Kitaj settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the
Ealing Art College, the
Camberwell School of Art and the
Slade School of Art. He also taught at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1968. He staged his first solo exhibition at
Marlborough New London Gallery in London in 1963, entitled "Pictures with commentary, Pictures without commentary", in which text included in the pictures and the accompanying catalogue referred to a range of literature and history, citing
Aby Warburg's analysis of symbolic forms as a major influence.
"School of London" He curated an exhibition for the
Arts Council at the
Hayward Gallery in 1976, entitled "The Human Clay" (an allusion to
W. H. Auden's lines 'To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso ... '), including works by 48 London artists, such as
William Roberts,
Richard Carline,
Colin Self and
Maggi Hambling, championing the cause of figurative art at a time when abstract was dominant. In an essay in the controversial catalogue, he invented the phrase the "School of London" to describe painters such as
Frank Auerbach,
Leon Kossoff,
Francis Bacon,
Lucian Freud,
Euan Uglow,
Michael Andrews,
Reginald Gray,
Peter de Francia and himself.
Style and influence Kitaj had a significant influence on British
pop art, with his
figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble
collages, but eschewing most
abstraction and
modernism. Allusions to political history, art, literature and
Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed together on one canvas to produce a
collage effect. He also produced a number of
screen-prints with printer
Chris Prater. He told Tony Reichardt, manager of the Marlborough New London Gallery, that he made screen-prints as sketches for his future paintings. From then onwards Tony Reichardt commissioned Chris Prater to print three or four copies of every print he made on canvas. His later works became more personal. Kitaj was recognised as being one of the world's leading draftsmen, almost on a par with, or compared to,
Degas. Indeed, he was taught drawing at Oxford by
Percy Horton, whom Kitaj claimed was a pupil of
Walter Sickert, who was a pupil of Degas; and the teacher of Degas studied under
Ingres. Meanwhile art historian
Edgar Wind encouraged him to become a 'Warburgian artist'. His more complex compositions build on his line work using a montage practice, which he called 'agitational usage'. Kitaj often depicts disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumes a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives. This is best portrayed by one his best-known works,
The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin) (1972–73). Kitaj staged a major exhibition at
Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965, and a retrospective at the
Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington, D.C. in 1981. He selected paintings for an exhibition, "The Artist's Eye", at the
National Gallery, London in 1980. In 1981 he was elected into the
National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1984.
Later years In his later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish heritage, which found expression in his works, with reference to the
Holocaust and influences from Jewish writers such as
Kafka and Walter Benjamin, and he came to consider himself to be a "
wandering Jew". In 1989, Kitaj published
First Diasporist Manifesto, a short book in which he analysed his own alienation, and how this contributed to his art. His book contained the remark: "The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once." And he added: "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist." A second
retrospective was staged at the
Tate Gallery in 1994. Critical reviews in London were almost universally negative. British press savagely attacked the Tate exhibit, calling Kitaj a pretentious poseur who engaged in name dropping. Kitaj took the criticism very personally, declaring that "anti-intellectualism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism" had fueled the vitriol. Despite the bad reviews, the exhibition moved to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and afterwards to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1995. His second wife,
Sandra Fisher died from hyperacute haemorrhagic leuco-encephalitis in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery had ended. He blamed the British press for her death, stating that "they were aiming for me, but they got her instead."
David Hockney concurred and said that he too believed the London art critics had killed Sandra Fisher. Kitaj returned to the US in 1997 and settled in
Los Angeles, near his first son. "When my Wife died", he wrote to
Edward Chaney, "London died for me and I returned home to California to live among sons and grandsons – It was a very good move and now I begin my 3rd and (last?) ACT! hands across The Sea." Three years later he wrote: "I grow older every day and rather like my hermit life." The "Tate War" and Sandra's death became a central themes for his later works: he often depicted himself and his deceased wife as
angels. In
Los Angeles No. 22 (Painting-Drawing) the beautiful young (and naked) girl records the shadow of her aged lover (on whose lap she sits) in a pose directly taken from the Scots Grand Tourist David Allan's
Origin of Painting. The latter was included by Ernst Gombrich in his 1995 National Gallery exhibition (and catalogue) on
Shadows so that Kitaj would have seen it two years before he left England for ever. In 1997 Kitaj exhibited his work
Sandra Three, an installation of paintings, photographs and text that stretched across an entire wall of the gallery at the
Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Kitaj used the Academy's
Summer Exhibition to showcase this sequence of works that dealt with the events of the "Tate War" and Sandra's death and even included a graffiti inscription stating 'The Critic Kills'. In 2000, Kitaj was one of several artists to make a
Post-it note for an internet charity auction held by
3M to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their product. The charcoal and pastel piece sold for $925, making it the most expensive post-it note in history, a fact recorded in the
Guinness Book of World Records. Kitaj was elected to the
Royal Academy in 1991, the first American to join the Academy since
John Singer Sargent. He received the Golden Lion at the
Venice Biennale in 1995. He staged another exhibition at the National Gallery in 2001, entitled "Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters". In 2007, Kitaj published his
Second Diasporist Manifesto with
Yale University Press and died one month later. In September 2010, Kitaj and five British artists including
Howard Hodgkin,
John Walker,
Ian Stephenson,
Patrick Caulfield and
John Hoyland were included in an exhibition entitled
The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the
Yale Center for British Art. In October 2012 a major international symposium was held in
Berlin to mark what would have been Kitaj's 80th birthday. It accompanied
Obsessions, the first comprehensive exhibition of Kitaj's work since his death, held at the
Jewish Museum, Berlin. The title is partly in reference to what he dubbed his "erratic Jewish obsessions".
All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life opened at Tate Britain in February 2018, inspired by Kitaj's School of London. ==References==