R. B. Kitaj

Background

Ethnicity: R. B. Kitaj's mother father was Hungarian while his mother was the American-born daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants.

Kitaj was born in 1936 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland, United States. His father, Sigmund Benway, left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born. His parents divorced in 1934. R. B. Kitaj took family name from his stepfather, Walter Kitaj, whom his mother married in 1941. Jeanne Brooks worked in a steel mill and as a teacher. R. B. Kitaj's mother and stepfather were non-practicing Jews.

Education

R. B. Kitaj's interest in art was sparked at the Cleveland Museum of Art where he took art classes while attending high school. After completing his high school education in 1949, Kitaj joined the crew of the SS Corona, a Norwegian freighter. He served as a merchant seaman for five years. During that period he visited Cuba, Latin America, and Europe. Kitaj was able to pursue his interest in painting and drawing by attending several courses, including those at the Cooper Union in New York in 1950 and in 1952, and at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna in 1951.

Due to the financial support of the American government's G. I. Bill (the Bill offered stipends covering tuition and expenses for veterans attending college or trade schools) R. B. Kitaj was able to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. There he studied under the supervision of Edgar Wind, an art historian. He directed Kitaj towards the Warburg Institute where he learned about the important role history and antiquity could play in interdisciplinary research. He completed his education at the Royal College of Art in London. While there R. B. Kitaj met David Hockney, an artist with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.

Career

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. His first solo exhibit, Pictures with Commentary/Pictures Without Commentary, in 1963 at Marlborough Gallery in London. Two years later it was followed by an exhibition at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York.

Following his wife's suicide in 1969, R. B. Kitaj returned to the United States where he took up a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though he continued teaching until the early 1980s, during this time he returned to painting. In the early 1970s, Conceptualism and Minimalism were the dominant art movements in the United States. However, Kitaj was not suppressed by what was fashionable and he continued to create his figurative works. Many of his paintings were based on historical and cultural narratives, especially relating to the Jewish tradition, and questioned the ideas of artistic progress.

In 1982 Kitaj moved to Paris, where he focused on drawing and his use of pastel. Two years later he went to London where the artist continued to work, creating his First Diasporist Manifesto in 1989. The first major retrospective exhibition of his artworks took place at the Tate in 1994 and it became a turning point in his life. The exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Although the show had a commercial success, it was vigorously condemned by critics who accused him of being a "pseudo-intellectual." The notorious critic Brian Sewell of the London Evening Standard described Kitaj as "a vain painter" who was "unworthy of [even] a footnote in the history of figurative art."

R. B. Kitaj decided to move back to Los Angeles in 1997 and continued to exhibit with Marlborough Fine Art and the Marlborough Gallery, New York. In 2001 the National Gallery London organized a solo exhibition of paintings: R.B. Kitaj In the Aura of Cezanne and Other Masters. Writing took a lot of time and his Second Diasporist Manifesto, in which Kitaj extended the aims of the first book by looking beyond the Jewish question and to reflect the diasporic experience as it touched (or might touch) all artists in exile, was eventually published in 2007, one week before his 75th birthday. Kitaj took his own life in the same year following a two-year battle with Parkinson's Disease, a condition that had robbed him of his ability to paint.

Achievements

• 

  R. B. Kitaj is best known for his expressive, figurative works that playfully depict contemporary life, art historical references, and sexuality. Kitaj received several significant honours in his lifetime, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London in 1991, and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995.
  
  In September 2010, Kitaj and five other British artists, such as Howard Hodgkin, Ian Stephenson, John Walker, Patrick Caulfield, and John Hoyland, were included in an exhibit The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, which was held at the Yale Center for British Art.
  
  Besides, a major international symposium was held in Berlin in October 2012 to celebrate Kitaj's 80th anniversary. It accompanied the first comprehensive exhibition of Kitaj's work since his death entitled Obsessions. It was organized at the Jewish Museum, Berlin.
  
