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David Cohen in conversation with R.B. KITAJ in Los Angeles, Part
2
R.B. Kitaj LOS ANGELES No. 22 2001
oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
I was in LA for the opening
of his show and the last week of his friend Lucian Freud's retrospective.
During his period of mourning (arguably ongoing) Mr. Kitaj
had sat for Mr. Freud, although neither of the portraits begun was completed.
I was also in town to work on an exhibition of Sandra Fisher and her
circle, for the New York Studio School in a couple of years. Sandra
was a personal friend, and it was unnerving, the next day, at Mr. Kitaj's
new house, to see portraits she had made of me ten years earlier. Mr.
Kitaj included a selection of Sandra's work in a back room at Louver.
She painted in an unpretentious, fresh, naturalistic style, favoring
a cheery, fauve palette. Her subjects were portraits of friends and
nudes of both sexes.
Mr. Kitaj now lives in Westwood.
His house, formerly Peter Lorre's, is overtaken by books. There are
no easy chairs, "to discourage visitors from staying too long",
he tells me. I'm honored to be invited at lunchtime; a man of very strict
habits, Mr. Kitaj habitually receives only at 4pm.
Rooms are given over to particular
subjects. In one, he has created a shrine to Cézanne, for instance.
He has all the prints (he prefers the uncolored version of the famous
bathers lithograph) and an impressive array of first editions. Another
room is his Judaica library. Volumes are organized according to an eclectic,
personal logic. Looking at one particularly odd juxtaposition, Kitaj
remarked: "My friend Leon Wieseltier was visiting, and he remarked
that this is probably the only library in the world where you will find
a set of Proust next to the works of Rabbi Soloveitchik."
Raised in an agnostic, leftist
household, Kitaj surprised friends in the mid-1970s when, just around
the same time this some-time "Pop" appropriationist rediscovered
drawing from life and the single figure, he also reconnected with his
Jewish heritage. For sure, it was a secular Jewishness, having more
to do with a spiritual identification with mid-twentieth century intellectuals,
especially mid-Europeans whose lives were shattered or disrupted by
the Holocaust, than with religion. (The name Kitaj belonged to his step-father,
a refugee from Vienna.) He has come to be fascinated, however, by the
kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every
morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded
by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emanuel Levinas,
before working for an hour on his memoirs.
He is living proof of some
traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas,
an inveterate historical namedropper. But he has always been aware of
that. An early critic complained that his work was "littered with
ideas", and he has often quoted the remark with pride. What friends
and foes alike often overlook in Mr. Kitaj is the ambiguity, irony and
self-depracating humor that invariably go along for the ride with his
grand theorizing and bombast.
In a corner of his Judaica
library is a back copy of the Burlington Magazine with his 1980 pastel
portrait of Degas on the cover. Degas has had to share with Ezra Pound,
yet another hero, the typically Kitajesque epitaph, "my favorite
antisemite."
He explains to me how different
antisemitism is in every country and situation. Degas's anti-Dreyfusard
stance, he feels, can be explained, even vaguely sympathised with, in
the context of the national disaster of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr.
Kitaj is both incensed and bemused by people's reaction to his charge
of the "low octane" antisemitism he feels he encountered in
the British press. "Antisemitism runs the whole gamut from ignorant
gossip in an English pub to the death camps, with infinite degrees and
nuances along the way", he explains, reaching as he speaks for
a press clipping recently sent to him by a London friend. It is a diatribe
by a tabloid critic who had given him a particular drubbing, this time
against the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, a champion of Kitaj's,
and a Jew. "Time to be rid of this Trotsky of art", ran the
headline. "You see," Mr. Kitaj exclaims, nodding sagely. "Trotsky!
Not Stalin or Hitler, but Trotsky!"
***
R.B. Kitaj LOS ANGELES
No. 11 2002-03
oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
To those who knew Sandra
Fisher it can be disconcerting to witness her transmutation into a motif.
She was blessed with a preternaturally sunny disposition, a Californian
optimism to counter her husband's studied pessimism. Kitaj dedicated
his book, "First Diasporist Manifesto", "For Sandra,
who puts me down when I complain, replying she'd rather live in these
times (as a woman and artist) than any other."
Since her death, Mr. Kitaj
has very publicly transformed her into a personal symbol of renewal
and resistance. Mr. Kitaj is a great collector and reader of little
magazines, and in emulation of them, he has launched "Sandra",
as a periodical manqué. Various projects, be they exhibition
catalogues or installations, have appeared under a "Sandra"
rubric, featuring the same beaming photograph from her youthful prime.
The first instalment of "Sandra"
was a strange set-up at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in London,
his farewell to the city. Surrounded by a personal selection of his
"School of London" friends (he had coined the term himself
in the 1970s), including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian
Freud, and David Hockney, was his own transcription of Manet's Execution
of Maximillian, in which he cast himself and Manet among the firing
squad, returning fire at the dreaded critics. The LA Louver catalogue
is "Sandra Eight: Los Angeles Pictures".
In "The Los Angeles
Pictures", "Sandra and I became Lovers again", he writes
in a catalogue note. "I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush,
fondle her again, caress her contours." Some paintings are very
graphic, as the couple make love in the bath, for instance. Others keep
up Mr. Kitaj's famous habit of referencing old master paintings, sometimes
in composite, taking not just forms but the aura and association of
the older work. Their two faces overlapping in a kiss (recalling Brancusi)
actually borrows its format from a detail of Giotto's Scrovegni fresco
at Padua depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna, Christ's grandparents.
"I detected Barnet Newman's Zip in the line running between the
profiles, so I emphasized it in the profiles of Sandra and me."
He sees his pictures as "love
stories". "The Man-Woman Story has become quite rare in painting
since the death of Picasso. Earlier, many painters had shown the woman
and man in a love situation- such as Picasso, Munch, Schiele, Chagall,
even Matisse." But then the subject became rare. He puts this down
to fact that many of the best painters recently have been gay or abstract.
Even straight artists, however, have veered towards the isolated, individual
figure, he says, citing his "School of London" friends. Sandra
Fisher, he points out, was an exception, often painting nude men and
women embracing.
An aspect of Mr. Kitaj's
Tate show which irked critics was his announcement that he had entered
his "old age style". They saw in this an impertinence, as
it is not for an artist but for connoisseurs to decide when this had
happened. Again, there was a failure to savor the intended irony, the
heavy quote marks that surrounded such a stance. In earlier work, whether
the tightly constructed fragmentary collage-influenced paintings of
his "Pop" period of the 1960s, which first catapulted him
to attention, or the more naturalistic pastels of the following decade,
Mr. Kitaj was noted for his draughtsmanly finesse. Robert Hughes had
famously said of him in the pages of Time that "he draws better
than almost anyone else alive." But in his self-consciously "old-age"
style he opted for a loose, wobbly, tentative, unfinished look, and
this carries over in his Los Angeles Pictures.
This doesn't stop him from
teasing me with a big assertion, typically one that raises a provocative
thought about culture at large beyond its overt egotistical posture:
"I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived".
