Master of the Arcane : Nearly two decades after his first show at LACMA, R. B. Kitaj is back with a major retrospective with nods to old masters from Rembrandt to Cezanne.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. That’s what comes to mind when writing about R.B. Kitaj. The celebrated 61-year-old American artist, who has lived mostly in London since 1957, is being honored for his life’s work in a retrospective organized by the Tate Gallery. After unusually high attendance--more than 40,000 visitors--during its summer debut in London, it comes to the L.A. County Museum of Art today as part of the wide-ranging UK/LA celebration.

Kitaj might be exultant over this achievement if not for a recent series of personal blows. Last month, his wife, painter Sandra Fisher, died of a stroke. She was 47--it was a second marriage for Kitaj--and their son Max is 9. Kitaj’s first wife also died quite young.

It was added pressure for Kitaj, whose mother, 84, a resident of Los Angeles, had been in serious condition with an illness at Century City Hospital.

Finally, the exhibition he wants to consider his moment of glory has been fraught with controversy. Although it drew tremendous popular response, the exhibition was as lambasted as it was praised by the London critics. The first edition of the catalogue sold out and is in its second printing.

Kitaj, a slight man with close-cropped white hair and a restless intelligence, speaks with an emphatically midwestern-American accent, as though determined to resist the influence of his adopted home. He is angry about what he considers shoddy treatment by certain critics and blames it on a laundry list of old grievances.

“It’s been a shooting war of proportions I didn’t expect. You get used to that,” he says. But after a pause, he adds, “Though you never really get used to it. I felt like fighting back, but friends like (David) Hockney would say ‘Don’t do it. You don’t want to make a third-rate hack into another John Ruskin’ “--a reference to that writer’s war with American artist James McNeill Whistler in the late 19th Century.

Kitaj speculates that certain critics have an agenda, and he gains solace by viewing himself in the mirror of art history: “You have to look at history and its precedents,” Kitaj says. “Manet was abused and savaged by the press. Baudelaire wrote to him saying, ‘It seems you have the honor to be hated.’ Cezanne was abused and humiliated. These are great artists. I’m not a great artist, but I’ve been attacked all my life because I don’t do what I’m expected to do.

“I’ve been born in the century of the autonomous art object, when you are not supposed to care or know about anything extraneous to that which you hang on the wall,” he continues. Kitaj has confronted that proposition by writing about his own work in catalogues and manifestoes. In this exhibition’s catalogue, he relays his theories along with anecdotes about his life.

“All modern art is difficult. I don’t see anything wrong with the artist remarking on what he is doing. Life isn’t pure, and I don’t see why pictures should be,” he explains.

Kitaj has been interested in the relationship between literature and imagery since the early ‘60s, when he was labeled a leader of the British Pop Art movement. In fact, his admiration for literature, particularly that of American-born poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who lived in England for so many years, inspired him to move to that country. In one painting, “If Not, Not,” Kitaj is said to have accomplished in paint what Eliot did in his poem “The Wasteland.”

Kitaj explains: “To me, books are what trees have been to a landscape painter. I’ve never met an artist of consequence who wasn’t an erudite, vast reader of literature. Yet, there is always an attack on the literary aspect of my work. A lot of people find my pictures too difficult, too obscure, too arcane.”

Even before its controversial reception in London, the Kitaj presentation at LACMA was faced with problems. In 1992, then-director Michael Shapiro, citing budget cuts, peremptorily eliminated it from the schedule of upcoming shows without discussing the matter with either of the co-hosting institutions, the Tate Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman, who was under fire from Shapiro, has been a longtime supporter of Kitaj, and many felt the decision was part of a form of institutional politics. Kitaj had had an association with the museum dating to 1965, when Tuchman gave the nearly unknown artist an exhibition at LACMA. Kitaj also participated in the famed “Art and Technology” show there. Shapiro underestimated Kitaj’s popularity in Los Angeles--David Hockney and others protested.

The show was reinstated when it secured full financing from EXOR-America (Agnelli Group). For a number of reasons, Shapiro announced his resignation in 1993. Coordinator of Curatorial Affairs Stephanie Barron is now shepherding the exhibition.

