to use the word Jew. Kafka, my greatest Jewish artist, never utters the word once in his work, so I thought I would. This name-sickness, which many Jews will recognize and understand in different ways, is so touching to me, that I've also given my Jew a secret name: Joe Singer. Now it's not secret anymore.

     In this picture, I intend Joe, my emblematic Jew, to be the unfinished subject of an aesthetic of entrapment and escape, an endless, tainted Galut-Passage, wherein he acts out his own unfinish. All painters are familiar with the forces of destiny embedded in happy accident and other revelations and failures which inform one's painting days. In that way, I'd like to expose Joe, in his representation here, to a painted fate not unlike the unpredictable case of one's own dispersion in the everyday world. For instance, before long I may name Joe's fellow passengers, those you can't see unless I paint them in; even though there's not much room left. In fact, I've begun to people this train-compartment in my journal. One of Joe Singer's jobs relates to a tradition of our exile, which influences this picture, whereby living messengers are trained up, who takes the place of books, in order to preserve a freshness of teaching, not endangered by date or dogma. Joe is the messenger-invention of my own peculiar dispersion (Galut), about which I learn more every day. His depiction on his expiatory pilgrimage, presides over what belongs to my sense of that changeful exilic condition and its uncertain art habits and futures, as in these beautiful lines about the Jews by the Catholic Pé: 'Being everywhere, the great vice of this race, the great secret virtue, the great vocation of this people,'"

R.B. KITAJ
Prefaces by R.R. Kitaj, R. B. Kataj, by Marco Liningstone, Thames and Hudson, 1992

 

 

"Kitaj is not a believer, but has adopted several of the thought patterns of Judaism and, strangely, these link with the mainstream of twentieth-century art. In The Neo-Cubist (1976-87), as well as showing David Hockney tied within the restraints of Cubism's legacy, he offers a road forward. He is an expansive artist. He may not have found an "ultimate revelation', but he stares hard at the world. His paintings have long been composed of the multitude of glimpses that makes up this vision. His writings have always interpreted this, but now they also explain the process. Man seems more threatened then ever."

New British Art in the Saatchi Collection
by Alistair Hicks, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1989

"For The Neo-Cubist Kitaj reworked a . . . portrait of one of his most intimate artist friends, David Hockney, which he had communced in 1976. The portrait as it stood was rare among his paintings in being charged with the directness of his drawings from life. Given his insistence at the time on the importance of life drawing of the human figure, and the closeness that he felt in this regard with his old friend Hockney, it is particularly striking that he decided to alter the image in this way rather than simply redrawing the fiure as the basis for a new work. He agrees that he deemed it necessary to the meaning of the painting to bring together the two spheres to which he and Hockney alike were most devoted: that of diret observation and that of the imagination. Kitaj explains that there were other reasons, too, for the particular nature of the alterations: 'I wished to indicate his neo-cubism by a kind of disjunction arranged in the classic cubist oval device. There are other aspects: the recent death of Isherwood (can you see a bent superimposed head bowed in death?) and a general gragic sense (AIDS) as countertheme in that exotic California, which was weighing on him - disjunction again.'"

R.B. KITAJ by Marco Livingstone
Originally published by Phaidon Press, 1985
Revised and expanded edition, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1992

 

pass cursor over image

kitaj

"DAVID," (unfinished), 1976-77
oil & charcoal on canvas, 72" x 60"

"THE NEO-CUBIST," 1976-87
oil on canvas, 70" x 52"
The Saatchi Collection, London

 

". . . I began the portrait of Hockney in the 'seventies. I didn't care much for it, and it lay in storage for many years. In the later 'eighties, David described to me the death of his friend Isherwood in California. I took up the old portrait again and drew a kind of alter-figure across the original full-frontal one, with Chris Isherwood in mind. Like Hockney, and unlike me, he had been a very optimistic and sublime personality, so I made of them a sort of Cubist doppelganger, representing both life and death in the particular, widely perspectival California setting they made their own in exile and, I hope, in some harmony with David's recent neo-Cubist theory for pictures."

from R.B. Kitaj's statement in: Exhibition Road, 1988

"The Neo-Cubist is Kitaj's most astute comment on the state of painting today. It pokes gentle fun at artists' aspirations to follow on where the Cubists left off, but also it shows how painting has evolved in the last seventy-five years. Between 1976 and 1987 Hockney, a close friend ever since their first year at the Royal College together, has been experimenting with photo-montages and prints. These works have been heralded by some as the natural successors to the great Cubist masterpieces. Kitaj as been doing the same in oils. In The Neo-Cubist Hockney is dislocated in a Cubist manner to reveal more sides than normally possible on a two-dimensional surface, but the painting is not restricted by the rules of Cubism. It shows Hockney stepping out from a mammoth egg shape. He floats in a landscape rich with references to Matisse, other Kitaj works, and his own Splash paintings.

Kitaj as usual is best at describing his own imagery. 'The "egg" shape,' he writes, 'is my mimicry of that grey Cubist ellipse which sometimes frames classical analytic Cubist compositions. I meant the lush plant life to stand for the artificial garden paradise one finds in Los Angeles, and in Hockney's own garden there. I began the painting as a nude (of D. H.) about twelve years ago. It had been in storage all these years - then a year or so ago, when his dear friend Isherwood died and Hockney related his last days and hours to me, I got the old failed painting out in order to transform it, with Isherwood's ghost dislocating (as you say) Hockney's form, after his newfound Neo-Cubism . . . I even gave Hockney bathing trunks (barely) . . .'

Hockney's many arms are firmly bound to his side. He is tied by the limitations of his art. Though he shares aims with Picasso, Braque, and Hockney, Kitaj is not a Neo-Cubist. His paintings demonstrates the ultimate failure of Cubism to resolve its spatial context. He doesn't rely on a distortion of perspective; he doesn't attempt to physically force an extra dimension into the canvas. He simply places the contrasting thoughts, references, and experiences on one canvas."

The School of London: the resurgence of contemporary painting
by Alistair Hicks
Phaidon Press Limited, Oxford, 1989

 

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Silkscreen of Francis Bacon by R.B. Kitaj

 

 

 

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