EXHIBIT CHAPTERS:

Commencing his training at the Royal College of Art in 1959, the American expatriate held his first solo exhibition four years later (1963) at the Marlborough Gallery in London.  This was the age of Pop Art, with its conscious disregard for elitist art conventions and embrace of popular culture.  While drawn to the innovation and iconoclasm of Pop Art, Kitaj developed a style that, as one observer noted, “had no direct precedent.”   He would befriend a number of prominent artists including David Hockney, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, whom he counted as fellow members of the “School of London.” 

One of the distinguishing features of Kitaj’s style was the tendency to accompany the painting with written commentary.  Fittingly, Kitaj’s first Marlborough exhibition was called “Pictures with Commentary/Pictures without Commentary.”  The commentaries that stood alongside his paintings revealed, even at that early point, his debt to a deep and wildly autodidactic reading, with figures such as Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Aby Warburg surfacing as key inspirations.  The London Times reviewer in 1963 commented that Kitaj’s work “engages the whole intelligence,” demanding both an aesthetic and cognitive response. 

Kitaj, for his part, continued his voracious reading and was drawn more and more in the 1970s into the world of the great German-Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century, including such luminaries as Kafka, Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Gershom Scholem.  By the 1980s, Kitaj had become a self-consciously Jewish artist who saw himself, and his commentaries, as part of the long history of Jewish interpretative creativity.