R. B. Kitaj: Little Pictures by Marlborough Gallery

SANDRA

17 New York, 2008

R.B. KITAJ little pictures

40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 t. 212.541.4900 f. 212.541.4948 www.marlboroughgallery.com

Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

POETS

Above: R.B. Kitaj plays baseball at Berkeley, 1967. Opposite, clockwise from top: R.B. Kitajâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father; R.B. Kitaj and Creeley, c.1967-68; R.B. Kitaj, center, with two students, Academy of Fine Art, Vienna, c.1950; R.B. Kitaj with Grandfather Dave Brooks, Cleveland, Ohio c.1936.

Clockwise, from top: 1. CREELEY, 1966 oil on canvas 16 x 12 in., 40.6 x 30.5 cm 2. ED DORN, 1965 oil on canvas 16 x 12 in., 40.6 x 30.5 cm 3. HUGH MCDIARMID, 1965 oil on canvas 10 x 8 in., 25.4 x 20.3 cm 4. AUDEN, 1966 oil on canvas 14 x 10 in., 35.6 x 25.4 cm

5. MICHAEL MCCLURE, 1969 oil on canvas 10 x 8 in., 25.4 x 20.3 cm

6. COLLABORATOR, 1966 oil on canvas 9.5 x 7.75 in., 24.1 x 19.7 cm

Clockwise from top: London, 1975; Interior of R.B. Kitajâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio, Los Angeles, 2000, 2001; London, 1975. All photos Lee Friendlander.

BORN NEAR THE BANKS OF LAKE ERIE,

Kitaj became a habitué of the romantic Atlantic and Pacific shores and harbors of South America while sailing as a merchant seaman in his late teens. He hit dry land on the British Isles at the age of 25 and ended up making art there, first briefly in Oxford and then in London, for about 40 of the remaining 50 years of his life. All these ports of call left an indelible impression on his life and on his art, with details of these experiences – layered with his consumption of other art and literature – often specifically recalled in memory and given concrete visual form in his pictures. These shores he fragmented not into his ruins, but into haunting paintings, pastels and drawings in which a multiplicity of references brush up against each other, literally or metaphorically collaged together into puzzle-pictures that linger in the mind long after any encounter. In thrall to early modernist literature and to the history of art, from which he borrowed liberally in constructing his own images and compositions, Kitaj often made a point of escaping from the strictures of his own time while nevertheless having a profound influence on artists of his own and younger generations. During a period when many artists sought above all an immediacy of impact – from his own 1960s’ Pop generation through to the engagement with spectacle promoted by the likes of Jeff Koons in the 1980s and Damien Hirst a decade later – Kitaj preferred to lace his art with the slow burn of an incendiary device, so that its full devastating power would be manifested gradually over many viewings, sometimes even over many years. Drawing the spectator in with his dryly-brushed surfaces, beguiling draftsmanship and seductive colour, he provided both clues to the meanings of

his pictures and traps with which to ensnare the inattentive spectator. The more knowledge one brought to his work, the more prepared one was to follow up the references and the quotations (both artistic and literary), the more one was rewarded. Long after the artifacts made by many of his contemporaries have exhausted themselves and been drained of content, Kitaj’s paintings will continue to gnaw away at our curiosity and to yield their secrets. Always in a hurry to discover the wisdom of a lifetime’s experience, Kitaj was longing for an old-age style by the time I met him in 1975, when I was a postgraduate student researching his art. He was then only in his early forties. Ten years later, when I published the first monograph on his work, now in its third edition, he had moved towards a looser and more expressive paint application and introduced a more confessional and elegiac tone into pictures that reflected back on his early life. Having for so long wanted to will an old-age style into existence, he magically stumbled upon it during his last years in Los Angeles, when as a septuagenarian he finally set aside his lifetime’s habit of working slowly on complex pictures and instead quickly and impulsively produced many dozens of small paintings with the rash vigor and excitement that an artist might more usually expend on drawings. Having insisted in his middle years on the virtues of being ‘the least spontaneous’ of men, in thus giving in to spontaneity, speeding up his production as he contemplated the certainty of his own imminent death, he discovered the late style that had been eluding him: an art at once wholly original and entirely in character with his life’s work.

MARCO LIVINGSTONE 11

7. ROBERT KELLY, 1970 oil on canvas 12 x 9 in., 30.5 x 22.9 cm

8. SELF-PORTRAIT 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

18 January 2008 Recently, sitting in front of the CĂŠzanne bathers in the National Gallery I thought of Kitaj, of the search of the painter for what is unknowable, and how Kitaj, in his own search, became a painter of our time. Leon Kossoff

R.B. Kitaj in his studion, Lodon, 1993. Photo Lee Friedlander.

