EXHIBIT CHAPTERS:

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 29, 1932, Ronald Brooks assumed the surname of Dr. Walter Kitaj, whom his mother, Jeanne Brooks, married in 1941. Raised in Ohio and Troy, New York, Kitaj was a strikingly handsome and talented high school student, already possessed of strong artistic and intellectual interests. Rather than follow the conventional route to college, Kitaj left home at the age of 17, joined the merchant marine and traveled the world for four years.

Over the course of his journeys, Kitaj studied in New York and Vienna before arriving in England in 1957. There he would remain for forty years, studying at Oxford and the Royal College of Art and going on to develop a reputation as an innovative and controversial painter. In 1982, he was awarded membership in the prestigious Royal Academy of Art, the first American admitted since John Singer Sargent.

Kitaj was also a probing intellectual and passionate bibliophile, whose friends in England included Isaiah Berlin, Lucian Freud, Ernst Gombrich, and David Hockney.

Following the suicide of his first wife, Elsi, he came to Los Angeles with his two children, Lem and Dominie, spending the 1970-1971 academic year teaching at UCLA. While in Los Angeles, he met the artist Sandra Fisher, whom he would soon encounter again in London and later marry in 1983. In the next year, their son, Max Kitaj, was born. Following Sandra's premature death in 1994, Kitaj decided to leave London. He came to Los Angeles in 1997, and spent the next decade painting and writing in his Westwood home, where he became increasingly consumed by the ''Jewish Question'' and the memory of Sandra.

Ceaselessly creative and vastly erudite, R. B. Kitaj embodied competing impulses: generous friendship and hermetic isolation, a deep passion for life and a recurrent fascination with death. On October 21, 2007, after struggling with health problems for several years, Kitaj took his life.