EXHIBIT CHAPTERS:

In 1989, Kitaj published his First Diasporist Manifesto.  Its epigraph came from a line in The Counterlife, the novel of his friend Philip Roth “The poor bastard had Jew on his brain.”  Kitaj hinted that he too was beset by the same condition as this “poor bastard.” 

The First Diasporist Manifesto is a set of autobiographical meditations, marked by Kitaj’s wide-ranging reading and stream-of-consciousness style.  A recurrent goal of the book was to capture the unique cultural disposition of “the Diasporist (who) lives and paints in two or more societies at once,” and is engaged in a ceaseless effort to balance the universal and the particular.  Along with its obvious self-referential quality, the book had a certain archaic feel.  The very idea of “Diasporism”—and the world of the Central European heroes who populated the book—were vestiges of the past. 

Kitaj was undaunted by the taint of anachronism.  He was happiest in the company of his most trusted friends, his books and paintings.  This made for a rather reclusive life, especially in Los Angeles where Kitaj composed the Second Diasporist Manifesto (2007)—the opening line was “I’ve got Jew on the Brain.”  Notwithstanding the persistence of this “condition” in Kitaj, the second book had a much stronger, and rather unusual, theological undertone to it.  Not only did Kitaj frame his thoughts in 615 rambling and erudite aphorisms, gesturing to the canonical 613 commandments that an observant Jew is enjoined to perform, but he was also deeply immersed in the mystical world of the Kabbalah out of which he constructed a most idiosyncratic form of divine faith (see Exhibit Chapter 8).