R.B. Kitaj: views of a fractured century - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, March, 1995 by Ken Johnson

Kitaj has been something of a wanderer in life as well as in art. Born in Cleveland in 1932, he finished high school in Troy, N.Y., in 1950. He spent the next seven years working as a merchant seaman, studying art for a couple of years at Cooper Union in New York City and doing a tour of duty in the U.S. Army. From 1957 to 1962 he studied in England, first at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and then at the Royal College of Art, where his life-long friendship with David Hockney began. Later his friends would include Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and others of a circle that he famously dubbed the School of London. Kitaj had his first solo show at London's Marlborough Gallery in 1963. He still lives in England, although following negative critical reception of the current retrospective, which opened at the Tate Gallery, and the sudden death in September of his wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, he has publicly vowed to move back to America.(1)

While Kitaj's oeuvre does not exhibit any very clear continuity in terms of formal development, what you can see (with considerable prompting from his own written asides) is the unfolding of a series of periods corresponding, roughly, to the stages of life. First there is a kind of adolescence, from the '60s to the early '70s, marked by an insouciant, youthful freedom of imagination. This is followed by a quieter early adulthood in which there is a turn to realism and tradition. In the '80s comes a later adulthood, when he works to come to terms with his identity as a Jew. And, finally, there is a "late phase" (his own description) in which he turns inward, preoccupied with memory, physical decline and death, followed by a kind of tentative rebirth, stylistically speaking.

The retrospective opens with a handful of student works in which the artist can already be seen attempting to join modernist idioms--grid painting, collage, pictographic sign-making, graffitilike gesturalism--with historically consequential topics (often announced in the titles) such as the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. It is not until he begins to center his work on the human figure in the early '60s that his career truly begins.

The works of Kitaj's self-described artistic adolescence (he was actually in his 30s) are marked by the graphic qualities of Pop art and new forms of geometric abstraction. Paint is thin and dry; figures tend to be derived from photographs and outlined in a flattened cartoon style; architectonic spaces are defined by flat, boldly colored planes. The earliest of these works mainly reflect what was to become an enduring preoccupation with and anxiety about sex. In The Ohio Gang (1964), a young woman seated naked on a modern chair is courted by two shadowy, semi-abstracted, thuggish men. She is attended by a matronly woman wearing an erotic bodysuit that exposes her breasts. In the upper right is a monkey; in the lower right, a wraithlike cartoon figure pushes a baby carriage carrying a monstrous child with a man's head and a woman's breasts. This tableau combines a kind of bright Pop public address with a darker, private experience of sexual confusion, offering a meditation on male desire, sacred and profane love, animal lust and fear of parenthood. This concern with sex, the most elemental mode of human connectedness, continues throughout Kitaj's career. At different stages and in different styles it inspires some of his most arresting efforts, even when he is at the same time contemplating the most high-minded of philosophical and moral themes.