R.B. Kitaj ~~1932-2007~~ Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

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Ronald Brooks Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. From a young age he was obsessed with books and movies. He remained an avid reader his whole life and once even wrote to Ezra Pound (who wrote back saying,“Pay more attention to external phenomena”). He attended art classes for children at the Cleveland museum, which seemed “like paradise to him.” He liked to draw war scenes and loved baseball. He pored over art books and “Life” magazine. He called his book collecting a “lifelong disease.”

In his teens, he sailed as a merchant seaman to Mexico and Cuba. He lost his virginity in a Havana brothel. A year later he moved to New York. He watched Action Painting “out of the corner of his eye”— he was more drawn to surrealist and symbolist art. He read James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka and, of course, Ezra Pound. Later he said that Kafka was the writer he could most relate to.

He moved to Europe in 1951 and studied art at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna. There he did watercolors of bombed-out ruins, hiked through the Austrian and Yugoslavian countryside and fell in love with the art of Gustav Klimt and Egon Shiele— both of whom made an impression on him. In 1953 he married Elsi Roessler. Together they spent time in Europe and North Africa. They had a son, Lem Dobbs, and adopted a daughter, Dominie.

Kitaj joined the army and was eventually sent to Germany during the US occupation. He did illustrations for army intelligence, working on anti-Soviet war games. He went to Paris on weekends and didn’t make any art for two years. When he left the army he went to school at Oxford University on the GI Bill. Around that time he saw the drawings of Michaelangelo and Raphael, which “stunned him for life.” He moved to London where he attended the Royal College of Art and met his lifelong friend David Hockney.

In 1963, when he was thirty-three, Kitaj had his first major show at Marlborough Gallery in London. Marlborough remained his dealer his whole life. He became good friends with many British artists like Lucian Freud and, to a lesser extent, Francis Bacon (whom he called “the Wicked Witch”). He did many drawings of family and friends, especially poets and writers he admired. His art was deeply influenced by poetry and literature. In 1969, during a very difficult period financially and emotionally, Elsi committed suicide. Kitaj returned to the US with his children for a time to recover and teach at UCLA. Years later, the painter Sandra Fisher became his studio assistant at Marlborough gallery, and a decade later they were married. They had a son, Max, in 1983.

Kitaj collected the art of his friends and fellow painters as well as that of historic painters he admired. His favorite painter was Cézanne. He once kissed Cézanne’s painting “The Bathers” when he was curating a show at the National Gallery. He thought the best painting ever was Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgement.” He love Van Gogh and spent many hours in Amsterdam looking at his work. Bacon and Balthus were his favorite post war painters. Kitaj’s own art is a weird delight. He achieved a mastery of oil paint, especially when using it lightly in a sketchy technique which gave his work an ethereal quality. A master of figure and face, color and form—in later years Kitaj seemed to actively reign-in his skill and make it cruder. It was difficult for him to not be elegant—you can see his struggle to be rougher in the work. His use of pastels was particularly beautiful, and he often made oil paints look like pastels. His subjects came from literature and life: cryptic, esoteric ideas laid down in strange, personal code. His wonderful use of color—odd and somehow still familiar, tied it all together.

In the 1980’s Kitaj grew unsure of his art. He felt he “had no method and was driven nearly mad, experimenting with more painterly painting and feeling (he) was going nowhere.” He felt better when he found out Cézanne was plagued by self doubts and had sometimes not known how to finish a painting.

In 1994 Kitaj had a large retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. He was very interested in the stories behind the paintings and also felt limited by not being able to elaborate on them like in novels and movies. He decided to write and include text with the work, explaining and expanding on the meanings of the paintings. The show triggered ferocious attacks from several prominent critics—they felt he was pompous and condescending. It seems they felt by writing about his own art, he was doing their job for them. The fiercest attacks came from very conservative critics who disliked Kitaj’s experimentation. Some of the articles were merely critical of the art, but a couple were overt personal attacks on Kitaj as a person. They are embarrassing to read because of their transparency and venom. It seems that some could not forgive Kitaj for being successful and sadly used their position to launch a personal assault. Kitaj’s friend Sandy Wilson wrote a letter chastising the cruel critics and many London artists signed it. Lucian Freud did not, and offered this suggestion: “I feel it pointless to gang up on a third-rate critic when you don’t consider him seriously. As they wisely say in Ireland: what do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” Sadly, during this time, Kitaj’s beloved wife Sandra suffered a fatal brain aneurism. Kitaj felt there was a direct connection between her death and the critics’ reaction to his show. He said they were aiming at him, but killed Sandra instead. He was never able to put these events behind him. He moved to Los Angeles to be near his mother and son Lem.

Sandra had been a connecting factor between Kitaj and the world. He said, “I have few social graces and I get in trouble when I go out into the world.” He had left England and was alone in the alien environment of LA with his anger and sadness. Pouring out his emotions in his work, he made paintings of himself assassinating the critics who had savaged him. He said he made art about “deep and hidden wounds.” In 2007, at the age of seventy-four, Kitaj committed suicide. He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a friend speculated that he was losing his ability to make art. He had wondered if his art would leave a legacy; would he be remembered? One of his last journal entries reads “Failure, failure as always.”  It seems he was quite a different man than the 1994 critics made him out to be—not quite the brazen egoist they said he was. Kitaj believed that paintings, even bad or dull ones, exposed what was going on in the artist’s head. We see in Kitaj's work mystery, curiosity, humor, elegance, sadness, intelligence, and overall, a sense of joy and delight. 

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• "R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective" Edited by Richard Morphet, Tate Gallery 1994
• "R.B. Kitaj: An Obsession With Revenge" By Tim Adams, The Guardian