R. B. KITAJ IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'
R.
B. Kitaj: The Diasporist Unpacks in Rosen. A. ‘Imagining Jewish Art’
This
is a summary of Chapter 3 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters
with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (2009, Legenda). The Introduction to this work by Rosen was
summarised in this blog on 22nd October 2014.
Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book, on Phillip Guston, was summarised in this
blog on 16 March 2015.
Ronald
Brooks Kitaj was born in 1932; he died in 2007.
R. B. Kitaj:
The Diasporist Unpacks
‘Unpacking my
library’: Kitaj and Benjamin
Rosen
describes the painting by R. B. Kitaj: ‘Unpacking my library’, from 1990-91.
Kitaj
– the peripatetic artist – encounters his books afresh every time he moves, and
for Kitaj literary allusions underpin his works.
Kitaj
was also a writer: in the last 20 years of his life he wrote ‘prefaces’ for his
paintings. He had Adin Steinsaltz’s
Talmud translations by his easel and he came to understand his prefaces as
‘Jewish exegesis’. And Kitaj understood
the close literary link of his paintings as being ‘bound up with his Jewish
identity’. For Kitaj, Jewish texts
stimulated visual art.
Critics
have been dismissive of Kitaj’s literary links.
A retrospective of Kitaj’s works was held at the Tate Gallery in 1994. Janet Wolff, writing about criticism of this
show, perceived three strands of ‘English sentiment’: anti-literary prejudice;
anti-Americanism; and anti-Semitism.
Rosen
asserts that in his work ‘Unpacking my library’, Kitaj was setting himself up
as Walter Benjamin. In the painting
Kitaj portrays himself as Benjamin. Specifically,
Kitaj drew on an essay by Benjamin: ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book
Collecting’ which was published in German in 1931, and was subsequently
published in English in 1968.
Rosen writes that by the early 1970s Kitaj’s immersion in the works of Benjamin led
Kitaj to find ‘striking affinities between Benjamin’s allusive style and his
own practice as a painter’. Rosen states
that this is the time when Kitaj produced ‘some of his first major works’.
Benjamin
also inspired Kitaj to reflect on his Jewish inheritance: he was stimulated to
re-read Kafka.
Rosen
states that he will examine Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking my library’, and will then
suggest that Kitaj worked with a variety of sources in the same manner as Benjamin
when collecting books.
Rosen
will show how ‘the iconographical library which Kitaj thus assembled provides
the key to understanding how the Jewish concepts of “assimilation, Diaspora and
Homeland” intersected in his work’.
W. Benjamin ‘Unpacking
My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’
In
his essay ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’, Benjamin revels
in the power of collected books and their meanings which transcend their
content: ‘the library is a refuge, a home’.
Firstly, Rosen states
that Benjamin had an idiosyncratic approach to the purchase of books, and of
the books’ meanings. Rosen states that
Kitaj also had personal and profound attachment to the iconography that he brought
out of his own past.
And
both Benjamin and Kitaj valued the opportunity to bring new life to the past by
unpacking their library.
Secondly, Kitaj sought
to paint ‘the human clay’: to re-engage with ‘the depictive stream in art’
which Kitaj considered to have ebbed after the first quarter of the 20th
Century. Thus, Kitaj frequently returned
to the work of Degas and Cezanne.
Whilst
Kitaj revelled in the art of Cezanne and his contemporaries, he also sought to
be relevant to his own era, and to respond to Jewish concerns. In the 1970s Kitaj read to fully acquaint
himself with the Shoah: ‘the central experience both uniting and challenging
modern Jews’. Kitaj stated his ambition was
to: ‘do Cezanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz’.
Rosen
states that Kitaj’s aim was ‘the creation of a specifically Jewish art’ in a
‘broader category which he called Diasporist Art’.
Kitaj’s
definition of Diasporist Art in his manifesto of 1989 is that it is ‘one in
which a pariah people, an unpopular, stigmatised people, is taken up, pondered
in their dilemmas’. Kitaj included
others – ‘blacks, homosexuals, Palestinians, Armenians’ as diasporists, and he
asserted that Diasporist paintings were ‘modulated pictures of the mind at
work’. Kitaj asserted that the diasporist
‘scrounged and improvised’: that ‘there are no traditional Diasporist
procedures [for painting].’ But Kitaj did identify Piacsso’s ‘Guernica’ as an
antecedent of Diasporist art.
In
neither Kitaj’s 1989 manifesto, nor his second manifesto of 2007, did he make
clear how a Diasporist art of scrounging and improvisation should actually
work. Comparison with Benjamin sheds
some light on this question.
So, thirdly, Rosen
observes that Kitaj’s library of ‘assimilationist aesthetics’ functions in the
same way as Benjamin’s library – that is, as a ‘conceptual landscape and
refuge’ because a diaspora painting ‘feels like the last days in a transit
camp, with your thin mattress in a roll at the foot of the bed’.
