R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions | Analyst for Our Time

The presentation of this dual-venue exhibition enabled the exploration of different facets of Kitaj’s identity and returned the American-born Kitaj to the UK for the first time since his controversial Tate show in 1994. This great retrospective triggered a flood of negative reviews, which Kitaj termed the “Tate War”. This, combined with the sudden death of his second wife, painter Sandra Fisher, prompted him to abruptly leave London for Los Angeles in 1997.

Born as Ronald Brooks in Cleveland, Ohio, Kitaj grew up in the left-wing intellectual home of his immigrant parents. Following a spell as a merchant seaman, Kitaj’s formal art schooling began the 1950s in New York and subsequently Vienna, Oxford and London. It was in London that he met his contemporary David Hockney, who remained a close friend throughout his life.

During the 1960s, Kitaj and fellow artists Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud pioneered a new, figurative art which defied the trend in abstraction and conceptualism. Known collectively as the ‘School of London’, most of them were cultural ‘outsiders’ who remained fiercely loyal to the human figure. Kitaj specifically positioned himself as a Jewish artist and maintained this as a pivotal dimension and motif in his “diasporic” art and writing.

This is powerful stuff, full of the colour and the symbolism that were his trademarks.

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent

It offers fascinating insights into the complex, emotional and culturally hungry painter…These two well-selected shows offer a much-needed opportunity to reassess him, and realise what an intense artist we have lost.

Richard Cork, The Independent