RB Kitaj

Ronald Brooks Kitaj RA (born October 29, 1932 in Chagrin Falls near Cleveland , Ohio ; † October 21, 2007 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American painter , graphic artist and draftsman who settled in England in the late 1950s . Kitaj was one of the most important exponents of British Pop Art . He started with enigmatic allegories and in his later work turned to a more understandable figurative representation that became known as the "School of London" .

Life

Early years

RB Kitaj was born as Ronald Brooks-Benway, the only son of the Hungarian Sigmund Benway and the Russian - Jewish emigrant daughter Jeanne Brooks. The father left the family shortly after the child was born and the marriage ended in divorce in 1934. The mother married 1941 from Austria immigrant chemist Dr. Walter Kitaj, whose surname was given to Ronald. At 17, Kitaj was hired as a sailor on a Norwegian freighter. From 1949 to 1954 he went to sea repeatedly as a merchant seaman; in 1951 he was granted a seaman's patent.

In 1950 he began his training as an artist at the Cooper Union Institute in New York, in 1951/52 he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Albert Paris Gütersloh and Fritz Wotruba . There he met Elsie Roessler, whom he married in 1953. Back in America, Kitaj briefly studied at the Cooper Union, but returned to Vienna with his wife that same year and continued his studies at the Academy. This was followed by some trips through Europe. In 1954, the young couple spent the winter in the Catalan port city of Sant Feliu de Guíxols . In 1955 Kitaj was drafted into the US Army and was stationed in Darmstadt and Fontainebleau .

Career as an artist

A GI Bill scholarship enabled Kitaj to go to Great Britain in 1957, first to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, then to the Royal College of Art in London in 1959 . In 1959 his first child, Lem (later screenwriter Lem Dobbs ) was born. Close friendships developed with his fellow students Derek Boshier , Patrick Caulfield , Peter Phillips and above all with Allen Jones and David Hockney . He also got to know the philosopher Richard Wollheim . Kitaj participated in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition in the RBA (Royal Society of British Artists) Galleries in 1960 and 1961 . From 1961 to 1967 Kitaj taught as a drawing teacher in London, at the Ealing School of Art and the Camberwell School of Art, and as a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art .

Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg , the star of the American art scene at the time, Kitaj focused increasingly on the expressive possibilities of Pop Art in the early 1960s, but remained true to his own graphic and drawing style. In 1962 he worked with Eduardo Paolozzi , the Scottish pioneer of British pop, and developed his first collages . RB Kitaj had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Marlborough New London Gallery . The following year Kitaj and his wife adopted a second child, daughter Dominie.

In 1964 Kitaj first took part in the documenta ( documenta III ) in Kassel and in the Venice Biennale . On the occasion of his first American exhibition at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York, the artist returned to the USA in 1965 after nine years of exile. Kitaj had his first solo exhibitions in museums, in 1965 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in 1967 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam . In 1967 he took on a visiting professorship at the University of California at Berkeley . In 1968 Kitaj returned to England, where he became friends with Jim Dine . In the same year Ronald B. Kitaj took part in the 4th documenta in Kassel. In 1969 his wife Elsie committed suicide .

In 1969/70 Kitaj's extensive graphic work was shown all over Germany, in Berlin , Stuttgart , Munich , Düsseldorf , Lübeck and Bonn and in Hanover . In 1969 he worked with Roy Lichtenstein on a project for the Art and Technology exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . He lived briefly in Hollywood , where he befriended the eminent Californian painters Richard Diebenkorn and Lee Friedlander . There he also met the painter Sandra Fisher, who soon became Kitaj's partner in London. The two married in 1983.

From the mid-1970s, Kitaj commuted between England and the USA: In 1976 Kitaj's work was shown in the traveling exhibition Pop Art in England , which took place in Hamburg , Munich and New York; In the meantime, he organized a large exhibition of 48 London artist colleagues and friends at the Hayward Gallery in London, which he named The Human Clay after a line of poetry by WH Auden . In the foreword to the exhibition catalog, Kitaj first used the term “School of London” for these figurative works, which stood in provocative contrast to the fashionable, abstract visual language of the western art world that had prevailed to date. The controversial and hotly debated exhibition marked a high point in Kitaj's work.