Kitaj
explicitly identified the portability of painting with the ‘refugee’s suitcase’
and ‘the Ark of the Covenant’. As the
Ark embodied the hope of a future home, so, for Kitaj, painting became the hope
of security in the midst of the Diasporic life.
Rosen
writes that he will describe how Kitaj’s hope of a future home is expressed in
two of his paintings: ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ of 1983-84 and ‘Los Angeles No.1’ of
2000–01. Before doing this Rosen will
describe Kitaj’s life and the development of his artistic and Jewish identity.
Ronald Brooks
Kitaj
Kitaj
was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. His
mother – American-born – was of Russian-Jewish parents, and his father – who
left home when Kitaj was 2 years old – was Hungarian.
Kitaj’s
mother brought up her son without any Jewish education.
When
Kitaj was 9 his mother married a Viennese Jewish refugee – Dr Walter Kitaj –
whose name Ronald Brooks adopted. In
1941 the family moved to New York State and were joined there by Walter’s
mother – Helene – who had been able to escape from the Nazi occupation. Most of Helene’s family were murdered. Kitaj wrote that Helene’s arrival changed his
life.
In
the early 1950s Kitaj served as a merchant seaman, travelling around the
Caribbean and South America. After a
brief time in Vienna he returned to New York to study, and to marry Elsi
Roessler in 1953. He then served with
the United States Army. When he was
discharged he studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford,
by virtue of the G.I. Bill, and in 1959 he moved to the Royal College of Art in
London where he became friends with David Hockney.
Kitaj’s
first solo exhibition was in London in 1963: these were ‘collage-based
paintings with explanatory texts pasted directly onto the canvas’. By the mid-1960s Kitaj had dispensed with the
inscriptions and he painted in dry layers, presenting ‘a wide range of discreet
images “into scenes combining apparent spatial integration with a flagrant
illogicality”’.
‘If
Not, Not’ of 1975-76 is probably the best known of his works from this period
and from his whole oeuvre: ‘the gatehouse of Auschwitz ominously presides over
a swirl of imagery culled from Matisse, Gauguin and Giorgione’.
Kitaj’s
first wife died in 1969.
He
met the American painter Sandra Fisher in the 1970s and they married in the
1980s in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London.
In
the 1970s Kitaj began to draw from life and to focus on the human figure. In the ‘Human Clay’ exhibition at the Hayward
Gallery, Kitaj brought together other artists working in London at the time:
Michael Andrews; Frank Auerbach; Francis Bacon; Lucian Freud; David Hockney; and
Leon Kossoff. Together with Sandra
Fisher and himself, Kitaj proposed that these artists be known as the ‘School
of London’.
Auerbach,
Freud, Kossoff, Fisher and Kitaj were Jews, but of the five only Kitaj pursued
Jewishness as a ‘great obsession’ comparable with his pursuit of drawing the
human figure at this time.
Kitaj
stated that by the mid-1970s ‘relative silence about the Holocaust began to
break into print and my head would spin.
I slowly decided I wanted to be some kind of new Jew’. In the early 1980s Kitaj visited Israel for
the first time and he visited the Nazi concentration camp at Drancy. He also
devoured Jewish texts and histories, advised by Isaiah Berlin.
In
the 1980s Kitaj’s content and style changed: Jewish interests were introduced into
the subject-matter and his brushwork became thicker and looser. ‘There was organization without composition’
in Kitaj’s work at this time. This is
when ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ was painted.
Throughout
the 1980s Kitaj was self-consciously painting ‘Diasporist’ works. Kitaj’s first Diasporist manifesto of 1989
quotes from Philip Roth’s novel ‘The Counterlife’: ‘The poor bastard had Jew on
the brain’. In this year Kitaj suffered
a heart attack. This was an intimation
of mortality which led Kitaj to start to explore his ‘old-age style’ as Kitaj
referred to it: conte stick beneath thin colour.
In
1994 the Tate Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Kitaj’s work, and, as
referred to above, this sparked skirmishes between Kitaj and his critics. Kitaj’s wife died at this time, and in 1997 he
left the UK for Los Angeles. ‘Los
Angeles No.1’ was painted in this, last phase of Kitaj’s life.
Kitaj
died in 2007 in Los Angeles, just after publication of his Second Diasporist
Manifesto.
‘Amerika
(Baseball)’
When
Kitaj painted ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ in 1983-84 he was homesick for the land of
his birth.
Kitaj
took the title ‘Amerika’ from Kafka’s unfinished novel of the same name: it
begins by describing the enforced emigration of a young man from Europe to the
USA for personal, family reasons, and the man’s feelings upon arrival in New
York. In contrast, Kitaj had emigrated
from the USA of his own volition. Rosen
writes that despite these differences – or because of them – Kitaj projected
his own ‘Amerika’ onto Kafka – a man who never visited the USA.
Kitaj
wrote that his painting ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ enabled him to ‘register my
American self from afar’. The act of
painting was a partial cure for his homesickness: ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ was, for
Kitaj, a safe home that nurtured his Jewish identity.
