February 28 to August 27, 2018
Millbank, London SW1
tate.org.uk

No matter how big the curator’s umbrella, some of the artists huddled under it in “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” seem destined to slip on London‘s rain-soaked pavement. In Tate Britain’s blockbuster summer show, which revolves around London-based painters, there’s an unruly range of representational imagery. So missteps are not surprising. What is surprising is how much power huddles beneath this exhibition‘s leaky umbrella.       

One huddler is a Swiss artist who never lived in Great Britain. Why is this show’s only sculpture even here? Granted, Giacometti inspired several key players in All Too Human, but so too did many other artists who are not included. Perhaps  Woman of Venice IX (1956), whose feet are almost ten times larger than her head, kicked and stomped her way in.

There’s a high voltage figure/ground sizzle jolting many of the paintings in this show. It runs from the group of complex compositions of R. B. Kitaj, an American expatriate who lived in London for almost forty years, to the turbulent canvases of Cecily Brown, a Londoner presently living in America. A more probable justification for including Woman of Venice IX, therefore, is that she melds place and person. Textured like tree bark, earth, and rocks, she is landscape incarnate. I never thought about a standing-straight-up figure so clearly in this way before — with an earthy surface, a faraway head, a middle ground body, and foreground feet.

Giacometti’s figure-ground “Woman” stirs the center of a gallery filled with portraits by Francis Bacon. Eyeing her, a prowling, ravenous Dog (1952) growls beneath its breath and saliva. Female as food. I couldn’t decide if the erect figure was scared stiff or impervious.

Mostly, Bacon’s cast of characters are “not only far from divine but all too human,” a phrase of  Friedrich Nietzsche’s that provides this exhibition with its title. Curator Elena Crippa’s choices are often grippingly rude and unpredictable, as are some of the nonhuman subjects included here, like Bacon’s dog and a bloodthirsty baboon.

While there are no feral animals in Brown’s Teenage Wildlife (2003), two youths – the male  dressed, the female naked – peek out amidst tangled flora. The zestful rhythms juicing the painting’s skin revel forward and back, as shapes and spaces pop and recede, a marked difference in speed and spirit from Bacon’s downbeat Portrait (1962), where a physiological figure/ground flip-flop prevails. Internal organs of Bacon’s sometime muse and lover, Peter Lacey — who once, in a fit of fury, flung the artist through a plate glass window — appear outside the man’s ripped-open body.

Emotional darkness colors Jenny Saville’s Reverse (2002-03). Saville literally overturns conventions of self-portraiture. The bruises and blood — even coating her teeth — make you want to look away. But her unblinking, glassy-eyed stare is riveting. After getting used to seeing this battered, in-your-face face in magazines and on computer screens, it was good to be reminded  how overwhelming this nearly eight-foot visage can be when viewed in person.

Celia Paul’s self-portrait, Painter and Model (2012), like Saville’s Reverse, breaks from traditional, male-gaze norms in respect to its gray, utterly unflattering portrayal. We sense blood and bruises beneath the skin rather than on it. Freud’s more comely portrait of her graces the front cover of the exhibition’s catalogue.

The psychological bruise of loss is the subject of Paul’s Family Group (1984-86), painted shortly after her father’s death. Highlighted in her checker-patterned skirt, the mother looks the same age as her daughters, and there are no younger or older sisters; this is time viewed through the prism of grief and gobs of pigment.

Family crowds a small bed. Survivors on a life raft, mom anchors the middle. Each remains in her isolated space, not sharing so much as a glance or word. Yet the group feels closely knit, drawing aid from its strength-in-numbers union.

Many of the artists in All Too Human were good friends. Some painted one another. Lucian Freud and Celia Paul were lovers. Others enjoyed a teacher/student relationship: Sickert taught Bomberg; Bomberg taught Auerbach and Kossoff; William Coldstream taught Paula Rego, Euan Uglow, and Michael Andrews; Freud taught Paul. It’s an impressive litany of begat-ing, biblical-sounding lineage. Yet, while friends like Auerbach and Kossoff are of like mind, brush, and chops, how they relate to the brilliant Sir Stanley Spencer and Walter Richard Sickert, or the lesser lights of F.N. Souza, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and the one photographer in the show, John Deakin, beats me.

I appreciate that Auerbach and Kossoff were inspired by (among many others) the Belarus-born Soutine, who lived his adult life in Paris — never in Great Britain. Was he Giacometti’s plus-one? Or vice versa? Neither RSVP’ed. Either way, for me, these great artists are welcome party-crashers.

This show boasts a trove of first-rate works by first-rate artists, Paula Rego and her multi-figure narrative compositions ranking high among them. They are overwhelming in scale, skill, and heart, her stories breathtaking, even as they keep us guessing.       