9. LOOKING TO SEE (K’S FIRST BOOK 1912), 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

10. TECHNICOLOR SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

11. BAHAMA SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

12. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

13. TECHNICOLOR POET, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

14. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 18

15. JEWISH BATHERS, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

16. NEGRITUDE (IMPROV IN CASSEL BROWN), 2005 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

R.B. KITAJ WAS THE ARCHETYPAL AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL IN LONDON – an artist completely

inside his time and place, yet forever outside it.

I remember his art from long before I knew him. Indeed his modern art on show at the Marlborough Gallery - close by Agnews, where I had my first job back in the mid-sixties - was one of the first places I ran into modern art at all. When I close my eyes, I see before me those colourful, intriguing, almost conceptual, screen prints based on Penguin book covers, the kind he was later to disown as juvenilia. Like his dear, younger friend from his Royal College days, David Hockney, he was at the very epicentre of the London Pop-Art scene but, like David Hockney, never entirely comfortable within it. Later, in 1969, as a student in Berlin, one of the then contemporary paintings that I remember most was his strange, almost surreal painting entitled Erie Shore 1966 that hung prominently in the Mies Van der Rohe Nationalgalerie. It was a monumental, scarlet painting dominated by two overwhelming, white, sinister-looking figures – a Red Cross nurse staring intently at a tall Uncle Sam figure in red and white striped trousers. I am not sure whether R.B. ever wrote one of his notorious and fascinating prefaces to this painting. I say notorious, as it was these prefaces that, for reasons that still mystify me, were ferociously attacked by the London critics at the time of his 1994 grand and memorable retrospective. To me these were unjust criticisms that in his eyes caused the death of his beloved, beautiful, young wife, Sandra, and were to cause him to pack his bags and leave with his young son for Los Angeles, where he was to live out his days as a hermit.

For, after all, was he not the inventor of the concept of the School of London? In its time it was a derided concept but is one that has stuck and long prefigured the YBA’s of the nineties. It is the world of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, but also of himself, David Hockney and others, whose values are in no small part centred on the unfashionable arts of drawing and painting from life, as well as from the imagination. Like all his friends and colleagues, living and dead, Cézanne and Bomberg were always of that company; each had his own hermetic universe, expressed in endless drawing, as well as in painting itself. In R.B.’s case it was the European Holocaust and its cultural consequences that increasingly dominated his painting and art and gave rise to an extraordinary series of images that now urgently await reassessment. One that I favour is the surreal, yet all too real landscape called If Not, Not that belongs to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The agitated landscape, reminiscent of Giorgione’s Tempesta is dominated by a depiction of the gatehouse of Auschwitz, standing for Kitaj as a symbol of the destruction of Middle European Kulchur [pace Ezra Pound] as he understood it, and which was never to exist again. From his own perspective R.B. had reason enough justifiably to become depressive, even misanthropic. But he had another side to him, a huge capacity for love and friendship, by which I too had the privilege of being touched. Now that he is no longer, I wish I had been with him more, but his outstanding, hard-won art, to use his own phrase, must and will continue to illuminate the world with his own set of complex visual truths and beauties.

NORMAN ROSENTHAL LONDON MARCH 2008

17. HAMMER CEZANNE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

Most painters, including (because of their great influence) many of the greatest, are subsumed, partly, in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;developmentâ&#x20AC;? of art. Others are so odd and indigestible - Pontormo? Elsheimer? perhaps even El Greco? - as to leave an impression of unanchored individuality. Kitaj might be an artist of the latter sort. Intensity fluctuates; work goes up and down over a lifetime. As far as I can judge from reproduction, Kitaj finished on a high. Frank Auerbach January 2008 22

Clockwise from Top: Lucian Freud painting Kitajâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portrait, 1996 (photo by Kitaj); Kitaj Studio window, Los Angeles; R.B. Kitaj and Frank Auerbach, 1974 (photo by Sandra Fisher); Francis Bacon and R.B. Kitaj at Elm Park Road, London (photo by Sandra Fisher).

18. YELLOW BIKINI, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

19. MIKHOELS, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Duncan and Jess

RBK and Lee Friedlander

THE PATHS OF RONALD BROOKS KITAJ’S LIFE…and my own of the same

duration have taken vastly different turns. But thirty-one years ago, in one of life’s coincidences, our paths intersected and a friendship began. In these ensuing years, along with the usual activities of friendship—visits, shared meals, shared news, letters, postcards, telephone conversations—something else, unplanned, unusual, has connected Kitaj and me. We have both been for many years, separately, subjects of my husband Lee Friedlander’s ongoing photographic curiosity and study. As Lee puts it: “You and Ron are my serial photography.” (When we all first met, Lee and I called him Ron, and that comes naturally to us despite our knowing he now prefers Kitaj.) …Lee’s pictures of Kitaj begin in Los Angeles in 1970 … From the start, Lee remarked how Kitaj was a most un-self-conscious subject, completely uninhibited before the camera. It didn’t seem to stop his train of thought, his look, his conversation. He never seemed to pose himself. Lee found this fascinating. (Years later, Kitaj’s second wife, Sandra Fisher, would tell Lee that this was not exactly the case, that R.B., as she called him, was always aware of being photographed, and Kitaj once wrote that he felt himself to be a participant in Lee’s photographing of him. Yet Lee liked his looseness as a subject.)

