KITAJ, R.B.

KITAJ, R.B. (1932– ), U.S. painter and printmaker. Born in Cleveland as Ronald Brooks, Kitaj took his surname from his stepfather, a Viennese refugee from the Nazi regime. From 1956 to 1958 he served in the Army as an illustrator, immediately after which he moved to England to study under the G.I. Bill at the Ruskin School of Art (1958–59). Before this time Kitaj received art training at the Cooper Union in New York (1950) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1951–52). In 1959 Kitaj transferred to the Royal College of Art in London. During this early period he experimented with a number of styles, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, while taking life-drawing classes. His work often included collage elements and also a sense of collage through the painted juxtaposition of diverse subjects. In 1963 he had his first one-person exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London, the same year he began printmaking. From the 1970s Kitaj painted highly personal subjects in an expressionistic manner, often of a Jewish nature. The recurrent figure of Joe Singer, the archetypal wandering Jew and a figure with strong autobiographical associations for the artist, appears for the first time in The Jew, Etc. (1976–79, collection of the artist). The exilic condition indeed preoccupies Kitaj, who wrote a book on the subject, The First Diasporist Manifesto. In the early 1980s, Kitaj explored visual responses to the Holocaust. Seeking a symbol for the Jews akin to the Christian cross, in 1985 Kitaj began to utilize a chimney in reference to the ovens in which Nazis burned Jews. The eight pictures in the series that explored this iconography bear the overarching title Passion. One of the best-known Passion images, a picture of a train passenger titled The Jewish Rider (1984–85, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway), plays on Kitaj's knowledge of art history; the canvas is based partly on The Polish Rider (c. 1655, Frick Collection, New York), a work once attributed to Rembrandt. Other works by Kitaj that adapt an artistic precedent and explore Jewish identity include The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem) (1980, private collection, Monte Carlo), a painting derived from a 19th-century antisemitic German engraving titled Die Judenschule. Following scathing reviews of his 1994 retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London, and the death of his wife soon after, Kitaj left England and moved to Los Angeles in 1997. Among Kitaj's many impressive accolades, in 1985 he became the first American since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the Royal Academy in London. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: R.B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto (1989); R. Morphet, R.B. Kitaj (1994); M. Livingstone, R.B. Kitaj (1999); J. Aulich and J. Lynch (eds.), Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj (2001). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)