Despite the “figure painting” way All Too Human is being promoted, there are numerous still lifes, as well: Examples by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow stand out. So too do the landscapes and (rainy) cityscapes of painters who seem not only to have traded in their smocks for raincoats, but their brushes for shovels, slathering simple recognizability into scabrous mystery in the process.        

Accordingly, the subject of  much critical attention is what Freud said he wanted paint to work like: flesh. That’s where inside meets outside. Psychic skin. Where  figure and ground merge.

Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996) is a case in point. The artist seems smitten by his model’s nuanced skin colors. We’re seduced by the sensuousness of the encrusted pigments, as well as the savage scrutiny of the painter’s scientific eye.

The dozing Sue Tilley (or Big Sue as she is also known) and the huge canvas she commands are part of a delicate public/private blend playing out in a small chair. The model looks unfazed by the queens or kings of the jungle lounging behind her like kittens on a rug. (Or are they a pair of wild beasts poised to attack a pair of gazelles?) There’s a raw beauty of raw form here, dignity free of pretense. 

While Freud’s reclining, little-footed Big Sue and Giacometti’s standing, big-footed, skinny Venetian represent different visions and looks, they share as much as they don’t. Forty years apart, both are ephemeral and earthy at once. Making their way through the museum’s rooms, they nod at other artistic sisters like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Celia Paul, who display little family resemblance.

Grand and idiosyncratic, this show includes all too human inconsistencies. Yet, a slew of powerful, brave, and unruly umbrella huddlers sometimes rise to realms not far from divine.

The post A Big Umbrella: “All Too Human” at Tate Britain appeared first on artcritical.

“What?”, he replies, incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even so would have had difficulty comprehending this question.

The lady gestures towards the paintings and drawings on display. Many feature a voluptuous young woman, usually nude, often in the company of an older bearded man. On first impression, they do indeed seem to represent a cast of women, with different features and hair colors, rather than a single protagonist.

When finally the penny drops, Mr. Kitaj fixes his bewildered interlocutor a defiant stare: “She’s dead!”

An exhibition of new paintings by R.B. Kitaj is a rare event. For years, his slow output has been a matter of notoreity. Since his controversial retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, which traveled to the Metropolitian Museum, New York, and the LA County Museum, he has gone even more reclusive than had been his norm. The Tate show had been the occasion of a barrage of vituperative criticism. Mr. Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, had lived in England since the 1950s.

In the “Tate War”, as he calls it, he lashed out at detractors, countering their cat-calls of “existentialist bullshit,” “namedropper” and “pseudo-intellectual” with his own charges, calling them “antisemitic, anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-intellectual.”

Amidst this furor, his much younger wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, also an American abroad, suddenly died of an aneurism. Sandra is the “beautiful women [sic]” of his “Los Angeles Pictures”, the group of works on display at LA Louver. He says that he doesn’t try to depict her exactly, but makes her up, from memory, as he goes along. In 1997, Mr. Kitaj returned to America, choosing as his base the city where he had met Sandra, where he had once taught at UCLA, and where his son by an earlier marriage, the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and his grandsons live.

He took with him Max, his son by Sandra, who he has raised singlehandedly since the boy was ten. Both his sons were at the opening, along with their sister, Dominie, a decorated servicewoman just back from Iraq. David Hockney, one of Mr. Kitaj’s closest friends, was also in attendance.

I was in LA for the opening of his show and the last week of his friend Lucian Freud’s retrospective. During his period of mourning (arguably ongoing) Mr. Kitaj had sat for Mr. Freud, although neither of the portraits begun was completed. I was also in town to work on an exhibition of Sandra Fisher and her circle, for the New York Studio School in a couple of years. Sandra was a personal friend, and it was unnerving, the next day, at Mr. Kitaj’s new house, to see portraits she had made of me ten years earlier. Mr. Kitaj included a selection of Sandra’s work in a back room at Louver. She painted in an unpretentious, fresh, naturalistic style, favoring a cheery, fauve palette. Her subjects were portraits of friends and nudes of both sexes.

Mr. Kitaj now lives in Westwood. His house, formerly Peter Lorre’s, is overtaken by books. There are no easy chairs, “to discourage visitors from staying too long”, he tells me. I’m honored to be invited at lunchtime; a man of very strict habits, Mr. Kitaj habitually receives only at 4pm.

Rooms are given over to particular subjects. In one, he has created a shrine to Cézanne, for instance. He has all the prints (he prefers the uncolored version of the famous bathers lithograph) and an impressive array of first editions. Another room is his Judaica library. Volumes are organized according to an eclectic, personal logic. Looking at one particularly odd juxtaposition, Kitaj remarked: “My friend Leon Wieseltier was visiting, and he remarked that this is probably the only library in the world where you will find a set of Proust next to the works of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”

Raised in an agnostic, leftist household, Kitaj surprised friends in the mid-1970s when, just around the same time this some-time “Pop” appropriationist rediscovered drawing from life and the single figure, he also reconnected with his Jewish heritage. For sure, it was a secular Jewishness, having more to do with a spiritual identification with mid-twentieth century intellectuals, especially mid-Europeans whose lives were shattered or disrupted by the Holocaust, than with religion. (The name Kitaj belonged to his step-father, a refugee from Vienna.) He has come to be fascinated, however, by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs.