... In 1970 Kitaj turned thirty-seven. Tall, with straight-line posture, he had a strong, intelligent face, thick curly hair. Definitely a very attractive man, he gave off a special aura. Movie star, maybe? Lee did say once at this time that he could be related to a young Marlon Brando. Sometime after Kitaj and the children returned to London, Sandra, an American painter who had been introduced to him in L.A. during his teaching year there, reentered his life. After a brief courtship, she moved in with him and together they created a life that included caring for Lem and Dominie and also time for their respective work… During these years, the mid-1970s, I would from time to time go with Lee to visit Kitaj and Sandra in London. For me, our visits were not only a warm exchange among friends, but a fascinating immersion into Kitaj’s personal and unique intelligence. I once told Lee after one of our long teas with Kitaj that I felt as if I had just attended a wonderful seminar. And I did not mean that in any pedantic way. Kitaj is, I feel, as loose and open a conversationalist as he was photographic subject for Lee. His thoughts on the history of art, on books that moved him, on favorite European museums, old bookshops, and brothels he had visited, on human nature, in general and specifically, he connected in his own way and delivered them with clarity and humor. It was marvelous to listen to him. Whenever I notice my copies of The Hermit of Peking or The Quest for Corvo on my bookshelf, I think of Kitaj, who first told me about them.

EXCERPT FROM RON AND LEE BY MARIA FRIEDLANDER

R.B. Kitaj with Sandra Fisher, London, 1984. Photo Lee Friendlander. Opposite: R.B. Kitaj and Lee Friendlander, c. 1975.

Opposite 20. A MODERN POTATO-EATERS, 2006-2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm 21. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

22. THE ROAD TO BUENOS AIRES, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

23. BAHAMA SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

24. Above WRAPPING-PAPER SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm 25. Left SELF-PORTRAIT ARMATURE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

26. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 27. MAX LIEBERMANN, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

28. MARRIAGE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm

29. DESPAIR, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

30. KOSSOFF AFTER AUERBACH, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

31. AFTER GIOTTO, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

32. ENVY AFTER GIOTTO, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

33. THE LETTER, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

34. LOVERS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

35. ROTHKO ISLAND, 2006 oil on canvas 24 x 12 in., 61 x 30.5 cm

WHEN KITAJ LEFT LONDON

for Los Angeles after a residence of nearly forty years the intellectual life of the city was visibly diminished by the loss of an artist and polemicist of unusual moral force. His withdrawal, which left us all so much the poorer, was a form of revenge on a society which had done him such unprovoked wrong. Understandably, Kitaj could not fathom the hostility of some of the critical responses to his retrospective at Tate in 1994. But he was also understandably inconsolable in his sorrow at the early and unexpected death of his cherished wife, Sandra. In his early years in Los Angeles that anger and sorrow continued to fuel his letters and his writings and seemingly, at times, his every action as an artist. However, in recent years an approach to painting combining his love of drawing with a new freedom in the application of dry paint to canvas has given his work crackling energy. Apparently dashed off, but in truth the product of much deliberation, this series of small canvases with heads, nudes, quotations from earlier paintings and from the masters whom he so revered can properly be regarded as a ‘late style’. Visiting the studio a few weeks before his death, I was moved by

the continuing compassion and suffering of a man whose emotions and convictions were always on or close to the surface. I encountered an artist looking into himself and drawing on his long appreciation of the masters of the nineteenth century, especially Degas and Cezanne, but increasingly van Gogh. In these intense works he was able to fuse drawing, expression and colour, in cameos of the traumas of his own life and of the Jewish Diaspora. His pain, but also his courage in confronting his position informs this whole body of work. These small paintings have the same incisive and tough rigour as his best paintings of the previous forty years and reflect his admiration for other artists, like David Bomberg, who had been overlooked by critics but not by fellow painters. What struck me, viewing the paintings one by one on the easel in the studio, was Kitaj’s relentless determination to convey the drama of individual and collective existence at the end of the twentieth century. He did not fail. SIR NICHOLAS SEROTA DIRECTOR, TATE

36. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

37. L.A. SPLEEN, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

38. ARABS AND JEWS (MAIMONIDES), 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

39. PISSARRO, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm 43

40. LOVERS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

41. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

42. MY FATHER, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm

43. SHEKHINA (SANDRA), 2006 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm

44. CONVERSATION, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

THE ARRIVAL OF A LETTER OR A POSTCARD

from Kitaj was always an event, beginning with the quality of his penmanship, the words imprinted on the page very precisely, almost as if they were engraved. Kitaj was a connector, an engager, both in the richness of the social world that he inhabited and in the complexity of the themes that he embraced in his painting. There were so many cities to explore, so many faces to draw, so many literary and philosophic ideas to be reimagined as visual incidents and pictorial narratives. Avidity was Kitaj’s essential, abiding subject. He was awestruck by the masterworks in the museums. He embraced the modern world as a spectacle that invited—indeed, demanded--understanding. The cacophonous, collaged nature of many of his finest canvases was not a compositional strategy but a natural inclination, an inevitability. He could not do without that wild, precipitous onslaught of imagery. No artist of our time has drawn men and women who are more fiercely, erotically alive. If Kitaj fought against the idea that less is more, it was because he loved hyperbole, loved theatricality, and quite simply refused to believe that these were not among the essential characteristics of twentieth-century art. For Kitaj, Cézanne and Matisse and even Mondrian were storytellers, fabulists. In the days following Kitaj’s death I found myself thinking about one of his most tightly-packed paintings, the enthralling Cecil Court, London WC2 (The Refugees). The setting is the little street off Charing Cross Road where old books have been sold for generations. And here Kitaj has gathered a Dickensian cast of characters, while the artist himself, the dreamer at the center of the dream, reclines on a modernist chaise, reading a book, thinking his thoughts. In Cecil Court, painted in the 1980s, Kitaj is middle-aged, a figure at once vigorous and aloof. Of course there are many other impressions of Kitaj that have come to mind in the months since his death. I have thought about visiting the Sickert retrospective at the Royal Academy with him, and about sitting at the kitchen table in Westwood. I have looked again at photographs from his early years, when he was a swaggeringly handsome figure, the invincible young American. Then there are the recent self-portraits, in which he is a comic presence, an absurdly aging marionette. But it is to Cecil Court that I return, because in the wake of Kitaj’s death that reclining portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man suggests not relaxation or contemplation but rather the recumbent figures carved on medieval tombs. How strange it is that Kitaj is no longer with us in the midst of the maelstrom, thinking his inimitable thoughts and painting his gloriously crazy paintings.

CECIL COURT, LONDON WC2 (THE REFUGEES), 1983-4 oil on canvas 72 x 72 in., 183 x 183 cm Tate Gallery, London

JED PERL

45. L.W., 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

46. SMF, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

47. AUTHOR OF THE ZOHAR, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

48. BUT WHAT SHE SAID, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

50. POET, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

49. G. SCHOLEM, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

51. SELF-PORTRAIT TALKING, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 54

KITAJ WORKED A MIRACLE: HE MADE CULTURE INTO ART. Usually the metamorphosis moves the other way,

as art is demoted into culture, so as to annul its explosive energies and prepare it for the perdition of the market. Kitaj pressed the dialectic of art and culture all the way to its conclusion: he extracted art that was imprisoned within culture, liberated it, refreshed its force, returned it to use. He was a modernist who never felt the burden of the past. The past made Kitaj free, even wild. He loved the chain, and wanted only his own place within it. He was stimulated by traditions the way other painters were stimulated by mountains and by seas, with the same enlivening sensation of immensity. The ferocity of his observation of paintings—in his hot yellow studio by the pool you felt as if you were housed in a colossal art book—used to remind me of the stories of his beloved Cezanne sitting before his easel for hours in the sun and looking. As for books, they were for Kitaj what cherries were for Chardin and bottles were for Morandi: the most elementary inspirations for perception and figuration. He depicted writers and scholars as brazenly as Goya depicted women. I once heard him remark that he hated flowers, unaware that he was echoing an ancient rabbinical warning against being seduced away from study by an impression of nature, but the quotations in his pictures quiver gorgeously like Redon’s petals, the testimonies of a profound arousal. References, references: they are the terms of his originality. They lead to the essence, not away from it. “Jews may write into their pictures as well”, he proclaimed, “like a Talmud page”. Kitaj wrote paintings; or better, he drew his Talmud page—the Piazzetta of the Jews!—and painted it, too. The “literariness” that some people deplored in his pictures—it is so outrageous, now, to have intellectual expectations of art —never constrained or distracted his astounding hand. Kitaj’s mastery always exceeded his eccentricity. And his eccentricity was owed chiefly to his purity. (There are such things.) He was defiantly, almost pornographically unironic, and completely unrelenting about the seriousness of his intentions. In his later years this sometimes made him seem childlike, or monkish—as if he had come out the other side of civilization, where he could enjoy his flamboyant visions without any peril of primitivism. “Depart this world still studying, mainly Art and Jews”. At this he succeeded. “Depart this world with few traces”. At this he failed. I hope that he has met the Shekhina, and that it is Sandra. I know better, of course; but I am prepared, for a little while, out of love and out of grief, to forget what I know. Where there is no forgetting, there is no remembering.

