R.B. Kitaj, 74; figurative L.A. painter had an eclectic career

R.B. Kitaj, a figurative American painter who became a significant contributor to the British Pop Art movement during his nearly four decades of expatriate life in London, has died. He was 74.

Kitaj died Sunday evening at his home in Los Angeles, according to the Marlborough Gallery, his official representative in New York. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office was looking at his death as a possible suicide and conducted an autopsy Tuesday, a coroner’s spokesman said. A final report was deferred until toxicology tests could be analyzed.

Over the years, Kitaj’s work generally created controversy. His figurative paintings featured areas of bright color and often resembled collages with their economic use of line and overlapping planes. His work often alluded to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity. He also produced a number of silk-screen prints and was considered an excellent draftsman.

Writing in Time magazine some years ago, critic Robert Hughes noted that Kitaj “. . . remains an artist of real, sometimes of remarkable interest: a restless omnivore whose way of painting, part personal confession, part syncopated history and part allusive homage to the old and Modernist masters, is quite unlike anybody else’s today.”

Stephanie Barron, chief curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which presented a large exhibition of Kitaj’s work in 1994, reflected on his career Tuesday.

“He was a magnificent painter qua painter who was always committed to the figurative tradition, in the face of waning interest in figurative,” Barron told The Times. “He also had an enormous appreciation for the history of art and felt very close to the European tradition of art.”

Peter Goulds, owner of the L.A. Louver gallery in Venice, met Kitaj in 1979 and maintained a fairly close association with him over the years. He presented a solo show of Kitaj’s work in 2003.

“He was a very great artist because he found a way of making ideas rooted in the 19th century relevant to our time,” Gould told the Times on Tuesday. “He took the major impulses of our time -- printed word and moving image -- and brought them alive with a sense of history and context that gave additional meaning to his paintings. Through his imagination, we are linked to a broader view of life. The paintings serve as entry points to imagination and invention.”

A slight man with close-cropped white hair and beard and stern features that, one Times writer noted, “gave him the appearance of [an Ingmar] Bergman patriarch,” Kitaj (pronounced Kit-eye) had a strong relationship with Los Angeles.

He had his first museum show here at LACMA in 1965, taught at UCLA in 1970 and met his second wife, Sandra Fisher, here the same year. A lifelong baseball fan, he also made portraits for Sports Illustrated magazine of figures including Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax.

Barron recalled him as an exacting man and totally devoted to his craft.

“He was enormously erudite and managed to eliminate everything extraneous from his life so that he could concentrate on his art,” she said. “As chaotic and bristling with energy as his paintings are, his life was quiet and ascetic, at least in his later years.”

Born Ronald Brooks in Cleveland on Oct. 29, 1932, he was 2 when his father abandoned the family. His mother found work as a secretary for a research chemist from Vienna, Dr. Walter Kitaj, and later married him. Young Ronald was particularly fond of his stepfather and took his name, eventually becoming known to all simply as Kitaj. His mother and stepfather were non-observant Jews, and years later religion would play a larger part in his life.

As a boy, Kitaj became interested in art through Saturday drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum. The family moved to Troy, N.Y., when Kitaj was in high school, and after graduation he signed on as crewman aboard a merchant vessel and began a 10-year odyssey of travels that would take him to Europe, Cuba, South America and Mexico, where he would paint and draw local figures, including prostitutes.

In 1954, he left the sea and started his formal art training at the Cooper Union in New York. His early work resembled that of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Willem de Kooning, who were then in vogue.

His art education was again interrupted by service, this time by the peacetime U.S. Army in Germany, where he was stationed after being drafted in 1955. He stayed in Europe after his discharge two years later, studying art in Vienna and then at Oxford. He was urged to apply for the Royal College of Art and was accepted there in 1959, with 19 other students, one of whom was his lifelong friend David Hockney.

Kitaj’s early paintings seemed to reflect a fascination with surrealism. His 1958 work “Erasmus,” which he regarded as the first picture of “any interest” that he painted in England, is a grid design of heads, one of several works that reflect his admiration of Piet Mondrian.

His first solo gallery exhibition came at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1963. The show was titled “R.B. Kitaj: Pictures With Commentary, Pictures Without Commentary,” and critic John Russell credited him with bringing “the subject back into painting” and “history-painting back to life.” Two works in the exhibition, “The Murder of Rosa Luxembourg” and “Isaac Babel Riding With Budenny,” offer what Russell called “an element of straightforward left-wing pamphleteering.” This tendency would surface time and again in Kitaj’s work.

His first museum exhibition came in 1965 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. William Wilson, then The Times art critic, noted that much of the work appeared “autobiographical” and that the reigning Pop Art style “was visible in the poster-like punch of Kitaj’s compositions.”

“There was a muffled erotic charge to his pictures that felt troubled but authentically human in that era of go-go sex,” Wilson wrote. “The slight European mustiness and angst of it all was oddly refreshing.”

In the early 1960s, Kitaj began a collaboration with Cris Prater, a London silk-screen printer that resulted in the publication in 1970 of several portfolios of prints. The 50 silk-screen prints of that series reproduce covers of real and imagined books. The series reflected Kitaj’s love of literature. He later observed, “Some books have pictures, and some pictures have books.”

After beginning to explore his Jewish roots in the early 1970s, his paintings began to reflect what one New York Times writer called a “born-again Jewishness,” exploring the Holocaust, the diaspora and “his own sense of personal exile.”

Several of his most effective paintings, including “The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin),” an homage to the German Jewish intellectual, and “If Not, Not,” inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” were competed in the 1970s.

“If Not, Not” offers a chaotic, Hieronymus Bosch-like landscape, which includes the guardhouse gate at Auschwitz. Eliot himself is portrayed in the left corner.

Kitaj’s eclectic career included the heights of artistic recognition. In 1991, he was elected to the Royal Academy, the first American to join the academy since John Singer Sargent nearly 100 years before him.

Kitaj’s work was presented in retrospectives at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1981, the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and LACMA in 1994 and 1995. He also received the Golden Lion at the Venice Diennale in 1995.

His exhibition at the Tate in 1994 created a major controversy in the art world. British critics generally hated the show and gave him “a drubbing,” critic Hughes wrote, “such as few others ever have to endure in a lifetime.”

Kitaj answered back, charging the critics with anti-Semitism. Around that time, his wife died of a brain aneurysm. Devastated, Kitaj returned with their young son to Los Angeles.

Barron said that Kitaj never got over his wife’s death and that it haunted him for the last 13 or 14 years of his life. “You had to deal with him on his own terms,” Barron said. “One visited him at 4 p.m. precisely. One stayed for 45 minutes or an hour and had tea. He didn’t drive. He didn’t participate in the cultural life of Los Angeles except one-on-one. But art world people passing through town would visit him, and when he came to the museum he looked for a long time and was a very articulate companion at exhibitions.”

Kitaj is survived by his sons, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, Len Kitaj and Max Kitaj, all of Los Angeles; a daughter, Dominie Kitaj of San Diego; and three grandchildren. At his request, there will be no funeral.

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jon.thurber@latimes.com

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Times staff writer Suzanne Muchnic contributed to this report.