Kitaj, Ron B.

Kitaj, Ron B. (1932– ). American painter and graphic artist, active mainly in England, where he has been one of the most prominent figures of the Pop art movement. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied at the Cooper Union, New York, 1950–1, and the Academy in Vienna, 1951–2. After working as a merchant seaman and serving in the US Army in Germany he came to England on a GI scholarship, studying at the Ruskin School, Oxford, 1958–9, and the Royal College of Art, 1959–61. His wide cultural horizons gave him an influential position among his contemporaries at the RCA (they included David Hockney and Allen Jones), particularly in holding up his own preference for figuration in opposition to the prevailing abstraction. (He has continued to be seen as a champion of figurative art, stressing the importance of drawing and painting from the life, and in 1976 he organized an Arts Council exhibition of figurative art entitled ‘The Human Clay'.) Unlike the majority of Pop artists, Kitaj has had relatively little interest in the culture of the mass media and has evolved a multi-evocative pictorial language, deriving from a wide variety of visual and literary sources—indeed he has declared that he is not a Pop artist. Typically his work uses broad areas of flat colour within a strong linear framework, creating an effect somewhat akin to comic strips.

After a visit to Paris in 1975 Kitaj was inspired by the example of Degas to take up pastel, which he has used for much of his subsequent work. Late 19th-century French art has been a major source of inspiration, as has a preoccupation with his Jewish identity, and he has said: ‘I took it into my cosmopolitan head that I should attempt to do Cézanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz.’ In 1994 a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery, London, received strongly negative reviews; his wife, the American artist Sandra Fisher (1947–94), died of a brain haemorrhage only months later, and Kitaj caused much controversy by blaming this on his critics: ‘They tried to kill me and they got her instead.’