RIP: Kitaj, 74, Self-Declared Best Jewish Artist Ever
October 27th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
R. B. Kitaj (whose recent Marlborough show I reviewed here) has died at 74. Obituary writers represent the artist’s faith in different ways, from ignoring it to championing it as his greatest contribution to contemporary art. Here’s a roundup of some obits.
(Right) Raphael Soyer. “R.B. Kitaj and Sandra Fisher” (1983), oil on canvas, Forum Gallery, NY
Jed Perl writes in The New Republic (HT: Amy Stempler): “As for Kitaj’s fascination with Judaism, this became more absorbing with each passing year. He saw Judaism as an aspect of modernity, and his Diasporist Manifestoes are at least in part metaphorical conceits, with the Jew representing the modern artist in all his glorious alienation.”
“Later in his career, Mr. Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE) celebrated Jewish culture and his Jewish identity in his art,” writes Martha Schwendener in the NY Times,” maintaining that Kitaj’s Diasporist Manifestos led him to “began to reconnect with his Jewish heritage.” And finally, “The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of Mr. Kitaj in Time magazine: ‘He draws better than almost anyone else alive.’ Mr. Kitaj offered his own revision: ‘I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived.’”
ARTINFO cites Kitaj’s “Jewish identity” and works at the Israel Museum. “His mother and stepfather were non-observant Jews, and years later religion would play a larger part in his life,” writes Jon Thurber deep down in his article in the LA Times. “After beginning to explore his Jewish roots in the early 1970s, his paintings began to reflect what one New York Times writer called a ‘born-again Jewishness,’ exploring the Holocaust, the diaspora and ‘his own sense of personal exile.’”
Adam Bernstein refers in the Washington Post to Kitaj’s “thematic concern with modern Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust,” and adds, “His mother was also Jewish, but it was not until the 1960s that his religion became increasingly central to his life. He said the change came with reading Hannah Arendt’s New Yorker dispatches of the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis’ foremost planners of Jewish extermination.”
The NY Sun’s David Cohen writes:
It was a telling coincidence that Kitaj rediscovered artistic and Jewish tradition simultaneously. In the catalog of a one-man exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1985, Kitaj quoted the composer Arnold Schönberg: “I have long since resolved to be a Jew … I regard that as more important than my art.” He used a chimney as a symbol of the Holocaust. 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 Kabala, 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. Benjamin became his alter ego. “The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin),” 1972–74, plays off sets of narrative that 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.
But where the American critics seemed to play up Kitaj’s London connection, the London critics did the opposite. “Kitaj, who saw himself as a ‘wandering Jew,’ emotionally and culturally displaced from his homeland, suffused himself in European literary and artistic traditions. His writing complemented — and, many argued, enriched — his painting, enabling the viewer to unravel the often complex web of pictorial symbols and associations,” writes the Telegraph:
During the mid-1970s Kitaj had become increasingly conscious of his Jewishness, and in 1980 he made his first trip to Israel. An American in exile, albeit voluntarily, he felt a profound empathy with the historical plight of his ancestors.
He declared that “the threatened condition of the Jews witnesses the condition of our wider world” and he sought “to try not only to do Cézanne and Degas over again after Surrealism but after Auschwitz, after the Gulag”.
The Guardian and the Cleveland Plain Dealer do not even mention Kitaj was Jewish.
Finally, see also the National Gallery’s online exhibit.