Velazquez’s
painting of 1632 – 37 ‘Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar’ was the model for Kitaj as
he created the work. Rosen writes that
Kitaj placed ‘a distinctly American breed of royalty’ in what Kitaj called the
‘vast metaphoric field’ of the painting.
In the painting Kitaj is celebrating the pleasures and achievements of
his childhood.
In
the early 1980s David Hockney took Kitaj to the British Museum to show him a 70
foot long Chinese scroll dating from the 17th Century: this shows a royal
progress along the Yangtse River. KItaj
was stimulated to consider how to depict time in a painting. Rosen observes that baseball culture
comprises memories of past games, the progress of a game, and the records
achieved by individuals and teams: it is a culture that is a ‘process of
remembrance’; it is ‘saturated with memory’.
For Kitaj, baseball provides a ‘unique imaginative capacity for
reconnecting to the USA’.
The
‘aqueous blue sea’ of the baseball field in ‘Amerika (Baseball)’ is, for Kitaj,
an ocean at the heart of America.
Kitaj’s ocean-baseball field is the Atlantic across which diasporists
sail westwards in search of a new home, fleeing persecution. Kitaj wrote that as he worked on the painting
he came to see that he must leave the centre of the field open to evoke both
the danger of the sea, and the sea as the path of salvation described in
Exodus. But the waters of the Red Sea in Exodus eventually returned to their
usual place, signifying that even in the safety of the USA there may be still
be trauma for the diasporists. There is
no orderly play in Kitaj’s baseball painting: no ‘home plate’ and no
bases. The players are all equally at
risk. Rosen writes that ‘Amerika
(Baseball)’ is Kitaj’s meditation on homelessness.
‘Los Angeles
No.1’
As
stated already, the last stage of Kitaj’s life was in Los Angeles from 1997 to
2007. In his Second Diasporist Manifesto
(2007) Kitaj stated that even though the diasporist may one day settle down in
a place he/she calls home, nevertheless he/she will always be a diasporist.
The
sad circumstances of his departure from the UK made Kitaj feel as if he had
been exiled, despite the USA being his birthplace.
Kitaj
associated his late second wife Sandra with the Jewish notion of Shekhinah – the female presence of
God. He understood that, as in the
Talmud the Shekhinah followed the
people of God into exile, so Sandra was accompanying him in his exile to Los
Angeles – his personal Babylon.
Several
eminent Jews had settled in Los Angeles in the exile from Europe before and
after the start of the Second World War.
Kitaj wrote, of Los Angeles: ‘Hollywood is its own Diasporist
Manifesto’.
‘Los
Angeles No.1’ is derived from Cezanne’s paintings of bathers. Kitaj had been influenced by Cezanne since
the early 1970s. Cezanne’s ‘Large
Bathers II’ (c1900-06) in the National Gallery in London is the primary
influence on ‘Los Angeles No.1’. It is
Cezanne’s ‘aesthetic of unfinish’ that Kitaj aspires to. All three of Cezanne’s large ‘Bathers’ were
left by him ‘in ambiguous states of completion’, and Kafka left three
unfinished novels.
Kitaj
wrote about the way in which both Picasso and Matisse had been inspired by the Cezanne’s
‘aesthetic of unfinish’. For Kitaj the
sense of something not fully attained or completed echoed his sense of longing
for the Promised Land in which the diasporist would be satisfied in this life.
Kitaj’s
‘Los Angeles’ paintings are creations by him of an intimate place in which he
and Sandra can be at home. ‘Los Angeles
No.1’ shows Kitaj and Sandra in a state of embrace as if he is an earth-bound
angel and she is an angel destined for the heavenly realms. For Kitaj Los Angeles is a place literally
‘of the angels’, and his understanding is that the angels visit during the day
but depart at dusk: this is the scene painted in ‘Los Angeles No.1’.
Conclusion
Rosen
concludes with the question posed by Martin Buber in 1901 in the journal Ost und West: ‘Is Jewish art possible
today?’ Rosen refers back to the
Introduction to his book (see this Blog of 22nd October 2014): Buber
argued that in the absence of a Jewish ‘homeland’ Jewish art would not appear.
Rosen
argues that Kitaj serves as a counter to Buber.
Life in the diaspora is the subject above all that Jewish art should
address: ‘Kitaj follows the intuition of Benjamin’s book collector that it
belongs to the imagination to create a true home’. But Kitaj also insisted that an imagined
Jewish home could ‘exist alongside the existence of a “real” home’.
Rosen
argues that the more positive attitude of Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto reflected
the ‘generous diaspora’ that Kitaj found in Los Angeles. Even though Jews may have learned in times of
persecution to find their true home by means of the imagination, this learning
may also be applied in other ways. Thus,
the imagination may continue to construct a true homeland despite the presence
of the ‘problematic’ state of Israel. Rosen concludes that ‘the ability to construct a dwelling
place out of books or to draw boundaries out of paint, may – in its very
abstraction – provide an ethical counter-balance to the exigencies of political
life.’
