Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
R.B. Kitaj
American (b. 1932)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (n.d.)
screenprint
29.75"x 20.75"

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO

  


Though born in America (as Ronald Brooks), R. B. Kitaj lived in London for much of his career and studied art at Oxford. He is widely conversant in the histories of art, politics, literature, and Jewish lore, and this knowledge informs his paintings. He moved back to the United States in the nineties and has been the subject of many major exhibitions, some controversial. His work is in major collections worldwide.

Kitaj believed deeply in the connection between images and ideas. His works are never self-referential, but connected to a web of outside allusions. His works are a vivid patchwork of images, intended to communicate a complex layering of meaning. He saw the world as a fragmented, collage-like realm and this is reflected in his works. Kitaj's screenprint for the Homage to Picasso portfolio is the usual combination of oblique references found in many of the artist's graphic works and paintings of the seventies.

  R.B. Kitaj, from The Human Clay (1976)
"The human figure is a swell thing to draw. It seems to be almost impossible to do it as well as maybe half a dozen blokes have in the past. I'm talking about skill and imaginations that can be seen to be done. It is, to my way of thinking and in my own experience, the most difficult thing to do really well in the whole art...There will always be pictures whose complexity, difficulty, mystery will be ambiguous enough to resemble patterns of human existence or speculative beyond what we know or expect."
  Ferdinand Protzman, Washington Post, 12/28/96
"Ronald Kitaj is a 64-year-old American painter and graphic artist who has lived and worked for much of his adult life in England, where he was one of the most prominent figures of the pop art movement. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kitaj's paintings and drawings are figurative and laced with literary allusions or direct references to the work of authors such as Franz Kafka or Walter Benjamin.
"I'm not afraid of the word 'literary,' " Kitaj told a reviewer when his first New York exhibition opened in 1965. "I feel in good company. You might say that books have meant to me what trees mean to a landscapist."
To Kitaj's fans, this overt literary bent gives his work a cerebral richness few artists can match. Detractors accuse him of dressing up journeyman-quality art with the writings and ideas of some of this century's greatest minds. At the major Kitaj retrospective staged by the Tate Gallery in London several years ago, British critics savaged him for being pedantic and intellectually pretentious.
It was a bum rap, judging by the fascinating exhibition of Kitaj prints at Robert Brown Gallery. The most interesting feature of this show, which focuses on Kitaj's earlier work, is a series of 50 screen prints from 1969 titled, "In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part."
The prints in that series are reproductions of dust jackets from books in Kitaj's personal library. Taken individually, they are pieces of art that captivate the viewer's eye, heart and mind. On a collective level, they work like a self-portrait of the artist, creating a composite picture of his intellect, personality and soul in the context of his times. The man behind the books is probably not an easy person, but he is a genuine intellectual."