In the late 1970s, the artist stayed mainly in the USA. In 1978 he became artist in residence at Dartmouth College , New Hampshire , after which he moved with his family to New York's Greenwich Village . He now mainly painted from a model and pastel painting dominated. After the large retrospective of this work, Kitaj was certified that he was approaching his role model Degas in this technique.

In 1982 Kitaj was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of London . Kitaj's stepfather Walter died in the same year. The family moved to Paris at short notice . In 1984 Kitaj's second son Max was born. As the third American after Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent , Kitaj was accepted into the British Royal Academy of Arts (1991).

Later years and death

At the end of the 1980s, Kitaj was primarily concerned with his own identity . He had gotten into such a crisis that he radically questioned his own work. He called himself an " Eternal Jew " because of his maternal Jewish origin and dealt with the subject of the Holocaust , reflecting on his own life on the expulsion of the Jewish people and also continuously addressing the issue of social migration and the problem of "non- Sedentary people ”. In addition, his European-American ambivalence gave him a certain outsider position as an artist.

In 1990 Kitaj suffered a minor heart attack. The large retrospective of his painting at the Tate Gallery in 1994 received devastating and, as Kitaj found, ignorant reviews. The rejection of Kitaj became a disaster due to two deaths. Sandra Fischer died surprisingly of a brain aneurysm , and his mother died shortly afterwards. A bitter Kitaj blamed the critics for his wife's death. Kitaj left London in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles with his son Max to be close to his first son. In the years that followed, he mainly focused on death in his pictures, he painted angels and stylized his wife Sandra and himself as figures of light. Kitaj committed suicide on October 21, 2007.

plant

RB Kitaj played a key role in the resurgence of realistic, figurative painting ( New Figuration ) in England, which became known through the great names Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud . Due to his European exile, he remained unknown in the American art world for a long time, but he influenced British Pop Art of the 1960s and later also individual conceptual artists. Together with friends like Frank Auerbach or Leon Kossoff , he opposed the still prevailing abstraction in the 1970s. He radically rejected stylistic formal development as a principle. He also no longer accepted his enigmatic, allegorical early work and then saw Dadaist / Duchampist art only as an expression of inability and laziness to think. Kitaj always went his own way towards a critical, committed and self-analytical art. Political radicalism found expression in his paintings and serigraphs of the 1960s.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• 1963: Marlborough New London Gallery, London
• 1965: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
• 1965: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
• 1967: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• 1967: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
• 1969: Galerie Mikro, Berlin
• 1969: Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart
• 1969: Galerie van de Loo . Munich
• 1970: Kestnergesellschaft , Hanover
• 1970: Overbeck Society , Lübeck
• 1970: Galerie Niepel, Düsseldorf
• 1970: Municipal art collections, Bonn
• 1995: Tate Gallery, London
• 1995: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 2007: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex
• 2012: Jewish Museum Berlin , Berlin catalog
• 2013: Hamburger Kunsthalle

Group exhibitions

• 1960-'61: Young Contemporaries , RBA Galleries, London. He wins the YC's Arts Council Prize in 1960.
• 1961-'63: John Moore′s Exhibition , Liverpool. Kitaj wins awards in both years.
• 1962: Compass II, Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven
• 1962– '63: Premio Marzotto , European Community Traveling Exhibition
• 1964: documenta III , Kassel
• 1964: Venice Biennale
• 1964: British contemporary painting , Düsseldorf
• 1965: The English Eye , Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
• 1967: University of California, Berkeley
• 1967: John Moore's Exhibition , Liverpool. Kitaj sits on the jury in 1969.
• 1967: Pittsburgh International, Carnegie Institute
• 1967: Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London
• 1967: Gemeentemuseum The Hague
• 1967: Compass III, Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven
• 1968: The Obsessive Image , ICA, London
• 1968: Prints from London , Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
• 1968: Young Generation Great Britain , Academy of the Arts, Berlin
• 1968: 4th documenta, Kassel
• 1969: Kunsthalle, Basel
• 1973: with Jim Dine , Cincinnati Art Museum , Cincinnati
• 1976: Hayward Gallery , London
• 1977: documenta 6 , Kassel
• 1995: Venice Biennale

