‘Cézanne said he wanted to do Poussin over again after nature,” said the painter RB Kitaj. “I like the idea that one might try to do Cézanne and Degas over again after Auschwitz.” London gallery Piano Nobile has created an intimate exhibition that shows you how Kitaj came to such a conception. It’s the story of an artist who painted history, and a life lived in its shadow.
The eeriest image of Jewish suffering here is a tall sliver of a canvas in which a blue-uniformed figure stares officiously, suspiciously, into an open doorway, against gold sunlight. You assume he’s looking into a railway carriage, or is it some deeper void? The painting is called The Gentile Conductor, suggesting an authority figure in 20th-century central Europe, inspecting identity cards, possibly hunting Jews.
Kitaj carried such historical awareness all his life and it seems to have haunted him more and more. Born in Ohio, he was the child of a gentile Hungarian father and a mother of Russian-Jewish descent. After his father left, his mother married a Jewish refugee from Vienna, whose surname Kitaj took.
In his charcoal portrait The Mother, he shows his mother reading in a deckchair, her eyes shadowed. But the title – The Mother, rather than My Mother – implies this is not just a personal work but an image of mothers generally, and a meditation on mothers and sons. It is also a conscious restaging of Whistler’s Mother, with the same sense of an artist feeling distance from, and fascination with, a parent.
Like Whistler, Kitaj was an American who made his artistic career in London. After being a merchant sailor and a GI he went to the Royal College of Art, where he met fellow student David Hockney. Later, Kitaj coined the term School of London for what he championed as the capital’s unique brand of intense figurative painters: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach and more.
His reverence for Bacon looms large here in a painting of the Soho reprobate in a trilby and multicoloured suit, a dandified observer of modern life in a canvas that juxtaposes sexual violence and landscape. Its title is a typically erudite mouthful: “Synchromy with FB - General of Hot Desire.”
If modern history, which for Kitaj has the Holocaust at its heart, is hard to decipher, that’s because we experience it in fragments. Kitaj is at his best in his kaleidoscopic, collage-like paintings, such as the Bacon diptych, that suggest the broken, complex mess of modern life and events. His appetite for history is unbounded. His 1962 painting Welcome Every Dread Delight may look like a typical slice of British pop art with its portrait of a young blond-haired woman in an arty interior: but what is the pink sculpture beside her of a man lying on his back with his single giant foot in the air? Kitaj explained it was copied from a 13th-century relief from Siena of a medieval monster called a sciapod. Equally obscure yet suggestive are the faces in his painting Junta, who are all figures from early 20th-century Spanish politics.
You can feel the sense of history, even when you don’t follow his references. But this show reveals that as he got older, Kitaj focused more starkly on the experience of Europe’s Jews. His painting Messiah (Boy) looks like a street kid from the 1940s, gazing at you intensely. Is he a saviour or just a doomed child in a wartime photo from Warsaw or Kraków?
When Kitaj was painting this in the 1980s, he was reading the works of the scholar Gershom Scholem, which include The Messianic Idea in Judaism. Scholem, who was born in Berlin before moving to the future Israel, became close friends with the Marxist Walter Benjamin when they were teenagers: Scholem survived, his great friend back in Germany did not. He rediscovered the Kabbalah tradition and searched for mystical hope in the century of the Holocaust. In his late paintings Kitaj searched for some hope in Scholem’s writings for himself. His wife Sandra Fisher died at 47 following a stroke which he blamed on the poor critical reception of his 1994 Tate retrospective.
Like an angel dredged from Jewish history by Scholem, the deceased Sandra Fisher appears to the aged Kitaj in his 2003 painting Kabbalist and Shekhina. He gently touches her blue hair, reaching across the gulf between the living and dead. She materialises similarly in other late works. He took his own life in 2007. You hope they found each other again.
