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The National Gallery in London invited Kitaj to take part in their
exhibitions designed to show the interaction between contemporary
artists and the works of the Great Masters in the National Gallery
collection: The Artist’s Eye in 1980 and Encounters in 2000.
This was highly appropriate for the American expatriate who nearly
fifty years ago ‘first visited Trafalgar Square and embarked
on a dialogue at once sustaining and passionate with the National
Gallery’s collection that has continued to this day, and of
which this exhibition is merely the latest fruit’. (1)
The young US serviceman was drawn to the early Italians, in particular
to Duccio and Sassetta: the established artist invited in 1980
to select an Artist’s Eye exhibition chose works across the
centuries, but clearly engaged with particular intensity with
Degas, of whom he produced a memorable imaginary portrait, showing
the master in extreme old age… But now the artist of the
past who speaks most powerfully is not Duccio or Degas, but Cézanne.
From his work, and in particular from the National Gallery’s
Bathers, Kitaj has forged a new language of anger and distress
– and of the hope inherent in struggles unfinished. It is
a language that can tackle loss and exclusion without despair.
(2)
Kitaj is one of the most formidable and articulate artists who
has developed a personal iconography that draws inspiration from
a range of sources. His Jewishness is a central theme. In the National
Gallery’s catalogue to accompany this show, Anthony Rudolf
has written an essay The Jew etc.
Where Kitaj differs from his peers, even other Jewish ones like
Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, is the public nature
of his love of the written word. For all I know, the three painters
mentioned are great users of words in one way or another, but
words (or the Word) are absent from their aesthetic. Unlike Kitaj,
they never go public with extensive texts, whether about one particular
picture, their own art in general or that of their precursors;
nor will you find words contained in a painting. Kitaj on the
other hand, makes pictures like The Murder of Rosa Luxenberg
or Reflections on Violence where the words enter the frame,
subverting or complicating the centripetal unity of the painting.(3)
Rudolf continues:
We all carry around a pantheon of exemplars in our head or hump.
Alive or dead, these mentors are there for us to engage with.
Kitaj’s extensive pantheon includes, of course, his all-time
hero, Cézanne (‘the greatest painter who ever lived’),
Edward Hopper (‘my favourite American painter’), Duchamp,
Degas, Van Gogh, Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound (‘my
favourite anti-Semite’), Walter Benjamin (the elective affinity
between Kitaj and WB is uncanny), Gershom Scholem. Kitaj argues
that in all spheres except painting – the other arts, the
human sciences and so on – Jews have figured disproportionately
among the pioneers of modernism, including the great iconoclasts.
Many of these pioneers - Schoenberg, Einstein, Eisenstein, Wittgenstein,
Freud, El-Lissitsky, Groucho Marx, Aby Warburg, and Edgar Wind
– could be added to the names of the Jews and non-Jews already
listed in his pantheon. Kitaj as a man, citizen and artist inhabits
a lieu de mémoire – yielding a creatively energising
tension in his work – between the immense power and weight
of his revered fathers and the equally immense collective power
and weight of those who were murdered because of what they were.(4)
Kitaj himself regards the Jewish question as central to his work:
‘I feel more human, more universal, more
personal, more daring as a painter if I can put the Jewish
question to my art and to myself’. Rudolf observes that for
Kitaj the Jewish question is ‘a psychically enabling device’(5)
for his work to be done although in visual terms a Jewish iconography
is present in only a minority of works. The key to appreciating
Kitaj’s work is to reconcile the visual elements with the ideas
depicted and references made. The paintings contain autobiography,
art historical referencing and issues surrounding death and love.