He is living proof of some traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas, an inveterate historical namedropper. But he has always been aware of that. An early critic complained that his work was “littered with ideas”, and he has often quoted the remark with pride. What friends and foes alike often overlook in Mr. Kitaj is the ambiguity, irony and self-depracating humor that invariably go along for the ride with his grand theorizing and bombast.

In a corner of his Judaica library is a back copy of the Burlington Magazine with his 1980 pastel portrait of Degas on the cover. Degas has had to share with Ezra Pound, yet another hero, the typically Kitajesque epitaph, “my favorite antisemite.”

He explains to me how different antisemitism is in every country and situation. Degas’s anti-Dreyfusard stance, he feels, can be explained, even vaguely sympathised with, in the context of the national disaster of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Kitaj is both incensed and bemused by people’s reaction to his charge of the “low octane” antisemitism he feels he encountered in the British press. “Antisemitism runs the whole gamut from ignorant gossip in an English pub to the death camps, with infinite degrees and nuances along the way”, he explains, reaching as he speaks for a press clipping recently sent to him by a London friend. It is a diatribe by a tabloid critic who had given him a particular drubbing, this time against the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, a champion of Kitaj’s, and a Jew. “Time to be rid of this Trotsky of art”, ran the headline. “You see,” Mr. Kitaj exclaims, nodding sagely. “Trotsky! Not Stalin or Hitler, but Trotsky!”

To those who knew Sandra Fisher it can be disconcerting to witness her transmutation into a motif. She was blessed with a preternaturally sunny disposition, a Californian optimism to counter her husband’s studied pessimism. Kitaj dedicated his book, “First Diasporist Manifesto”, “For Sandra, who puts me down when I complain, replying she’d rather live in these times (as a woman and artist) than any other.”

Since her death, Mr. Kitaj has very publicly transformed her into a personal symbol of renewal and resistance. Mr. Kitaj is a great collector and reader of little magazines, and in emulation of them, he has launched “Sandra”, as a periodical manqué. Various projects, be they exhibition catalogues or installations, have appeared under a “Sandra” rubric, featuring the same beaming photograph from her youthful prime.

The first instalment of “Sandra” was a strange set-up at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in London, his farewell to the city. Surrounded by a personal selection of his “School of London” friends (he had coined the term himself in the 1970s), including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, was his own transcription of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, in which he cast himself and Manet among the firing squad, returning fire at the dreaded critics. The LA Louver catalogue is “Sandra Eight: Los Angeles Pictures”.

In “The Los Angeles Pictures”, “Sandra and I became Lovers again”, he writes in a catalogue note. “I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush, fondle her again, caress her contours.” Some paintings are very graphic, as the couple make love in the bath, for instance. Others keep up Mr. Kitaj’s famous habit of referencing old master paintings, sometimes in composite, taking not just forms but the aura and association of the older work. Their two faces overlapping in a kiss (recalling Brancusi) actually borrows its format from a detail of Giotto’s Scrovegni fresco at Padua depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna, Christ’s grandparents. “I detected Barnet Newman’s Zip in the line running between the profiles, so I emphasized it in the profiles of Sandra and me.”

He sees his pictures as “love stories”. “The Man-Woman Story has become quite rare in painting since the death of Picasso. Earlier, many painters had shown the woman and man in a love situation- such as Picasso, Munch, Schiele, Chagall, even Matisse.” But then the subject became rare. He puts this down to fact that many of the best painters recently have been gay or abstract. Even straight artists, however, have veered towards the isolated, individual figure, he says, citing his “School of London” friends. Sandra Fisher, he points out, was an exception, often painting nude men and women embracing.

An aspect of Mr. Kitaj’s Tate show which irked critics was his announcement that he had entered his “old age style”. They saw in this an impertinence, as it is not for an artist but for connoisseurs to decide when this had happened. Again, there was a failure to savor the intended irony, the heavy quote marks that surrounded such a stance. In earlier work, whether the tightly constructed fragmentary collage-influenced paintings of his “Pop” period of the 1960s, which first catapulted him to attention, or the more naturalistic pastels of the following decade, Mr. Kitaj was noted for his draughtsmanly finesse. Robert Hughes had famously said of him in the pages of Time that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive.” But in his self-consciously “old-age” style he opted for a loose, wobbly, tentative, unfinished look, and this carries over in his Los Angeles Pictures.