52. FLOWER CRUCIFIX, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

LEON WIESELTIER

53. STILL LIFE, 2006-2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

R.B. Kitaj with Max, Lem, and his grandsons, Los Angeles, 2001. Photo Lee Friedlander.

54. FASTING - ARTIST, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

55. MICKEY SABBATH, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

56. AFTER BOMBERG’S LAST SELF-PORTRAIT, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

57. THE HUNTER GRACCHUS, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

R.B. Kitajâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home, Los Angeles: Yellow Studio. Opposite: Library; Cezanne Room. Photos Robert Wedemeyer.

58. AFTER A BOMBERG NUDE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

59. HOLLYWOOD HILLS, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

60. UNTITLED, 2006 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in., 61 x 61 cm

61. ACTRESS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm

62. CADMIUM GREEN NUDE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

63. MARCEL (YOUNG PROUST), 2006 oil on canvas 12 1/8 x 12 1/8 in., 30.8 x 30.8 cm

64. BLACK DOG 2006-07 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

65. SPINOZA, 2006 oil on canvas 9 x 12 in., 22.9 x 30.5 cm

66. SIGMUND FREUD, 2007 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm

We met at UCLA in June 1999 when Kitaj came to lecture on, no surprise, the idea of Jewish art. Thereafter, we remained in close contact. I would come to his house every month or so at the agreed upon 4:30 hour. We would sip that rather challenging diet cranberry juice and range widely from books to politics to art to the Jewish condition. I tended to listen more often than not, because Kitaj, for all his innate shyness and cultivated sense of alienation, was both wonderfully warm and a first-class conversationalist. In between visits, Kitaj might send a postcard in that perfect block-letter handwriting of his (red felt marker, as always), seeking illumination on a particular point of Jewish history or further bibliographic references.

MOST KNEW KITAJ AS A GREAT,

idiosyncratic, and controversial painter. I knew that Kitaj less well than his alter ego—the Jewish intellectual, of which he was one of the last great exemplars. Erudite and vastly read in the ways of the autodidact, Kitaj nurtured a thirty-year obsession with the Jewish Question. He studied the works of his inspirational heroes—Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Scholem—with the passion and diligence of a yeshiva student. He wrote commentaries to his paintings with the frequency and intensity of a rabbinical scholar. And via Scholem, he pored over the Kabbalah, both to find warrant for his own interpretive audacity and to seek a path of communion—devekut in the language of the Jewish mystics— with his beloved Shekhinah, Sandra. Very few figures in modern Jewish culture would attempt such a project. It was owing to Kitaj’s unique mix of genius and hutzpah that he could and did.

Above: 67. AFTER CIMABUE, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Somewhere in the course of our many conversations, we began to talk about the idea of his donating his papers to UCLA. Kitaj was his own best archivist, obsessive in preserving every scrap of writing by or about him, including boxes full of doodles and unvarnished thoughts from his early morning sessions at the Coffee Bean in Westwood Village. We both imagined this rich trove of papers as the foundation of an Archive of Jewish Culture at UCLA, a testament to the very spirit of alienated genius that Kitaj so admired—and himself embodied. I had always expected that Kitaj would be there to celebrate the formal inauguration of the Archive. That he is not pains me every single day. I’ve been deprived of the one conversation partner I had who could move in an instant from discussing the 17th-century false messiah, Shabtai Zevi, to Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath to the Cleveland Indians’ C. C. Sabathia. My wife, Nomi, and I have been deprived of a dear friend who always signed off on the phone with the touching “love you guys both.” And the world has been deprived of a painter, writer, and thinker of supreme talent who, for all of the darkness that hovered above him, brought immense stimulation, humor, and joy to those who were privileged to know him.

