R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective : Exhibition Guide. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1994

Kitaj:

Rosa was a student work begun at the Royal College of Art. It looks naïve and graceless to me now. It arose out of meditation upon two of my grandmothers (there had been a third). It is about a historic murder, but it is really about murdering Jews, which is what brought all my grandmothers to America (fifty years apart). Grandma Rose is given as her veiled wraith, upper left, but it is grandmother Helene (whose two sisters, like Kafka’s three sisters and four of Freud’s five sisters were murdered in the same camps by the German/Austrians), who really prefigures Rosa L. (in my life). My grandmother was not political, but Helene and Rosa L. looked alike, dressed alike (Helene wore those long black skirts and boots in America until she died at 103), and came from the same cultivated milieu whose brilliance and disaster are now legend. Helene was born in Vienna the same year as Picasso, the year Disraeli died, when Dreyfus was an obscure captain on the French General Staff. I didn’t paint Rosa because I was attracted to her revolution. That God never failed me because I never worshipped in his church, but this painting has always seemed to failed to me, although I do ponder its terms now and again as if those terms have some breath left in them … I would never quite be free of what is called the lachrymose view of Jewish history.