This doesn’t stop him from teasing me with a big assertion, typically one that raises a provocative thought about culture at large beyond its overt egotistical posture: “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived”.

This article originally appeared in the New York Sun, Monday June 30, 2003

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David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

The post “A Bright Globe of Everything”: Extracts from “Becoming A Londoner” appeared first on artcritical.

Peter had the demeanour of a dishevelled, rather droll, down-to-earth ouvrier, in a blue cotton ‘French worker’s’ jacket. He habitually had a pipe, which he mostly seemed to be in the process of filling, rather than actually smoking. He had Romano-Gallic good looks, with heavy bags under the eyes, a shock of grey hair, and a deep voice and distinctive laugh that came from low in his chest. He directed my interview with great authority, for all his apparent informality. I had brought a large painting of a figure playing bagpipes (based on a 17th-century Dutch sculpture in the V&A museum, where the Royal College was also housed at the time). The painting led to a discussion of the French painter Jean Hélion, whose work indeed interested me a lot, and of the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, whom I had met briefly when I was an undergraduate at the Central School of Art. These were the right sort of references for Peter, and I was in.

Once I started at the RCA though, we didn’t really get on. He wasn’t comfortable with the small, rather cryptic and skeptical paintings I was mostly making. My interests in artists also turned out to include not just solid men of the Left and the Résistance like Hélion, but dubious types like Picabia, or like André Derain who Peter said ‘should have been shot’. (Derain had submitted to an obligatory artists’ tour of Germany during the Occupation.) Peter’s politics seemed very black-and-white. He was massively informed about political affairs across the world, and with him it was basically ‘which side are you on?’ Nuance and complexity he swept aside as weakness, and simply conversing with him could be difficult as a result. My natural equivocation exasperated him. At one point he asked – as if it might explain, if not excuse, my general ambivalence and perverse interests – if I was ‘some kind of Catholic’. I said no, I was an atheist from a Protestant background. He shrugged and walked away.

At the RCA in the early ’80s Peter liked to insist that the age of art ‘stars’ was over. He was thinking of the celebrities of Pop and abstract art that the college had produced in the ’60s (David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley); and one sensed he was glad to think that such notoriety for artists was a thing of the past. But of course, even as he spoke, Goldsmiths College in London (where he had been a former principal) was fomenting the YBA phenomenon, a yet more rampant and market-enmeshed star system. The Royal College at this period was – to its credit perhaps – no route to fame, and certain students of my generation jumped ship in search of a smarter career path. Peter did have favorite students whose careers he promoted, but this tended to mean landing them in good teaching jobs rather than in hot galleries. I think I had been earmarked as a likely golden boy, but now I wasn’t playing the game. He liked to use his influence generously, and he was infuriated when I went to Paris and sought out Hélion without first seeking an introduction from him, Peter. He exploded when I didn’t want to apply for a certain post-RCA opportunity he thought would suit me.

Nevertheless a few years after I had left the Royal College he learned that I had work in an exhibition in Paris and could not afford to go out for the opening. A check arrived in the post for the fare and a hotel, with a note saying this was a gift not a loan, and that he wanted to hear no mention of it again. I was hugely grateful, and went to Paris. Later on he asked ‘Did you get that money I sent you to go to Paris?’ which amused me in the light of his stipulating that he wanted to hear nothing of it. But I thanked him then, profusely.

After that we would meet up periodically in central London. He favored a continental-style bistro called Pélican, in St Martin’s Lane, despite his disapproving of nostalgia for an “Americanized” cliché of continental cafe society – something of which he accused his one-time comrade Kitaj. I was in contact with Kitaj, and Peter would say “Don’t mention that you’ve seen me – he’ll pump you for information!” Kitaj had included Peter in his “School of London” notion in the ‘70s, and in the associated Human Clay exhibition. The two men had since become estranged, I gathered, though Kitaj always spoke warmly of him. Peter could clash with allies as much as opponents. I once went to see him with the painter and writer Tim Hyman, closer to him personally than I was, also in terms of artistic “style,” and probably ideology. Peter got so irascible as the afternoon wore on that we eventually had to flee in disarray. But people tended to forgive Peter. He was a charmer as well as a tyrant, and very attractive. He addressed everyone as “my love,” and though it was often intoned with irritation, it did signify a basically benign intent. I think he had quite a few romantic relationships, and the impression was that when they ended it was without rancor.

At Pélican I would always have a Kir, a drink to which Peter introduced me, explaining it was named after a mayor of Dijon who created the drink when the German army had commandeered all red wine in the area. Peter would have Burgundy. I don’t think the symbolism of our differing dilutions of red was ever commented on, but he seemed to have accepted what he must have thought my rather bloodless socialism. He was great talking about European film, and literature. I was trying to catch up on some classics of French and Italian cinema and on non-Anglophone poetry. The painters I knew in more depth and I think it gave him pleasure to talk to someone of my generation who actually cared about post-war figures he felt close to and who were little known in the UK. Sometimes I would come with my then partner, a figurative sculptor whose work he liked. Again he was delighted that she was interested in artists like Zadkine or Laurens (he corrected our pronunciation – the S is sounded), or Ipoustéguy whom he especially supported.

