His Jewish answer

By Leah Ollman

Jan. 9, 2008 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

R.B. Kitaj followed a strict regimen: Rise at 5, walk to the Westwood Coffee Bean at 6 to write and sketch, return home to paint, eat lunch, rest. Receive visitors for tea at 4, have dinner, retire early. The discipline provided a framework for his restless brush and brilliant, meandering mind.

Kitaj, a deeply literate painter long associated with the London School of figurative artists (including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff), enjoyed a long, successful career that was reaching yet another high point when he took his life in October.

The artist’s “Second Diasporist Manifesto (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses)” had just been released by Yale University Press in September. A dense, spirited investigation/rant/interrogation/plea concerning, among other things, the viability of Jewish art, the book was described by the New Republic art critic Jed Perl as “a crucial document of our postmodern period . . . a searching artistic confession that’s also a dazzling literary achievement.”

Kitaj had ruminated on what he called his Jewish Question since the 1970s, but issues of cultural identity, diaspora and the legitimacy of Jewish art consumed him in his final years. The artist often described himself, quoting his friend Philip Roth, as having “Jew on the brain.”

Now, two landmark exhibitions focusing on Kitaj’s prolific obsession with things Jewish are opening in Los Angeles, where the Cleveland-born artist resettled a decade ago after 40 years in England.

“R.B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory -- Jewish Works From His Personal Collection” opens Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. The largest museum exhibition to concentrate on Kitaj’s Jewish themes, and the last show he helped organize, it includes more than 30 paintings, drawings and prints. One series of paintings pairs “Arabs and Jews” but provocatively withholds identification of the parties in each picture. The “Passion” paintings, never before exhibited, represent Kitaj’s effort to create an icon of Jewish suffering, an aesthetic equivalent to the Christian cross.

Other works pay homage to Freud and Kafka (two of the brightest stars in Kitaj’s personal pantheon), express a searing tenderness toward his youngest son, Max, and make clear his devotion to his late wife, artist Sandra Fisher.

“When you think of Jewish art, you think of ceremonial art or images of synagogues or rabbis, but he’s not interested in that,” says Tal Gozani, curator of the Skirball show. She credits Kitaj with expanding the definition of Jewish art.

“He thought of himself as a very skilled and thoughtful artist who was dealing with the Jewish question in a profound way. He doesn’t deal with the religion, with Judaism. He’s interested in the experience of being a Jew in the modern world.”

UCLA exhibition

The other exhibition, “Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R.B. Kitaj in Text and Image,” opened Monday at UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. Over the last two years, Kitaj had donated his papers to the university, intending them to serve as the foundation of a new Archive of Jewish Culture. The exhibition, which traces Kitaj’s life and thought through correspondence, publications, writings and collaborative works, celebrates the archive’s formal launch.

“At its core is the desire to create a repository of papers, correspondence, scores, sketches, scripts with the idea of capturing the genius of Jewish cultural creativity that’s been such a potent force in the making of Western culture,” explains professor David Myers, director of UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies and founder of the archive.

“We’d love to attract to our archive the work of leading artists, writers, intellectuals, actors, composers. We hope also to stimulate research around the issue of Jewish culture and use the archive as a forum for ongoing Jewish cultural creativity. That’s the grand vision. We’re just at the beginning.”

The idea for the archive arose in conversations between Myers and Kitaj, who were close friends. “He felt it important that his idea of Jewish art have its own institutional setting and its own legitimacy, that there be a kind of monument to that project,” Myers says.

Kitaj took it upon himself to craft his own legacy, just as he assumed control over his own death -- the 74-year-old artist was found dead in his home Oct. 21, a suicide by suffocation. Those who knew him well say he was obsessed with death at an early age. His grief over the sudden loss of his wife in 1994 remained fresh and raw. Recently, says Myers, “he talked a lot about death, confronting death. He talked about his sense of his own powers diminishing, though he wrote and painted and drew up to the very last.”