Juxtapositions, fragmentation, quotations, contradictions, disjunctions,
are not confused, not arbitrary. Purposeful, mimetic of our late
modern condition, incarnated in a highly sophisticated use of
montage and collage (derived in part from Sergei Eisenstein, Ezra
Pound, Walter Benjamin and others, their deployment constitutes
the artists own version of chaos theory.(6)
Kitaj’s Jewishness is central to his art but it is one element
among many in his rich and complex oeuvre , which includes
literature, sport, sexual love, London, America. His favourite artists
include Giotto, Degas, Matisse, Kafka and Munch. In his recent interview
with Colin Wiggins he said:
I have an obsessive personality and these last 30 years I’ve
been mostly obsessed with the Jewish question, Sandra and Cézanne’s
Bathers. I have other grand obsessions and I’ve begun to
write my Confessions where I hope to tell all. But those three
have suddenly come together in the last tentative pictures in
this show.(7)
Los Angeles No. 1, is perhaps the most explicit expression
of grief and loss. Two figures, a man and a woman lean towards each
other but cannot embrace for a table divides them. The female figure
is brightly coloured with wings that seem to symbolise her imminent
departure. The male figure has odd wings: one black symbolising
grief and a red one symbolising sacrifice (or blood) . The painting
expresses acute tension and distress.
I’m always anxious. I’ve been a dissident sceptic,
even a pessimist, all my life. If I were even more anxious I might
be another Cézanne or more likely another Frenhofer, the
obsessive painter in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece.
The dictionary definition of anxiety I like best is ‘strained
desire’. My anxiety gets me into all kinds of absurd trouble,
like the Surveyor K in Kafka’s The Castle. I often
feel jumpy and expectant in the studio so I listen to jazz and
blues all day like Mondrian (a hero of my old age). Sometimes
I even calibrate my brushstrokes to the rhythm of the music. I
would guess that most ambitious painters are anxious.(8)
Kitaj also describes how there is little harmony in himself or
in his artworks: ‘My pictures seem to rouse the art rabble
don’t they? And cause Tate Wars and such. I guess my favourite
modernist picture is still the uncouth, Cézanne - induced
Demoisselles d’Avignon, by Picasso, painted upon Cézanne’s
death….In spite of my bibliomania, everyone in the School of
London is more sophisticated than I am’.(9)
There is a searing tone in a number of the new paintings in the
Kitaj show at the National Gallery. These are challenging and difficult
works and express a level of genuine pain that is uncommon in the
visual arts at present. The new works mostly do not have the elegance
of If Not, Not, the superb painting of 1975–76 that
I was delighted to see on show as part of this exhibition. It has
since been reproduced in tapestry form at the new British Library.
One of his most important paintings it was inspired in art historical
terms by Giorgione’s, Tempesta; in literary terms by
Eliot’s Wasteland and in Jewish/ historical terms by
the Holocaust. In the new works there is a rough unfinished quality
with bare white canvas revealed, which Kitaj suggests possibly expresses
nothingness – death. He has pleaded guilty to ‘crimes
against painterly painting’. ‘These undecided pictures
are about death-in-life, and the blank negative spaces can be read
as Emily Dickinson’s ‘White Exploit’, her term for
death’.(10) In the world at large, nostalgia abounds where
death and loss are concerned as we have witnessed repeatedly in
the past months, or the skirting around of issues that might otherwise
reveal the intensity of grief and utter desolation. Both are absent
in the work of Kitaj. His portrayal of death, loss and subsequent
alienation is extraordinary in the present world situation and it
reminds us of the central role to be played by the visual arts in
conveying ideas with subtlety and conviction. As Neil MacGregor
stated in his Director’s Foreword; ‘The great pictures
of the National Gallery speak from the heart to the heart, articulating
the deepest feelings of those who look at them, pointing the way
for other artists to do the same. We are pleased that Kitaj has
allowed us to show his latest acts of homage to an enduring tradition’.(11)
This is an exhibition that is difficult to actually enjoy because
the issues are so profoundly challenging. However, in terms of being
able to salute the courage and determination to survive through
the creative act, it is a difficult experience to forget.
1.Neil MacGregor, Director’s Foreword, Kitaj in the Aura of
Cézanne and Other Masters.
2. Ibid.
3. Anthony Rudolf, ‘The Jew etc.’, ibid, p.54.
4. Ibid, p.56.
5. Ibid, p.58.
6. Ibid, p.59.
7. RB Kitaj in conversation with Colin Wiggins, ibid, p.15.
8. Ibid, p.18.
9. Ibid, p.30.
10. Ibid, p.26.
11. Neil MacGregor, ibid.
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