With the exception of Philip Guston, he didn’t have much time for the New York School and its descendants. He seemed basically opposed to America – again politically, first of all, and then by extension culturally. “You actually like New York?”he’d ask, skeptically. I once made the mistake of saying I’d been quite impressed with Julian Schnabel’s film about the persecuted gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Peter erupted with disapproval. He was vetoing the film, and it was clear that what was unconscionable to him was the implied criticism of Cuba, especially by a director who probably personified the worst of American capitalism. Any possible inherent virtues of the film, or real injustices of the Cuban régime, could simply not be entertained. I was on safer ground when the conversation turned to the Tate Gallery’s acquisition of a group of work by the long-neglected French social realist André Fougeron, including a huge anti-American propaganda painting.

The Tate finally acquired a group of Peter’s work also, and hung a room of it, clearly bringing some satisfaction, for all his professed indifference and grumbles at how long they took to pay him. In 1983 he had had a retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre in London, and then periodically there were shows in more or less alternative venues (one at Wimbledon School of Art I remember), and sometimes with commercial galleries. From the ‘80s onwards he had been mostly drawing. His earlier paintings on canvas had always been very graphic, like his major piece The Bombing of Sakiet (1959), a big canvas indicting French actions during the Algerian war of independence. For years this work — which is now on long loan to the Tate — had slightly mythic status, locked in storage in the Tunisian Embassy in London. The jagged, narrative charcoals Peter came to concentrate on were – and are – widely admired for their poignancy and expressive energy. They sometimes have mythological motifs, sometimes historical ones. I recall him in his studio bringing out one sheet with a tremulous tenderness that evidently reflected his feeling for the subject itself – the death in prison camp of Robert Desnos. At other times his drawings are more poetically unspecific – an old man with a flower, a woman with a bird. Peter didn’t have a gallery at that time, and conflicts had often scuppered relationships with dealers. The inherent contradictions of functioning as an anti-capitalist artist in a capitalist system of course make for great tensions. In recent years, however, James Hyman Gallery has been representing his work and facilitating a reconsideration of his achievement.

When Peter got older and more infirm I visited him more at his house, in a handsome terrace hidden behind Elephant and Castle in south London. The studio was on the ground floor, and I was only allowed in there once, fleetingly. He lived mostly in the basement, where the kitchen and bathroom opened off the study/living room and were admirably old fashioned in their plumbing and appliances. The place teemed with books, letters, journals and papers. A typewriter was lodged in the middle of everything, from which issued his roughly typed and much-corrected letters. He would talk of his current correspondences, conferences and campaigns with Left-wing organizations all over the world. It felt like an international operations room. I sensed he had many contacts like myself, making periodic visitations.

In his last years he could no longer go down annually to his house in rural France, which was a great sadness to him. On one of my visits I brought a bottle of rough red from roughly the right area. As we drank he examined the label amusedly and declared that the wine was “probably made in Norwich,” emitting his inimitable, chesty, machine-gun laugh.

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David Cohen’s lecture “The Exemplary Diasporist: R.B. Kitaj in the aura of Walter Benjamin” is tonight at 6.30 pm at the New York Studio School, 8 West 8 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212 673 6466

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R.B. Kitaj, who died on Sunday at his Los Angeles home aged 74, could be called the Zarathustra of contemporary art. With characteristics of prophet and jester alike, he produced complex, compelling, at times knowingly irksome images that were both intensely personal and able to address major themes of modern history and identity politely avoided by most art of his time.

His work broke a modernist taboo – before that became fashionable – by being unabashedly literary. Hilton Kramer once complained that his paintings were “littered with ideas.”  He told stories through painting, using visual quotations from high art to convey meaning, and wrote wordy, bombastic “prefaces” to accompany pictures, and manifestos.  These texts were sometimes essential to understanding the work, but as often as not, they merely added another layer of playful obscurantism.

But as referential and as literary as he could be, Kitaj was always a consummately visual artist. In mid career he turned with renewed vigor to drawing from life with a robust, assured hand, prompting Robert Hughes to opine that he “draws better than almost anyone else alive.”

Kitaj was born Ronald Brooks in Cleveland, Ohio on October 29, 1932, taking his Viennese refugee step-father’s surname when his mother remarried in 1941. He adopted in the process a rapport bordering on obsession with a displaced European intelligentsia. In his “First Diasporist Manifesto” (1989), which was, typically, a cross between an apologia for his own work and a broader essay about Jewish art, he described his paintings as “a refugee’s suitcase, a portable ark of the covenant.”

