R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and the Jewish Archive

Abstract

Kitaj, as he preferred to be known, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, was raised and educated in upstate New York, and left the country as a merchant marine at age seventeen. He studied in Vienna, Oxford, and London as well as New York City, and would gain renown as an expatriate American painter based in England for forty years. Working in close proximity to a coterie of friends, most prominently Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, and David Hockney, Kitaj designated this group of figurative painters in 1976 “the School of London.” His own work, marked by the precision of a great draftsman, an explosively colorful palette, and an unrestrained intellectualism, drew wide praise throughout the world. But Kitaj was also the subject of often harsh criticism, particularly owing to his tendency to append erudite and often humorous commentaries to his paintings. This proclivity was present already in his first solo show at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1963, entitled Pictures with Commentary: Pictures without Commentary. Thirty years later, a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1994 elicited scorn from the London art critics, many of whom held to the belief that “no amount of exegesis will improve paintings that fail for pictorial reasons.” Gradually, Kitaj came to see his persistent commentarial practice as a decidedly Jewish act, part of the tradition of dynamic interpretation that characterized rabbinic Judaism from late antiquity to the present. The intuition present in 1963 developed into an ideological credo, stimulated by Kitaj’s voracious reading in Jewish history and philosophy. By the 1980s and 1990s, his commitment to the Jewish commentarial tradition brought him into increasing conflict with critics, whose negative view of his glosses struck Kitaj as thinly veiled antisemitism. Undaunted and even emboldened, Kitaj readily confessed not only that he was beset by “Jew-on-the-brain” but that he was embarked on a project to create a “Jewish Art.” His inspirations in undertaking this project were not earlier Jewish artists, only a few of whom he held in high regard. Rather, they were the great Jewish intellectuals of the German cultural sphere—Benjamin, Buber, Einstein, Freud, Rosenzweig, and, of course, Kafka—whose work represented for Kitaj the essence of the agitated Jewish creative spirit. Marginality, displacement, and ceaseless innovation were the qualities of the Jewish intellectuals with which Kitaj, the American Jewish artist in England, so keenly identified—and which he often sought to convey in his art. A good part of what made Kitaj so extraordinary was the quality of his mind. He was vastly learned and ferociously engaged in ideas. As one of the last great Jewish intellectuals Appreciation