DAVID N. MYERS PROFESSOR OF JEWISH HISTORY AND DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES AT UCLA

68. JEWISH SCREAM, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

69. HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM, 2006 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm

Clockwise, from top: 70. CLEM GREENBERG, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 71. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 8 x 8 in., 20.3 x 20.3 cm 72. UNTITLED, UNFINISHED oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Opposite: 73. RUNNING TO DEATH, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

74. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

75. BELLE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

76. PAINTING SANDRA, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

THOUGH SUDDENLY AND SHOCKINGLY KITAJ IS NO LONGER HERE, his art and his writing ensure he will remain unusually close, not only to those who knew him but far into the future. All significant artists create a world the viewer can enter, imaginatively, intellectually and sensuously. The world Kitaj created is notably rich in all three ways and his work gives access to it with great immediacy. This is so whether the subject is basic experiences of life, love, and death, universally understood, or arcana that need study fully to be comprehended yet which, in his hands, communicate from the first a compelling atmosphere peculiarly Kitaj’s own. Though his work goes to both extremes, at each he engages the viewer directly in his mindset, disclosing a setting, a story and its context, with the talent of a great director. Insistent fact alternates (or fuses) with exuberant fiction. His obsessions with genius, history, identity and injustice yield original and telling results. His portraiture is incisive, not least when a key (and natural) subject is himself. Kitaj’s urgency - of feeling, of idea, of touch - invests all his pictures with extraordinary vitality. Each is a spur to exploration, whether of lives, of issues or of the visions of other artists and other arts. His late art offered, increasingly, an infectious example of the rich potential of the simplest means. The very elements of painting and of drawing are rawly exposed, testifying how expressive mark, gesture and colour can be, each in its own right but all the more so in combination. Kitaj’s writing is a parallel resource. He savoured words and used them with abruptness, economy and subtlety, all at the same time. Kitaj suffered sorely, but even in works filled with anguish - let alone in the many that are openly joyous - he celebrated humanity and creativity. Whether grave or humorous, powerful or lyrical, his generous, inventive and distinctive art has a great future.

RICHARD MORPHET

77. TZARA AFTER GIACOMETTI, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

79. AZO RED NUDE, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

78. JERUSALEM AFTER BOMBERG, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

80. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 77

81. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 82. A.E., 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

83. SELF-PORTRAIT MASK, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 84. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

85. 1906, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

R.B Kitaj was a friend and colleague for almost fifty years. A unique marvelous artist who thought content more important than form, yet knew they were one. Perverse, argumentative and thoughtful in his art and his life. I loved him.

80 David Hockney + RB Kitaj on the Pont des Arts, 1973

David Hockney

LIST OF WORK 29. DESPAIR, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

1. CREELEY, 1966 oil on canvas 16 x 12 in., 40.6 x 30.5 cm

15. JEWISH BATHERS, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

2. ED DORN, 1965 oil on canvas 16 x 12 in., 40.6 x 30.5 cm

16. NEGRITUDE (IMPROV IN CASSEL BROWN), 2005 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

30. KOSSOFF AFTER AUERBACH, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

3. HUGH MCDIARMID, 1965 oil on canvas 10 x 8 in., 25.4 x 20.3 cm

17. HAMMER CEZANNE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

31. AFTER GIOTTO, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

4. AUDEN, 1966 oil on canvas 14 x 10 in., 35.6 x 25.4 cm

18. YELLOW BIKINI, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

5. MICHAEL MCCLURE, 1969 oil on canvas 10 x 8 in., 25.4 x 20.3 cm

19. MIKHOELS, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

6. COLLABORATOR, 1966 oil on canvas 9.5 x 7.75 in., 24.1 x 19.7 cm

20. A MODERN POTATO-EATERS, 2006-2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

7. ROBERT KELLY, 1970 oil on canvas 12 x 9 in., 30.5 x 22.9 cm

21. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

8. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

22. THE ROAD TO BUENOS AIRES, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

9. LOOKING TO SEE (K’S FIRST BOOK 1912), 2007 23. BAHAMA SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 10. TECHNICOLOR SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

24. Above WRAPPING-PAPER SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

11. BAHAMA SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

25. Left SELF-PORTRAIT ARMATURE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

12. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

26. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

13. TECHNICOLOR POET, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

27. MAX LIEBERMANN, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

14. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

28. MARRIAGE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm

32. ENVY AFTER GIOTTO, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 33. THE LETTER, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 34. LOVERS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 35. ROTHKO ISLAND, 2006 oil on canvas 24 x 12 in., 61 x 30.5 cm 36. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 37. L.A. SPLEEN, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 38. ARABS AND JEWS (MAIMONIDES), 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm 39. PISSARRO, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm 40. LOVERS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm 81

41. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm 42. MY FATHER, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm 43. SHEKHINA (SANDRA), 2006 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm 44. CONVERSATION, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm 45. L.W., 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 46. SMF, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 47. AUTHOR OF THE ZOHAR, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 48. BUT WHAT SHE SAID, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 49. G. SCHOLEM, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 50. POET, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 51. SELF-PORTRAIT TALKING, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

