Kitaj, R.B

ArtForum, May, 1995 by John Ash

There are two paintings in the R. B. Kitaj retrospective that, with hindsight, look uncannily prophetic. One is called Whistler vs. Ruskin (Novella in Terre Verte, Yellow and Red), 1992, and portrays the expatriate American artist and his critical adversary as boxers, after George Bellows. Whistler has knocked a blue-haired Ruskin out of the ring. The other painting is called Against Slander, 1990-91, and concerning it Kitaj remarks, "At the very moment Cezanne was showing in the first Impressionist exhibition, the Hafetz Hayim, across Europe, published...his first book (translated as Hold Your Tongue), a three hundred page tract against slander, evil speech, and defamation - all of which Cezanne was suffering." And all of which Kitaj, too, has suffered in the last year, for this retrospective's first appearance, at London's Tate Gallery last June, was the occasion for one of those critical Nights of the Long Knives that are such an entertaining feature of life in Quaint Britain.

Apparently the Brit Crits decided to get this Jewish-American upstart in their midst. Ruskin would be avenged! In newspaper after newspaper, spleen was vented in language so venomous and abusive as to generate a major scandal. To make matters worse, and more newsworthy, the painter Sandra Fisher, Kitaj's wife of 11 years, suddenly died. In Nixonian fashion, Kitaj threatened to give up painting, and people began to wonder whether the critics might have contributed to Fisher's death.

This is not such a fantastic idea as it may seem: the reviews are hard to credit. Next to them, Ruskin's ill-advised remark about Whistler's "pot of paint flung in the face of the public" seems like the mildest slap on the wrist. Here is a selection - a kind of poisonous bouquet - culled from the pages of The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, The London Evening Standard, and The Daily Telegraph: "From the first, it appears, he would try anything, however senseless....His pornographic scenes, also his straightforward nudes are tasteless and sinister." "The dispiriting, admonitory spectacle of an oeuvre ruined by fatal self-delusion...." "A staggeringly trite cheapening...of human catastrophe...." "We are in the slushy world of Teflon Ron and his non-stick pix." "His drawing has become so incompetent and careless, so childish and so ugly...wretched adolescent trash...a vain painter puffed with amour propre, unworthy of a footnote in the history of figurative art...." "The Wandering Jew, the T. S. Eliot of painting? Kitaj turns out, instead, to be the Wizard of Oz, a small man with a megaphone held to his lips."

Whatever one may think of Kitaj, this sustained outburst of vituperation requires some analysis. Persons writing in the grip of irrational loathing always betray themselves through their promiscuous use of adjectives, and what a crop we have here - "senseless," "pornographic," "tasteless," "sinister," "incompetent," "childish," "ugly," "wretched." The only significant entry in the lexicon of art abuse that seems to be missing is "degenerate," though it is certainly implied. One is reminded of the reaction of the cultural arbiters of the Third Reich confronted by the work of Max Beckman, Otto Dix, and Emil Nolde. Indeed, it is precisely Kitaj's insistence on sexuality and jewishness that these critics seem to consider an affront to the canons of middle-class good taste.

Kitaj is a genuinely problematic figure nonetheless. He is altogether too apt to wrap himself in the mantle of the great tradition, and his frequent, uncritical invocations of Eliot, Pound, and Degas, all of whom were anti-Semites, sit uncomfortably with his allusions to the Holocaust. He may also be his own worst enemy. He consistently says too much; he is a sphinx who can't wait to give his secret away. All a critic can do is either echo the master's words or bitch.

When this show was at the Tate, Kitaj committed a particularly egregious act of folly by writing "prefaces" to the paintings, which were fixed to the gallery walls. Some of these were fanciful and oblique, but a good many were crudely explanatory. One in particular enraged the critics; it appeared next to a pastel of three women and a cat by the sea. The piece, from 1979-80, is moody, sumptuously colored, and a little troubling. If it had been called Three Women and a Cat, it would rank as an attractive if minor work, but, alas, it is called The Rise of Fascism, and the weight of the title crushes the image. If you were wondering how on earth title and image relate to each other, Kitaj - ever helpful, and unable to help himself - rushes in with an explanation: the woman on the left is "the beautiful victim," the one in the middle (who has the build of a wrestler or dominatrix) is "the figure of Fascism," and the one on the right "is everyone else." It is difficult to know whether this is some sort of dark joke or sheer foolishness. I suspect that for all his cosmopolitan erudition, Kitaj (who was born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio) retains a certain Midwestern naivete, and I am convinced that both title and interpretation were arrived at after the fact, which is to say, he created this unsettling image and then decided what it meant.