I went to the friends view of the Kitaj show at Pallant House yesterday morning and I said I'd return to the theme of R.B. Kitaj this week so I will. When I first saw a Kitaj show he was a living artist and a major one. It is sad that I have now seen my first show where he is a late artist. The world seems a good deal less brighter today. I'm going to go back to the summer of 1994. Where are those who have gone before us?
To me, after over twenty years of being with his ideas and art on my bookshelf, I still love the work as much as I did on the first day I saw it on a wintery Saturday afternoon in Houbens bookshop in Richmond.
I'm not going to go into the 'Tate war' of 1994 to any great extent. I think that more than enough has been said about it by just about everybody. I do want to say this though. I went to that retrospective and loved it and I didn't see anybody else who visibly didn't. I feel that Richard Morphet is entirely correct in the comments he made regarding this. On the day I went I saw people not just wandering through but really closely looking, scrutinising, and devouring the paintings. I had lunch in the Morpeth Arms and then I went to the Marlborough Fine Art Kitaj exhibit and finished the day at the V&A where I saw the exhibition of Kitaj prints. I will say only one thing about the 'Tate war'. It takes guts for an serious and committed artist to make marks on a canvas because those marks are tracks of flesh and blood and spirit. The are imbued with the life of the person who made them and that person must be brave enough to stand by those marks and reveal them to the world. I have never seen a drawing or painting as good as anything as Kitaj at his best by any of the critics who savaged him and were not able to forgive what were actually very human flaws that appear to some degree in all of us. Often art historians and art critics do not spend as much time looking in the mirror as they do looking out of the window and maybe if they did their words would be kinder but have no less veracity.
From the first day I ever saw 'The Ohio Gang' I always believed Kitaj's paintings to be Marmite; you either love them or hate them. I do a bit of both. To me, a Kitaj painting at its best is still a strange symphony that combines the extremes of deep romanticism and the deepest clashes of atonal polyrhythmic discord. I don't know, but I can imagine that Kitaj was probably a bit like that himself and if he was then so what? Nobody was ever forced to read what he wrote or look at what he drew and painted. The world is made more colourful by passionate people and their intense passions and I think we can say that Kitaj was one of the most intense in this regard.
R.B. Kitaj, (1932-2007), The Ohio Gang, 1964,
Oil and Graphite on Canvas, 183 x 183 cm, The Museum of Modern Art New York, Philip Johnson Fund 1965.
Some passages in his painting make me cringe and I almost hear myself shouting 'No! Don't do that!' But they are corresponded with drawing of sublime beauty. It's the Rodinesque fragmentation, the surrealist bent for the uncanny that is so exciting. Just like his writing, the paintings make me want to find out more, look longer, look deeper, concentrate harder.
This week I will revisit Kitaj every day on this blog. This isn't going to be an assessment of his works. This is going to be a revisit to the things that have inspired me. A return journey after a very long trek.
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