Honors

• 1984 elected member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design , New York
• 1991 admission to the Royal Academy of Arts, London
• 1995 Awarded the “Golden Lion” at the Venice Biennale
• 1998 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

literature

Exhibition catalogs (selection)

• RB Kitaj: Pictures With Commentary: Pictures Without Commentary , Marlborough Fine Art, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, 1963. 4 °, 34 pp.
• RB Kitaj , Marlborough-Gerson, New York, 1965.
• Complete Graphics 1963-1969 , Galerie Mikro Berlin, printed in England, by The Hillington Press, Uxbridge, Middlesex, 1969.
• Pictures From an Exhibition , Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1970.
• Three Sets , Marlborough Graphics, London, 1970.
• RB Kitaj , with an introduction to notes on RB Kitaj by Wieland Schmied , Kestner-Gesellschaft , Hanover, 1970.
• Dine – Kitaj: A Two Man Exhibition , Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 1973.
• Pictures , Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1974. Text by Frederic Tuten .
• Pictures , Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1977. Introduction Robert Creeley .
• Fifty Drawings and Pastels. Six Oil Paintings , Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1977.
• RB Kitaj 1932–2007 , Jewish Museum, Berlin. Texts by Cilly Kugelmann et al.

Secondary literature

• Andrew Lambirth: Kitaj , Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 2004, ISBN 978-0-85667-571-3
• John Lynch, James Aulich: Critical Kitaj (Issues in Art History Series) , Rutgers University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-8135-2900-4
• Richard Morphet: RB Kitaj: a Retrospective , Tate Publishing, 1994, ISBN 978-1-85437-197-3
• 4th documenta , international exhibition June 27 to October 6, 1968 Kassel, Kassel 1968 (Druck + Verlag GmbH); Catalog 2
• Robert Darmstädter: Reclams Künstlerlexikon , Stuttgart 1979 (Philipp Reclam jun.); ISBN 3-15-010281-2 (carton)

Web links

• RB Kitaj on kunstaspekte.de
• Literature by and about RB Kitaj in the catalog of the German National Library
• RB Kitaj in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• The Human Clay - Foreword by RB Kitaj to the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London 1976 ( Memento from February 24, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
• Tate Collection | RB Kitaj
• "RB Kitaj" , The Times , October 23, 2007, detailed obituary
• "RB Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74" , The New York Times , October 24, 2007 ( cookie acceptance required)
• “Artist Ronald Kitaj has died” , Spiegel Online , October 24, 2007
• Materials by and about RB Kitaj in the documenta archive
• Literature by and about RB Kitaj in the library of the Jewish Museum Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary: RB Kitaj. In: The Telegraph, October 24, 2007 , accessed May 23, 2013. - In it: “… he became a leading member of a group of artists known (a term he created) as The School of London; alongside such contemporaries as Frank Auerbach , Leon Kossoff , Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud , he elevated English painting to international significance. "
2. ↑ Awards RB Kitaj , marlboroughgallery.com, accessed December 21, 2015.
3. ↑ Jonathan Jones: Did art critics kill RB Kitaj? , guardian.co.uk, January 8, 2010, accessed January 7, 2012.
4. ^ Obsessions Jewish Museum Berlin, accessed on November 12, 2012
5. ↑ RB Kitaj. The retrospective July 19 - October 27, 2013 .
6. ^ Nationalacademy.org: Kitaj, Ronald p. ANA 1981; NA 1984 ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed June 29, 2015)