52. FLOWER CRUCIFIX, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 53. STILL LIFE, 2006-2007 oil on canvas 12 x 18 in., 30.5 x 45.7 cm

54. FASTING - ARTIST, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 55. MICKEY SABBATH, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 56. AFTER BOMBERG’S LAST SELF-PORTRAIT, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 82

57. THE HUNTER GRACCHUS, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm

58. AFTER A BOMBERG NUDE, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 59. HOLLYWOOD HILLS, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 60. UNTITLED, 2006 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in., 61 x 61 cm 61. ACTRESS, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 18 in., 45.7 x 45.7 cm 62. CADMIUM GREEN NUDE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 45.7 x 30.5 cm

72. UNTITLED, UNFINISHED oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 73. RUNNING TO DEATH, 2006 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 74. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 75. BELLE, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 76. PAINTING SANDRA, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 77. TZARA AFTER GIACOMETTI, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 78. JERUSALEM AFTER BOMBERG, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

63. MARCEL WAS YOUNG PROUST, 2006 oil on canvas 12.125 x 12.125 in., 30.8 x 30.8 cm

79. AZO RED NUDE, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

64. BLACK DOG, 2006-07 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in. 5.7 x 30.5 cm

80. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

65. SPINOZA, 2006 oil on canvas 9 x 12 in., 22.9 x 30.5 cm 66. SIGMUND FREUD, 2007 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm 67. AFTER CIMABUE, 2006 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 68. JEWISH SCREAM, 2007 oil on canvas 18 x 12 in., 45.7 x 30.5 cm 69. HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM, 2006 oil on canvas 14 x 11 in., 35.6 x 27.9 cm 70. CLEM GREENBERG, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 71. UNTITLED, 2007 oil on canvas 8 x 8 in., 20.3 x 20.3 cm

81. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 82. A.E., 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 83. SELF-PORTRAIT MASK, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 84. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm 85. 1906, 2007 oil on canvas 12 x 12 in., 30.5 x 30.5 cm

R.B. KITAJ (1932-2007) 1932 1941

R. B. Kitaj is born as Ronald Brooks in Cleveland, Ohio Kitaj’s mother, Jeanne Brooks, the daughter of Russian Jews, marries for the second time. Her husband is Dr. Walter Kitaj, a Viennese Jew

1949 First sailing as a merchant seaman 1950-51 Attends Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York

1951-54 Further travels as a seaman

Studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna

1956-58 U.S. Army of Occupation, AFCE HQ (Armed Forces Central Europe)

1957-59 Ruskin School of Drawing, University of Oxford, where

he attends lectures by Edgar Wind and Douglas Cooper

1959-61 Royal College of Art, London

Forms lasting friendship with David Hockney

1962-65 Settles in London and teaches at Camberwell and the Slade

1970-71 Teaches at UCLA. Meets Sandra Fisher 1976 Curates the polemical exhibition The Human Clay at

the Hayward Gallery in London and coins the loose term ‘The School of London’, to describe the various London-based artists devoted to representations of the figure

1978-79 Artist in residence at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Returns to London

1980 Selects The Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National

1999

Exhibition at the National Gallery, London: Kitaj In The Aura of Cézanne And Other Masters

2001 2004 2007

Begins to write his Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter

Gallery, London

1981-82 Lives and works in Paris for a year 1982 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1983 Marries his second wife, American artist Sandra Fisher 1985 Elected to the Royal Academy 1989 Published First Diasporist Manifesto, translated into Major retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London Hostile and personal attacks from some critics spark what Kitaj has called the “Tate War” Sudden death of Sandra Fisher at the age of 47

1994-95 The retrospective exhibition is shown at the Metro-

politan Museum of Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

1985-95 Five Honorary Doctorate 1995 Wins the Golden Lion at la Biennale di Venezia 1996 Awarded Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France

Commissioned portrait of Mahler for Vienna Opera Commissioned portrait of President Bill Clinton for University College, Oxford

1997

Following the death of his wife and feeling that London was also now dead for him, Kitaj returns to live in the United States, with Max, his young son by Sandra. They settle in Los Angeles among sons and grandsons

Yale University Press publishes Second Diasporist Manifesto. Kitaj dies at his home in Los Angeles a week before his 75th birthday.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITONS 1963

R.B. Kitaj: Pictures with Commentary Pictures without Commentary, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, England

1965

R.B. Kitaj: Paintings, Marlborough Gerson Gallery, New York, New York R.B. Kitaj: Paintings and Prints, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

1967

Work of Ron Kitaj, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Kitaj: Tekeningen en Seriegrafiën, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands R.B. Kitaj, University of California, Berkeley, California

