EXHIBIT CHAPTERS:

Kitaj spent much of his last decade in a state of artistic and spiritual dialogue with his late wife, Sandra.  He painted and wrote about her extensively, hoping, as he declared in the Second Diasporist Manifesto, to “seek communion with her in pictures.  I can report some success, believe it or not.  We were together 26 plus yrs plus NOW in our Diasporist paintings called LOS ANGELES.  She’s back.”  This most curious assertion rested, in large measure, on Kitaj’s deep immersion in the thought of the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982).   Scholem imparted to Kitaj a conceptual vocabulary with which to “seek communion” with Sandra.  Thus, Sandra became, for Kitaj, the “Shekhinah”—the female side of God according to the Kabbalah.  This unabashed deification of his late wife reflected a new theological phase for the secular Kitaj, who was drawn to Albert Einstein’s self-description as a “deeply religious non-believer.”  Scholem’s manifold studies of Kabbalah also provided Kitaj with a theoretical basis for his impulse to write commentaries:

Infinite interpretability, infinite lights shine in every word, says Scholem on Kabbalah.  Fitful commentary
waits patiently by some of my pictures as it does in thousands of years of Jewish commentary.  Painter:
‘I’ll comment on my painting in writing and be damned!’  Critic: ‘No! I’ll comment but not you!’ 

To the end, Kitaj remained defiantly committed to commenting, inventing, and transgressing convention, albeit with a deep sense of belonging to past artistic, intellectual, and interpretive traditions.  It was this tension that inspired the creative genius of one of the great Jewish artists and thinkers of modern times.