R.B. Kitaj

Cleveland, Ohio-born painter R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) lived and worked in London, England from 1959 to 1997, where he pioneered a new type of figurative art in the 60s with his artist friends Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, all of whom would find themselves dubbed the “London School.” Kitaj’s art mixed modernist allusions to literature, art history and Jewish history with a tremendous feeling for figuration and color that owed much to the elegant contours and palette of Degas. In the mid-70s, Kitaj positioned himself as a Jewish artist, authoring a Diasporist Manifesto and attempting to instigate a modern Jewish school of painting. This catalogue is the first new Kitaj overview since the artist’s death in 2007, and looks at all the major periods of Kitaj’s work, surveying prints and sketches as well as paintings.

This intimate exhibition catalogue, produced to accompany Marlborough gallery's recent posthumous New York exhibition of R.B. Kitaj's small paintings, most of which measure well less than two feet square, and many of which depict his astonishingly influential circle of friends and heroes--Creeley, Auden, Freud, Arendt, Greenberg--is also a memorial of sorts. The artist died on October 21, 2007, at which time the Marlborough exhibition was already in the works. Therefore, in addition to color illustrations of the 85 paintings which were exhibited--which span from 1965 to 2007, with the majority dating from 2006 and 2007--this volume includes plentiful documentary images, as well as quotations, remembrances and short essays from many of his esteemed colleagues and friends, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maria Friedlander, Nicholas Serota, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. It is a fitting tribute to an artist whom the London Times called "one of the most passionate and committed artists of his time."