After a spell in the merchant navy and Army service in Europe, Kitaj studied in Vienna, Paris and the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford on the GI Bill, and then went on to the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in the stellar class of 1960 that included David Hockney, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. These artists were all associated with the British Pop Art movement, but in Kitaj’s case, the identification was misleading. If his early work had a tight, cool, illustrative quality and was rooted in collage and appropriation, which were hallmarks of Pop, but from the get go the intellectual content and emotional tenor of his work were unapologetically highbrow.

His series of fifty screenprints, “In Our Time” (1969-70) consists of reproductions of original book covers, of left wing tracts, antisemitic pamphlets, popular novels, critical essays.  A cross-section of Kitaj’s eclectic reading, the battered covers alluded nostalgically to the mystique of past ideas.  “For me, books are what trees are for the landscape painter,” he later said.

In 1969 Kitaj was devastated by a personal tragedy when his first wife died of an overdose, bringing his artistic production to an abrupt halt. His artistic recuperation came about through intense drawing from the human figure, and a rededication to traditional Western painting. In the 1960s, he had opposed the New York scene’s abstract formalism; as an intellectual among painters in the 1970s, he pitted himself against the dominant “conceptualism.”

He experimented with styles rooted in Impressionism, Symbolism and the old masters. With the encouragement of Sandra Fisher, who later became his wife, he turned to pastels. Their particular inspiration was Degas, whom he playfully called “my favorite antisemite” (an accolade Degas had to share with Ezra Pound.)

In 1976 he accepted an invitation to collect art on behalf of Britain’s Arts Council.  The result was an extraordinary exhibition, “The Human Clay,” in which he presented drawings – some recent, others from student days – of a spectrum of British artists, including representatives of diverse styles.  In a typically bombastic preface, Kitaj put forward the idea of a “School of London,” construed in his head, that could rival Paris and New York.  The idea would be taken up and applied to a small circle of figurative expressionists championed by Kitaj in that show, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who would be exhibited, along with Kitaj himself, as representing a resurgence of painterly expressionism.

Kitaj’s imagery often dealt with sex, drawing on a personal fascination with what he liked to quote Flaubert coining “the undertaste” of prostitution. His works could deal in a way that was both haunting and arousing with the alienations of sexual langor in an archetypal modern city.  At the same time, he was also steeped in the history and lore of his adoptive city, London.  In “Cecil Court, London, WC2 (The Refugees)” (1983-84), a surreal jumble of distended, puppet like figures and a self portrait reclining in a Corbusier chaise longue in the alleyway famed for its booksellers, he deals at once with Yiddish theater, books, his personal history, and the ambivalences of tradition and modernity, a settled place and diaspora.

It was a telling coincidence that Kitaj rediscovered artistic and Jewish tradition simultaneously. In the catalogue of a one-man exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1985, Kitaj quoted the composer Arnold Schoenberg: “I have long since resolved to be a Jew…I regard that as more important than my art.”  Grouped together under the title “A Passion”, the works in this exhibition used a chimney as a symbol of the Holocaust, which had come to obsess Kitaj.  .

In retrospect, however, earlier works of a political and intellectual nature, such as “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg” (1960) or “Isaac Babel riding with Budyonny” (1962) invariably had Jewish connotations, too, if only that Luxemburg and Babel were Jewish. Kitaj liked the idea, adapted from the Cabala, that pictures could periodically change their meaning.

Kitaj’s affirmation of his Jewishness was strictly in the secular, intellectual, style of agnostic Jews such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, “the exemplary and perhaps ultimate Diasporist” according to Kitaj’s Manifesto.  At first he was attracted to such men as angst-ridden intellectuals rather than as Jews, but he grew to realise the potency of Jewishness as a metaphor for their common alienation and malaise.  Benjamin became his alter ego.  Apart from a fascination with his brilliant and radical ideas, Kitaj identified personally with the melancholy, dilletante nature of Benjamin.  “The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin)”, 1972-74, plays off sets of narrative which have lost their intelligibility; the layers of “citations” – the jigsaw puzzle proletarian, the animated talkers, the café as “open air interior” – all relate to aspects of Benjamin’s theories and his “agitational usage” of sources and references.

Kitaj’s own capacity to agitate became evident in the critical response to his retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, when one reviewer after the next lambasted him with such cat-calls as “existentialist bullshit,” ““namedropper” and “pseudo-intellectual.”  They were in part incensed by Kitaj’s statement that he had now entered his “old age style” in the quickly produced, loose expressive works that were primarily linear though not carefull drawn, in contrast to earlier work, slowly construced with areas of saturated color and deliberative line.  These were often direct reworkings of old master paintings.  Their dismissal, however, was of the whole oeuvre.

