Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1932 Chagrin Falls, Ohio, USA

Died: 2007 Los Angeles, California, USA

Year of Migration to the UK: 1957

Other name/s: Ronald Brooks Kitaj, Ronald Brooks, Ron Kitaj

Biography

Artist R. B. Kitaj (né Ronald Brooks Benway) was born to a Hungarian father and American mother of Russian-Jewish parentage on 29 October 1932 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, USA. After his parents divorced, his mother married Walter Kitaj, a Viennese-Jewish refugee and research chemist, and Ronald took his stepfather's name. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, where he met his first wife, American Elsi Roessler, whom he married in 1952, before continuing his studies at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Afterwards, he served in the US Army, using his compensation from the G. I. Bill to further his studies in England: first at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958–59), and then at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London (1959–61), where his peers including David Hockney - who became a lifelong friend - as well as Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield, among others. This led some critics to categorise Kitaj as a pop artist, a label he rejected.

His work, often characterised by the use of obscure iconography, expressed his interest in history, cultural, social and political ideologies, as well as his conflicted Jewish-American identity. Kitaj's first solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, London (1963) featured a series of collage-based paintings with explanatory texts pasted directly onto the canvas. The show, which attracted both praise and criticism, marked the beginning of a difficult relationship with critics which was to last throughout Kitaj’s career. The Guardian described Kitaj as ‘an artist whose temperament one understands but whose messages are by no means clear and whose art, for all its impulsiveness, deliberately ignores the law of coherence on which the power of the arts has always depended’ (Newton 1963, p. 9), while the Observer noted that Kitaj ‘demands a totally new posture on the part of the spectator. We must shut our eyes, forget our laboriously trained susceptibilities and start again […] The images he uses […] are diffused across the canvas and held together by loose and highly personal rhythms of line and colour and space. The skill with which Kitaj transforms any object into his own language is extraordinary […] this exhibition will strongly affect the compositional shape of pictures to come' (Gosling 1963, p. 21). During the 1960s Kitaj taught at several London art schools, including Ealing Art College, Camberwell School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. After the sudden death of his first wife in 1969, he moved with his children to Los Angeles, where he taught for a year at the University of California and met his future second wife, painter Sandra Fisher. In 1976 Kitaj selected a group of works by British artists to form the core of an exhibition for the Arts Council of Great Britain, The Human Clay, held at the Hayward Gallery. In an accompanying essay, he described this stylistically diverse group of artists, all working in London at that time with a focus on the representation of the figure, as representing a 'School of London'. The members of the 'School' were gradually honed to an almost fixed 'core' of painters, including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Kitaj himself. Later in his career, he became more interested in his Jewish heritage, publishing his First Diasporist Manifesto in 1989, in which he discussed how his Jewish roots influenced the subject matter of his paintings.

Kitaj was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982 and to the Royal Academy in 1985, becoming the first American Royal Academician since John Singer Sargent. In 1995 he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and in 1996 he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France. Kitaj staged major retrospectives during his own lifetime, including at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC (1981) and Tate in London (1994). However, in the wake of the savage response to the latter by British art critics, and the sudden death of his second wife, Kitaj relocated permanently to Los Angeles in 1997, where he was debilitated by Parkinson's disease. In 2001 an important exhibition of his work was held at the National Gallery, London. Kitaj took his own life in Los Angeles, USA on 21 October 2007, just weeks before his 75th birthday. His death was followed by the publication of the Second Diasporist Manifesto by Yale University Press, and the celebration of the gift of his archive to the UCLA Library Special Collections with exhibitions at the Skirball Cultural Center and UCLA's Young Research Library. His work is represented in many public collections in the UK including the Ben Uri Collection, the Tate, and the V&A.

