R. B. Kitaj
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ronald Brooks Kitaj (29 October 1932 – 21 October 2007) was an
American-born artist who spent much of his life in England.
Born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near
Cleveland, United States, his Hungarian father, Sigmund Benway,
left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born and
they were divorced in 1934. His mother was the American-born
daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She worked in a steel
mill and as a teacher. She remarried in 1941, to Dr. Walter
Kitaj, an Austrian research chemist, and Ronald took his
surname. His mother and stepfather were non-practising Jews. He
was educated at Troy High School. He became a merchant seaman
with a Norwegian freighter aged 17. He studied at the Akademie
der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York
City. After serving in the United States Army for two years, in
France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin
School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958-59) under the
G.I. Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the
Royal College of Art in London (1959-61), alongside David
Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones, Patrick
Caulfield and Richard Wollheim. Hockney remained a life-long
friend.
Kitaj settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the
Ealing Art College, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade
School of Art. He also taught at the University of California,
Berkeley in 1968. He staged his first solo exhibition at
Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1963, entitled "Pictures with
commentary, Pictures without commentary", in which text included
in the pictures and the accompanying catalogue referred to a
range of literature and history. He selected an exhibition for
the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, entitled "The
Human Clay" (an allusion to a line by W. H. Auden), including
works by 48 London artists, such as William Roberts, Richard
Carline, Colin Self and Maggi Hambling, championing the cause of
figurative art at a time when abstract was dominant. In an essay
in the controversial catalogue, he invented the phrase the
"School of London" to describe painters such as Frank Auerbach,
Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Michael
Andrews, and himself.Kitaj had a significant influence on
British Pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas
of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes
which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most
abstraction and modernism. Allusions to political history, art,
literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed
together on one canvas to produce a collage effect. He also
produced a number of screen-prints with printer Chris Prater.
His later works became more personal. Kitaj was recognised as
being one of the world's leading draftsmen, nearly as good as
Degas. Indeed, he was taught drawing at Oxford by Percy Horton,
himself a pupil of Walter Sickert, who was a pupil of Degas; and
the teacher of Degas studied under Ingres. His more complex
compositions build on his line work using a montage practice,
which he called 'agitational usage'. Kitaj often depicts
disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with
exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumes a detached
outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical
narratives. This is best portrayed by his masterpiece "The
Autumn of Central Paris" (1972-73), wherein philosopher Walter
Benjamin is portrayed, as both the orchestrator and victim of
historical madness. The futility of historical progress creates
a disjointed architecture that is maddening to deconstruct.He
staged a major exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
1965, and a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington
D.C. in 1981. He selected paintings for an exhibition, "The
Artist's Eye", at the National Gallery, London in 1980. In his
later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish
heritage, which found expression in his works, with reference to
the Holocaust and influences from Jewish writers such as Kafka
and Walter Benjamin, and he came to consider himself to be a
"wandering Jew". A second retrospective was staged at the Tate
gallery in 1994. Despite an almost universally negative response
from art critics in London, the exhibition moved to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in Los Angeles in
1995. His second wife, Sandra Fisher, died of a brain aneurysm
in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery ended.
He blamed the critics who savaged his exhibition for her death,
and returned to the US in 1997 to live in Los Angeles, near his
first son. The "Tate War" and Sandra's death became a central
themes for his later works: he often depicted himself and his
deceased wife as angels.
Kitaj was one of several artists to make
a post-it note in celebration of 3M's 20th anniversary. When
auctioned on the internet in 2000, the charcoal and pastel piece
sold for $925, making it the most expensive post-it note in
history, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records.
He was elected to the Royal Academy in
1991, the first American to join the Academy since John Singer
Sargent. He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in
1995. He staged another exhibition at the National Gallery in
2001, entitled "Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters".