Kitaj was already devastated by this onslaught when personal tragedy caught up with him. While attending his mother on her deathbed in America he learned that his wife Sandra had been taken suddenly ill of an aneurism: she died days after his return to London. Like Coleman Silk in his friend Philip Roth’s novel “The Human Stain” (a character likely in part to have been modeled on Kitaj), he believed that – aiming at him – the critics had murdered his wife.

After this “Tate War,” as he described it, Kitaj decamped to America, settling for his last decade in Los Angeles, where his children by his first wife, including the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, were living. He bought a house that had formerly served the actor Peter Lorre, painting his studio, a former garage, Van Gogh yellow. After producing a series of agitprop-like tableau taking on his critics, who he viewed as “anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-foreign and anti-intellectual,” his anger abated in an extended series of lustrously lyrical paintings memorializing Sandra, the posthumous muse of his “Angels/Los Angeles” paintings.

He is survived by three children, Lem Kitaj (nom de plume Lem Dobbs), Dominie Lee Kitaj and Max Kitaj, and his sisters Karma Kitaj and Madeleine Kitaj MD. He has three grandchildren.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 24, 2007 under the heading “Visual Artist R.B. Kitaj is dead at 74”

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“Where are all the beautiful women?” a lady asks R.B. Kitaj during the packed opening of his recent show at L.A. Louver, a leading gallery in Venice, California.

“What?”, he replies, incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even so would have had difficulty comprehending this question.

The lady gestures towards the paintings and drawings on display. Many feature a voluptuous young woman, usually nude, often in the company of an older bearded man. On first impression, they do indeed seem to represent a cast of women, with different features and hair colors, rather than a single protagonist.

When finally the penny drops, Mr. Kitaj fixes his bewildered interlocutor a defiant stare: “She’s dead!”

An exhibition of new paintings by R.B. Kitaj is a rare event. For years, his slow output has been a matter of notoreity. Since his controversial retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, which traveled to the Metropolitian Museum, New York, and the LA County Museum, he has gone even more reclusive than had been his norm. The Tate show had been the occasion of a barrage of vituperative criticism. Mr. Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, had lived in England since the 1950s.

In the “Tate War”, as he calls it, he lashed out at detractors, countering their cat-calls of “existentialist bullshit,” “namedropper” and “pseudo-intellectual” with his own charges, calling them “antisemitic, anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-intellectual.”

Amidst this furor, his much younger wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, also an American abroad, suddenly died of an aneurism. Sandra is the “beautiful women [sic]” of his “Los Angeles Pictures”, the group of works on display at LA Louver. He says that he doesn’t try to depict her exactly, but makes her up, from memory, as he goes along. In 1997, Mr. Kitaj returned to America, choosing as his base the city where he had met Sandra, where he had once taught at UCLA, and where his son by an earlier marriage, the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and his grandsons live.

He took with him Max, his son by Sandra, who he has raised singlehandedly since the boy was ten. Both his sons were at the opening, along with their sister, Dominie, a decorated servicewoman just back from Iraq. David Hockney, one of Mr. Kitaj’s closest friends, was also in attendance.

I was in LA for the opening of his show and the last week of his friend Lucian Freud’s retrospective. During his period of mourning (arguably ongoing) Mr. Kitaj had sat for Mr. Freud, although neither of the portraits begun was completed. I was also in town to work on an exhibition of Sandra Fisher and her circle, for the New York Studio School in a couple of years. Sandra was a personal friend, and it was unnerving, the next day, at Mr. Kitaj’s new house, to see portraits she had made of me ten years earlier. Mr. Kitaj included a selection of Sandra’s work in a back room at Louver. She painted in an unpretentious, fresh, naturalistic style, favoring a cheery, fauve palette. Her subjects were portraits of friends and nudes of both sexes.

Mr. Kitaj now lives in Westwood. His house, formerly Peter Lorre’s, is overtaken by books. There are no easy chairs, “to discourage visitors from staying too long”, he tells me. I’m honored to be invited at lunchtime; a man of very strict habits, Mr. Kitaj habitually receives only at 4pm.

Rooms are given over to particular subjects. In one, he has created a shrine to Cézanne, for instance. He has all the prints (he prefers the uncolored version of the famous bathers lithograph) and an impressive array of first editions. Another room is his Judaica library. Volumes are organized according to an eclectic, personal logic. Looking at one particularly odd juxtaposition, Kitaj remarked: “My friend Leon Wieseltier was visiting, and he remarked that this is probably the only library in the world where you will find a set of Proust next to the works of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”

Raised in an agnostic, leftist household, Kitaj surprised friends in the mid-1970s when, just around the same time this some-time “Pop” appropriationist rediscovered drawing from life and the single figure, he also reconnected with his Jewish heritage. For sure, it was a secular Jewishness, having more to do with a spiritual identification with mid-twentieth century intellectuals, especially mid-Europeans whose lives were shattered or disrupted by the Holocaust, than with religion. (The name Kitaj belonged to his step-father, a refugee from Vienna.) He has come to be fascinated, however, by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs.

