Renewal
and Resistance
David Cohen in conversation with R.B. KITAJ in Los Angeles
This article originally
appeared in the New York Sun, Monday June 30, 2003
photograph by Paul
O'Connor; this and all images courtesy L.A. Louver Gallery and Marlborough
Gallery, Inc
"Where are all the beautiful
women?" a lady asks R.B. Kitaj during the packed opening of his
recent show at L.A. Louver, a leading gallery in Venice, California.
"What?", he replies,
incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even
so would have had difficulty comprehending this question.
The lady gestures towards
the paintings and drawings on display. Many feature a voluptuous young
woman, usually nude, often in the company of an older bearded man. On
first impression, they do indeed seem to represent a cast of women,
with different features and hair colors, rather than a single protagonist.
When finally the penny drops,
Mr. Kitaj fixes his bewildered interlocutor a defiant stare: "She's
dead!"
R.B. Kitaj LOS ANGELES
No. 22 2002
oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
An exhibition of new paintings
by R.B. Kitaj is a rare event. For years, his slow output has been a
matter of notoreity. Since his controversial retrospective at London's
Tate Gallery in 1994, which traveled to the Metropolitian Museum, New
York, and the LA County Museum, he has gone even more reclusive than
had been his norm. The Tate show had been the occasion of a barrage
of vituperative criticism. Mr. Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio
in 1932, had lived in England since the 1950s.
In the "Tate War",
as he calls it, he lashed out at detractors, countering their cat-calls
of "existentialist bullshit," "namedropper" and
"pseudo-intellectual" with his own charges, calling them "antisemitic,
anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-intellectual."
Amidst this furor, his much
younger wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, also an American abroad, suddenly
died of an aneurism. Sandra is the "beautiful women [sic]"
of his "Los Angeles Pictures", the group of works on display
at LA Louver. He says that he doesn't try to depict her exactly, but
makes her up, from memory, as he goes along. In 1997, Mr. Kitaj returned
to America, choosing as his base the city where he had met Sandra, where
he had once taught at UCLA, and where his son by an earlier marriage,
the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and his grandsons live.
He took with him Max, his
son by Sandra, who he has raised singlehandedly since the boy was ten.
Both his sons were at the opening, along with their sister, Dominie,
a decorated servicewoman just back from Iraq. David Hockney, one of
Mr. Kitaj's closest friends, was also in attendance.
R.B. Kitaj LOS ANGELES
No. 7 2001
oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