  All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, opened at Tate Britain in February 2018, was inspired by R. B. Kitaj's School of London.
  
  Today, the artist's works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Second Diasporist Manifesto

    (This book, a follow-up to Kitaj's influential "First Dias...)

    2007
  • First Diasporist Manifesto

    (The artist declares his credo on art and life.)

    1989

• collage

  • I've bailed every Waitress in this Club (aus 15teilige Serie 'Mahler Becomes Politics', Beisbol, 1964-7)

  • The Red Dancer of Moscow

• painting

  • The Autumn of Central Paris

  • Cecil Ct London WC2 (The Refugees)

  • Bather (Psychotic Boy)

  • Dismantling the Red Tent

  • The friendship and the shadow of betrayal

  • Synchromy with F. B.

  • Marynka Smoking

  • Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea

  • Do you know the country?

  • Desk Murder

  • The Orientalist

  • The Ohio Gang

  • Artists for Peace

  • The Rise of Fascism

  • Apotheosis of Groundlessness

  • The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem)

  • The Man of the Woods and the Cat of the Mountains

  • America (Baseball)

  • Portrait of Walter Lippman

  • La hispanista (Nissa Torrents)

  • Mary Ann

  • If Not, Not

  • A Life (B)

  • Still Life

  • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

  • Los Angeles No. 7 (Double)

  • Rosseau

  • Man with Matisse Tattoo

  • The Man on the Ceiling

Views

Quotations: "The Jewish question, in its infinity, is the central drama and romance of my life and art."

"A lot of good and regular art gets made because of who you talk to. No one is immune to human contact and art is not made in a vacuum."

"My pictures had and have secret lives, and so there were things I did not tell, a lot of stuff I did not say back then which I'm saying now... I intend to continue allowing forms of secret life to paintings I'm working on right now because it excites me to do that..."

"Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done. "

"I carry themes in my mind for years before I will try to compose them. I've got themes that will last me now til I die."

"There is a genius in origins - ripe for picking, in art and life, for those who feel it's there for them. Speaking as a diasporist Jew, my own origins explained themselves to me slowly and bodied forth in my life and pictures unsurely and uneasily."

"If some of us wish to practice art for art's sake alone, so be it [...] But good pictures, great pictures, will be made to which many modest lives can respond. When I'm told that good art has never been like that, I doubt it, and in any case it seems to me at least as advanced or radical to attempt a more social art as not to."

Membership

In 1981 R. B. Kitaj was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member and became a full academician in 1984. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991, the first American to join the Academy since John Singer Sargent.

• National Academy of Design , United States

  1981

• Royal Academy , United Kingdom

  1991

Connections

R. B. Kitaj married Elsi Roessler, his first wife, in 1953. They gave birth to a son, Lem Dobbs, who became a screenwriter, and also adopted a daughter, Dominie. Kitaj's first wife committed suicide in 1969. In December 1983, after living together for 12 years, he married Sandra Fisher, an American figure painter. The marriage produced one son, Max. Sandra Fisher died from hyperacute haemorrhagic leuco-encephalitis in 1994, at age 47.

Father:

Sigmund Benway

Mother:

Jeanne Brooks

Spouse:

Elsi Roessler

Spouse:

Sandra Fisher

stepfather:

Walter Kitaj

Son:

Lem Dobbs

adopted daughter:

Dominie Kitaj

Son:

Max Kitaj

References

• R. B. Kitaj: Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Autobiography Kitaj left behind a manuscript unmatched among 20th-century artist autobiographies - Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Eloquently describing his vices and sufferings, it stands in the traditions of both St. Augustine and Thomas de Quincey. Now published for the first time, it is a sensation, from both a literary and art historical point of view.
  2017
• R.B.Kitaj : A Retrospective
  1994
• R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions, 1932-2007 This catalogue is the first new Kitaj overview since the artist’s death in 2007, and looks at all the major periods of Kitaj’s work, surveying prints and sketches as well as paintings.
  2013