This retrospective of approxi mately 100 drawings, paintings and collages traces the changeable nature of Kitaj’s art, beginning with his interest in popular culture and film in the ‘60s. Filmmaker Peter Greenaway remembers him as an important influence on his thinking as an art student. “Kitaj legitimized text; he legitimized arcane and elitist information; he drew and painted in as many as 10 different ways on the same canvas; he threw ideas around, like confetti,” Greenaway is quoted as saying in the catalogue.

In the ‘70s, inspired by his new partner Sandra Fisher, Kitaj turned his back on collage and dedicated himself to classical methods of drawing. He published writings that were critical of the closed system, as he saw it, that modern art had become.

Fascinated by his Jewish background, in the ‘80s he pursued paintings about Semitic culture and art history, topics that inform his paintings to this day. His paintings embrace issues that have come to be seen as post-modern, but Kitaj rejects the requisite irony.

Each work in exhibition is uniquely Kitaj, but he obviously quotes from Surrealism and Realism, from Max Beckmann and Cezanne. The sensitive drawings owe their debt to Degas; the emotional and chaotic compositions recall Van Gogh.

Kitaj would be the first to admit this. He considers his work to be a dialogue with the painters and paintings of the last century. When asked about his stylistic variety, from the meticulous figure studies to the unfinished and disjunctive paintings, he explains, “People are so used to signature styles, like Warhol or Rothko. But I never wanted to live my life that way. What has always intrigued me were the protean possibilities. I wake up in the morning and do whatever I like. Warhol could not wake up in the morning and make a fantastic drawing of a friend. Picasso could. Matisse could. It is no coincidence that the two greatest modernists happen to be the two greatest draftsmen of the 20th Century.”

Critic Robert Hughes once said that Kitaj “draws better than almost anyone alive.” The artist defends drawing with a vigor rarely heard these days. “I tell kids if you want to be an artist get on a plane and go to Barcelona to the Picasso museum and see the work he did between the ages of 9 and 20. You’ll see what you have to do to be a great artist. Few people know that Matisse was an art student for 10 years or more. It’s very hard to achieve a memorable picture. David (Hockney) is the greatest natural draftsman alive. He’s a natural. Whether I am or not, I don’t know.

“Who knows what would have happened even to Picasso or Matisse if they were faced with all the alternatives of today?” he adds. “If those people were faced with the fact that you could stand on your head and jerk off, or place a thousand umbrellas in a canyon, or put 100 repetitious photographs on a wall, if all those alternatives had been available, who knows if they would have been glamorized the way Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol are?

“What fascinated me in the controversy (around the exhibition) was, when we say reactionary we usually are talking about conservative reactionaries who support academic art. But now I think we have modernist reactionaries who are stuck in formalist modernism. And you have avant-garde reactionaries, people who only know about Joseph Beuys, and to them that is the cutting edge.

“My whole concept of life is based on the idea of liberty. People should do whatever the hell they want to do if they are not hurting anybody. I made a lot of enemies in the early ‘70s saying it was sad that this great tradition (of drawing and painting) since the caves had gone down because they were not teaching drawing in schools anymore, in America especially.

“Degas said the reason for the high quality of art at the end of the last century was the example of Ingres,” continues Kitaj. “He meant that everyone was taught to draw at that level. So the ones with talent will out. Before the Second World War, the average convent girl of 18 could draw rings around the hotshot painters in New York and Germany today.”

K itaj considers L.A. to be a second home and comes here every year to visit family and friends. His mother, his son from his first marriage and his grandson live here. His son, Lem Dobbs, is a screenwriter whose credits include the recent movie “Kafka”--an author who had a tremendous influence on Kitaj’s painting.

Kitaj met his late wife in L.A. in 1970 when she was working for Gemini G.E.L., a West Hollywood printmaking studio, and he was here to teach at UCLA. “She was a radiant, marvelous person,” he says sadly. Although partners for nearly a quarter of a century, they were married in 1983--an event that prompted a painting included in the exhibition.

“I have to become a young mom all of sudden,” he says, disconsolately referring to his new role as a single parent. “This focused my mind. I want to be near my family and plan to start spending half the year in L.A.”