1969

R.B. Kitaj: Complete Graphics 1963 1969, Galerie Mikro, Berlin, Germany; traveled to Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; Galerie van de Loo, Munich, Germany; Galerie Niepel, Düsseldorf, Germany

1970

R. B. Kitaj, Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lübeck, Germany; traveled to Städtisches Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany; Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Marlborough New London Gallery, London, England

German and Hungarian

1994

Lectures at UCLA and USC

1971 1973

Kitaj, Graphics Gallery, San Francisco, California

1974

R.B. Kitaj: Pictures, Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York

2002

R. B. Kitaj: A Survey of his Printmaking 1964-2001, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, England

1975

R.B. Kitaj: Pictures, New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

2003

R.B. Kitaj: Lithographs, Petersburg Press, New York, New York

R. B. Kitaj: Los Angeles Pictures 1998-2003, L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California

2004

1976

R.B. Kitaj : The rash Act A, B1, B1, B3 , Petersburg Press, New York, New York R.B. Kitaj: Mala Galerija, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia

Kitaj: Retrato de un Hispanista, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

2005

R.B. Kitaj: How To Reach 72 In A Jewish Art, Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York

1977

R.B. Kitaj: Graphics, Icon Gallery, Birmingham, England

2007

R.B. Kitaj: Pictures/Bilder, Marlborough Fine Art, London, England; traveled to Marlborough Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland

R.B Kitaj: Passion and Memory: Jewish Works from his Personal Collection, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California

1978

R.B. Kitaj, Beaumont May Gallery, Hopkins Center, Hanover, New Hampshire

Gallery, London,

R.B. Kitaj: In Our Time, Mappenwerk und Grafik aus den Jahren 1969 1973, Amerika Haus, Berlin, Germany

R.B. Kitaj, FIAC, Grand Palais, Paris, France

1979

R.B. Kitaj: Fifty Drawings and Pastels, Six Oil Paintings, Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York

1980

Kitaj: Pastels and Drawings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, England

1981

R. B. Kitaj, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; traveled to Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany

1985

R.B. Kitaj, Marlborough Fine Art, London, England

1986

R.B. Kitaj, Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York

1990-91 R.B. Kitaj: Mahler Becomes Politics, Beisbol, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany

1994-95 R.B. Kitaj: Recent Pictures, Marlborough Fine Art, London, England

Retrospective Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London, England; traveled to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

1996

Sandra Two, FIAC, Espace Eiffel Branly, Paris, France

1998

R.B. Kitaj: An American in Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; traveled to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna, Austria; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany

2000

R.B. Kitaj: How To Reach 67 in Jewish Art, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain; traveled to Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York

2001-02 Kitaj: In the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters, National England

Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R. B. Kitaj in Word and Image, organized by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, Charles E. Young Research Library, Los Angeles, California

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Royal College of Art, London, England

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, Silkeborg, Denmark

Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas Arts Council of England, London, England Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England British Council, London, England British Museum, London, England Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Chillida Foundation, Hernani, Spain Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Potsdam, Germany Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Swindon, England Tate Modern, London, England Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio University College, Oxford, England Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna, Austria Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain Detroit Historical Museum, Detroit, Michigan Fondation du Judaisme Française, Paris, France Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, England Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark Ludwig Collection, Aix-la-Chapelle, France The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island

PRIZES AND HONORS 1982

Honorary Doctorate, University of London, London, England

1991

Honorary Doctorate, Royal College of Art, London, England

1995

Golden Lion for Painting, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy

1995

Honorary Doctorate, California College of Arts, Oakland, California

1996

Honorary Doctorate, Durham University, Stochton-on-Tees, England

1996

Awarded Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Republic of France

1997

Wollaston Award to the best painting in the Summer exhibition, Royal Academy, London, England

1999

Honorary Doctorate, Spertus College, Chicago, Illinois

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, Wales National Portrait Gallery, London, England Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California Pallant House, Chichester, England Royal Academy of Arts, London, England 85

BIO

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MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, INC. 40 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 Telephone 212.541.4900 Fax 212.541.4948 www.marlboroughgallery.com mny@marlboroughgallery.com

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Agents for: Frank Auerbach Steven Campbell Matthew Carr Stephen Conroy Christopher Couch John Davies David Dawson Daniel Enkaoua Karl Gerstner Francis Giacobetti Catherine Goodman Daniela Gullotta Maggi Hambling Clive Head Paul Hodgson John Hubbard Raymond Mason Thérèse Oulton Celia Paul Paula Rego Vladimir Velickovic The Estate of Chen Yifei The Estate of Ken Kiff The Estate of Oskar Kokoschka The Estate of Victor Pasmore The Estate of Sarah Raphael The Estate of Graham Sutherland The Estate of Euan Uglow The Estate of Victor Willing

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