He is living proof of some traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas, an inveterate historical namedropper. But he has always been aware of that. An early critic complained that his work was “littered with ideas”, and he has often quoted the remark with pride. What friends and foes alike often overlook in Mr. Kitaj is the ambiguity, irony and self-depracating humor that invariably go along for the ride with his grand theorizing and bombast.

In a corner of his Judaica library is a back copy of the Burlington Magazine with his 1980 pastel portrait of Degas on the cover. Degas has had to share with Ezra Pound, yet another hero, the typically Kitajesque epitaph, “my favorite antisemite.”

He explains to me how different antisemitism is in every country and situation. Degas’s anti-Dreyfusard stance, he feels, can be explained, even vaguely sympathised with, in the context of the national disaster of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Kitaj is both incensed and bemused by people’s reaction to his charge of the “low octane” antisemitism he feels he encountered in the British press. “Antisemitism runs the whole gamut from ignorant gossip in an English pub to the death camps, with infinite degrees and nuances along the way”, he explains, reaching as he speaks for a press clipping recently sent to him by a London friend. It is a diatribe by a tabloid critic who had given him a particular drubbing, this time against the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, a champion of Kitaj’s, and a Jew. “Time to be rid of this Trotsky of art”, ran the headline. “You see,” Mr. Kitaj exclaims, nodding sagely. “Trotsky! Not Stalin or Hitler, but Trotsky!”

***

To those who knew Sandra Fisher it can be disconcerting to witness her transmutation into a motif. She was blessed with a preternaturally sunny disposition, a Californian optimism to counter her husband’s studied pessimism. Kitaj dedicated his book, “First Diasporist Manifesto”, “For Sandra, who puts me down when I complain, replying she’d rather live in these times (as a woman and artist) than any other.”

Since her death, Mr. Kitaj has very publicly transformed her into a personal symbol of renewal and resistance. Mr. Kitaj is a great collector and reader of little magazines, and in emulation of them, he has launched “Sandra”, as a periodical manqué. Various projects, be they exhibition catalogues or installations, have appeared under a “Sandra” rubric, featuring the same beaming photograph from her youthful prime.

The first instalment of “Sandra” was a strange set-up at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in London, his farewell to the city. Surrounded by a personal selection of his “School of London” friends (he had coined the term himself in the 1970s), including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, was his own transcription of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, in which he cast himself and Manet among the firing squad, returning fire at the dreaded critics. The LA Louver catalogue is “Sandra Eight: Los Angeles Pictures”.

In “The Los Angeles Pictures”, “Sandra and I became Lovers again”, he writes in a catalogue note. “I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush, fondle her again, caress her contours.” Some paintings are very graphic, as the couple make love in the bath, for instance. Others keep up Mr. Kitaj’s famous habit of referencing old master paintings, sometimes in composite, taking not just forms but the aura and association of the older work. Their two faces overlapping in a kiss (recalling Brancusi) actually borrows its format from a detail of Giotto’s Scrovegni fresco at Padua depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna, Christ’s grandparents. “I detected Barnet Newman’s Zip in the line running between the profiles, so I emphasized it in the profiles of Sandra and me.”

He sees his pictures as “love stories”. “The Man-Woman Story has become quite rare in painting since the death of Picasso. Earlier, many painters had shown the woman and man in a love situation- such as Picasso, Munch, Schiele, Chagall, even Matisse.” But then the subject became rare. He puts this down to fact that many of the best painters recently have been gay or abstract. Even straight artists, however, have veered towards the isolated, individual figure, he says, citing his “School of London” friends. Sandra Fisher, he points out, was an exception, often painting nude men and women embracing.

An aspect of Mr. Kitaj’s Tate show which irked critics was his announcement that he had entered his “old age style”. They saw in this an impertinence, as it is not for an artist but for connoisseurs to decide when this had happened. Again, there was a failure to savor the intended irony, the heavy quote marks that surrounded such a stance. In earlier work, whether the tightly constructed fragmentary collage-influenced paintings of his “Pop” period of the 1960s, which first catapulted him to attention, or the more naturalistic pastels of the following decade, Mr. Kitaj was noted for his draughtsmanly finesse. Robert Hughes had famously said of him in the pages of Time that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive.” But in his self-consciously “old-age” style he opted for a loose, wobbly, tentative, unfinished look, and this carries over in his Los Angeles Pictures.

This doesn’t stop him from teasing me with a big assertion, typically one that raises a provocative thought about culture at large beyond its overt egotistical posture: “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived”.

This article originally appeared in the New York Sun, Monday June 30, 2003

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