During his stay in L.A., Kitaj sketched portraits of some of the great directors like Reuben Mamoulian, Henry Hathaway, Billy Wilder and Jean Renoir. The painting “John Ford on his Death Bed” was completed 15 years after the artist and his first son visited Ford. “He was wearing an admiral’s bridge cap he’d been given for filming ‘Midway.’ He said, ‘Too bad you guys just got here. The Duke just left.’ John Wayne! We almost died.”

Kitaj seems to feel older than his 61 years. He had a mild heart attack four years ago and now has healthier habits of exercise and diet. “I’m considered a prime candidate because I’m pessimistic and melancholic. But Hockney is the opposite, and one year later he got a heart attack. So did (writer) Philip Roth, who had been doing all the right things, eating fish, walking five miles a day. So one learned that the heart is a mystery.”

A lively raconteur, Kitaj admires the traditions of intellectual discourse and distinct points of view. If, as it is said, one can be judged by the company one keeps, he must be valued quite highly. He is close to leading British figure painters--Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff--as well as many writers. Roth was his neighbor for many years and remains a friend. He has done a portrait of Roth, as well as of Robert Creeley, John Ashbery and John Golding.

Kitaj’s wit, his intellectual depth and breadth are the result of disciplined self-schooling, for his background was not one of abundance. Kitaj, as many a successful artist, is self-invented. Though born Ronald Brooks in Cleveland, he told people for years that he was from Chagrin Falls, the birthplace of Hart Crane, because he thought it more poetic. (He is still friends with actor Joel Grey, whom he has known since his elementary school years in Cleveland.)

Kitaj’s father abandoned the family when Kitaj was 2, and his mother, daughter of Russian Jews, went to work as a secretary until she married a research chemist from Vienna, Dr. Walter Kitaj. As an indication of the fondness he felt for his stepfather, the artist took his last name and became known to all simply as “Kitaj.” As he had no religious training as a child, he finds himself bemused by his own turning to Judaism in middle age.

Kitaj was introduced to culture at the Cleveland Museum, by taking art classes there on Saturdays, and he still remembers favorite pictures like Picasso’s “La Vie.” He escaped his Midwestern life at age 16 when he went to sea to work the merchant ships. After 10 years of working at sea and drawing or painting such experiences as visiting prostitutes in Havana, he started studies at the Cooper Union in New York in 1954. The Abstract Expressionists were at the height of their power, and there is an obvious resemblance between his earliest drawings and those of De Kooning. He was soon drafted into the U.S. Army and when released, studied art in Vienna and then at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford. The Ruskin Master at the Ashmolean Museum suggested that Kitaj apply for the Royal College of Art. He was one of about 20 students accepted in 1959, along with Hockney.

Kitaj remembers their meeting: “I saw this boy making the most beautiful drawing of a skeleton. I said, ‘I’ll give you five quid for that.’ All I had was $150 a month from the G.I. Bill to support me and my family, so five quid was a lot of money. You could feed your family for a week on that. Then I bought the next one and the next one. I still have them all. We’ve been like brothers ever since. I’ve always liked to collect pictures by my contemporaries. Within a very short time, the spotlight was on us, and I could sell pictures.”

Of that period, critic John Russell wrote: “If I had to choose the artist who preeminently represents the open situation, I should probably single out R.B. Kitaj. . . . I know of no painter now living from whom we can expect more.”

The Marlborough Gallery in London and New York has represented Kitaj since 1963. “The Ohio Gang,” shown in his 1965 exhibition there, was purchased by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art. He has supported himself through sales ever since.

Kitaj works slowly and deliberately to produce six pictures a year. He takes a dim view of artists who come out with several exhibitions a year. “Everybody has got to have an exhibition every year, or if you’re Julian Schnabel, 10 exhibitions all at the same time. OK, maybe he is a natural and can be that spontaneous. But one gets a little suspicious when everybody’s that spontaneous.”

Despite his career-long battle with the critics, he ultimately recognizes his good fortune as an artist. “What I do infuriates a good part of the art world. I’m talking about the art world, not audiences or people who like art in a different way. But the Tate buys a picture every half decade. I’ve lived off the sales of my work. How many people can do that? I’ve had more than my share of the pie. I’ve led a charmed life.”*

Vital Stats

“R.B. Kitaj”

Address: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

Price: $6; $4 seniors, students

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