Kitaj’s Napkin Map

Abstract

THE JEWISH PAINTER R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) was one of the most interesting of Jewish travelers m recent times. Not only did he live a life full of adventurous journeys. He also delighted in traversing, and transgressing, boundaries, particularly those between well-established genres and media. For example, while best known for his explosively colorful canvasses, Kitaj also developed a large audience of admirers - and critics - owing to the wild and erudite texts that accompanied his paintings. In writing these commentaries, Kitaj, who described himself as secular, became increasingly cognizant, and proud, of his place as a fellow traveler in the long history of Jewish interpretation. Embodying the famous principle (of Heine and Steiner) that the text had become the portable homeland of the Jews, Kitaj was a restless interpreter and an inveterate Diasporist. If for Gershom Scholem (one of his great heroes) the discovery of the vitality of Zionism went hand in hand with the study of Kabbalah, for Kitaj the Jewish interpretive imperative and the condition of Diaspora were inextricably entwined. In fact, he amply affirmed this connection throughout his two major works of Jewish writing, the Fintt Diaaporut Manifesto (1989) and the Second Duuporut Manifesto (2007).After nearly forty years as an American expatriate in London, Kitaj returned to this country in 1997 and settled in Westwood, a few blocks from the UCLA campus. He commenced his day with a 5:30 walk to the neighboring Coffee Bean, where he would sit and write. Beset by a writerly obsession that rivaled his daily painting regimen, Kitaj would engage in ruminations large and small in his clear, block handwriting - Wittgenstein and kabbalistic speech theory mixed in with forgettable aphorisms or angry tirades against his London critics. Some of the more weighty musings made their way into published form, most prominently in the Second DiaaporLft Manifesto. Those of a more ephemeral nature were recorded on the small square napkins dispensed at the Coffee Bean, hundreds of which have been preserved in the Kitaj Papers at the UCLA Department of Special Collections.Among these jottings is the particularly revealing one from the last years of Kitaj 's life reproduced here, a sort of autobiographical map charting the important stations of his peripatetic existence. Peripateticism was, for Kitaj, not merely a condition - both his own and his fellow Jews' - but also a virtue, the font of Jewish cultural and textual innovation. Toward the end of his life, he memorialized his own geographic - and by extension, intellectual and artistic - peripateticism in this cartographic napkin.In the upper left-hand corner is Ohio, where he was born (in a suburb of Cleveland) in 1932. Moving immediately to the right, we find Troy, New York, where Kitaj went to high school, graduating in 1950. To the immediate right of Troy is the phrase High Seas, a reference to the fact that Kitaj joined the merchant marine right after high school, making his way, among other stops, to Cuba, Mexico, South America, and Europe. …