Related books

Tracy Bartley, Jonathan Griffin, R.B. Kitaj Collages and Prints 1964–75 (Los Angeles: LA Louver, 2019)
Barry Schwabsky and Keith Mayerson eds., R. B. Kitaj: The Exile at Home (New York: Marlborough Contemporary, 2017)
R. B. Kitaj, Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter: Autobiography (Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2017)
Jennifer Ramkalawon ed., Kitaj Prints: a Catalogue Raisonné (London: British Museum Press, 2013)
Aaron Rosen, 'Kitaj, Ronald Brooks', in H C G Matthew, Brian Harrison and Lawrence Goldman eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013)
David N. Myers, 'R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and the Jewish Archive', American Art, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 98-100
R. B. Kitaj, Second Diasporist Manifesto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
'R. B. Kitaj', The Times, 23 October 2007, p. 61
Carol Salus, 'R. B. Kitaj: The Tate Fiasco and Some Key History Paintings', Shofar, Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter 2007, pp. 63-81
Adam Phillips, R. B. Kitaj: How to Reach 72 in a Jewish Art, Including the Second Diasporist Manifesto Marking 45 Years with Marlborough (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2005)
Lee Friedlander, Kitaj (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2002)
James Aulich and John Lynch, Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R. B. Kitaj (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Jane Kinsman, The Prints of R. B. Kitaj (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994)
Richard Morphet ed., R. B. Kitaj: A Retrospective (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1994)
Kitaj: A Print Retrospective (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1994)
R. B. Kitaj: Graphics 1974–1994 (London: Marlborough Graphics Ltd., 1994)
Catherine Milner, 'The Arts', The Sunday Telegraph, 11 September 1994, p. 7
R. B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989)
John Ashbery ed., Kitaj: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986)
Marco Livingstone, 'Iconology as Theme in the Early Work of R. B. Kitaj', The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 122, No. 928, July 1980, pp. 488 and 490-497
R. B. Kitaj: Pastels and Drawings (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1980)
R. B. Kitaj Pictures (London: Marlborough Fine Arts Ltd., 1977)
R. B. Kitaj ed., The Human Clay: An Exhibition (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976)
R. B. Kitaj: Pictures (New York: Marlborough Gallery Inc, 1974)
R. B. Kitaj (London: Marlborough, 1970)
Werner Haftmann ed., R. B. Kitaj, Complete Graphics 1963–1969 (Munich: Galerie van de Loo, 1969)
R. B. Kitaj: Pictures With Commentary, Pictures Without Commentary (London: Malbrough Fine Art, 1963)
Michael Levey, 'Around the Galleries', Vol. 3, 1 May 1963, p. 72
Eric Newton, 'Kitaj Exhibition at the New London Gallery', The Guardian, 12 February 1963, p. 9
Nigel Gosling, 'The Shapes of the Sixties', The Observer, 10 February 1963, p. 21
Nevile Wallis, 'The New Images', The Spectator, 1 February 1963, p. 136

Public collections

Related organisations

Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (student)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (member)
Camberwell School of Art, London (teacher) (teacher)
Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (recipient) (recipient)
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York (student) (student)
Ealing College of Art (teacher) (teacher)
Golden Lion, Venice Biennale (recipient) (recipient)
Royal Academy of Arts, London (member) (member)
Royal College of Art, London (student) (student)
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, London (student) (student)
Slade School of Fine Art (teacher) (teacher)
University of California (teacher) (teacher)

Selected exhibitions

Figuration, group show, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2022)
Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2021)
All Too Human, Tate Britain, London (2018)
Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repitition, Manchester Art Gallery (2018)
Retrospective, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2015)
R. B. Kitaj: Obsessions, Pallant House Gallery, Chicester, United Kingdom (2013) and Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany (2012)
London Senses and Experiences, Ben Uri Gallery (2007)
Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters, National Gallery, London (2001)
The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum, Ben Uri Gallery (2001)
Sandra Three, Royal Academy, London (1997)
Jewish Artists in London Works from the Ben Uri Collection, Ben Uri Gallery (1997)
Retrospective, Tate, London (1994)
Discernible Traces? Contemporary Jewish Art Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1991)
Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, Ben Uri Gallery (1990)
Retrospective, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (1981)
Pictures with Commentary, Pictures Without Commentary, Marlborough New London Gallery, London (1963)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [R.B. Kitaj]