What exactly was Kitaj’s idea of a Jewish art? What categorizes any work of art as Jewish (Its maker? Its theme?) has been long contested. Traditionalists argue that Jewish art itself is a contradiction in terms, because the Second Commandment, strictly interpreted, prohibits the creation of likenesses. Kitaj repeatedly disputes the prohibition in his manifesto and embraces the concept of a Jewish art, however controversial or unpopular.

“If I say ‘Jewish Art’ to people, even dear friends, Jewish or not, it’s like saying, ‘The world is round’ in 1491,” he writes.

With typographic urgency (lots of exclamation points and underlining) and humor in equal parts self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, Kitaj extols the possibilities and potential of a Jewish art. “Paint the opposite of Anti-Semitism,” he commands. Make Jewish diasporist art that is “daring, unusual and risky,” the product of “ecstatic torment.” Tell it slant, he insists, borrowing from Emily Dickinson. “Dare holiness.”

Kitaj’s text reads as an intense dialogue with other artists, poets and thinkers, among them Einstein, Celan, Soutine, Cezanne, Matisse, Mondrian, the Baal Shem Tov, Joyce, Buber, Benjamin, Wittgenstein and Steiner. Synthesizing influences is basic to his work, both visual and verbal, but he warns fellow diasporists against assimilating too much into the host culture.

Kitaj’s enterprise, says Myers, epitomizes the modern Jewish experience in its tension between the desire to preserve tradition and to enter the cultural mainstream.

“In the first third of the 20th century, there were many attempts to define Jewish art, mostly to align it with a form of nationalism,” he explains. “Heroic, military, martial themes anchor this kind of art. Kitaj’s art is far more individualist and unmoored to any collective movement, but it does have this quality of an unabashed Jewish undertaking that harks back to that earlier self-conscious ideological engagement of art to a higher cause. That unapologetic, defiant quality captures the best of Jewish creative genius, using that liminal position, in but not fully of the culture, to think beyond the conventional, to resist the conventional, to understand the need for ceaseless change and creativity as a prod to social betterment.”

However Jewish art is defined, Kitaj’s work fits the bill. But some have looked askance at that affiliation and disparaged his art as too Jewish.

Several British critics of his 1994 retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London (the show also traveled to New York and L.A.) damned the artist’s work as banal, imitative and self-important, condemning Kitaj for being “imprisoned by his library.” A writer for the Independent concluded that the exhibition exposed the Wandering Jew as the Wizard of Oz.

Open to interpretation

Kitaj had been writing texts to accompany his paintings since his first exhibition in 1963. In his second manifesto (his first was published in 1989), he likened the texts to the “Midrash, the commentaries to be found interspersed in the Talmud in the form of poetic digressions, parables, legends, allegories, tales, etc.”

“For him,” adds Myers, “the whole idea of Jewish art was reinterpretation, drawing from the famous principle of an ancient sage that we should ‘turn it over and turn it over again, for everything is within it.’ ”

Certain critics derided this predilection as a nasty case of Jewish intellectualism. Kitaj, in turn, derided them, scribbling notes of revenge on cafe napkins and elaborating on his aspirations in the outrageously provocative -- some would say presumptuous -- manifesto.

“It was central to his audacity to talk about genius in a self-congratulatory way,” says Myers, “but that’s precisely what he wanted to do in response to his critics, who said, ‘Your art is Jewish. That constant interpretiveness is a distinctly Jewish move.’ And he said, ‘Yes, it is a Jewish move, and I’m going to embrace it.’ ”

Kitaj wore the badge of Jewish artist without fear that it would diminish his stature, position him as a big fish in a small pond.

Gozani calls him “one of the most significant Jewish artists of the last half century.”

How might Kitaj have responded to that label? She laughs.

“I think he would correct me and say the most significant Jewish artist.”

‘R.B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory’

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Opens Friday. Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: March 30

Price: $5 to $10; free on Thursdays

Contact: (310) 440-4500, www.skirball.org

Also:

“Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R.B. Kitaj in Text and Image”