SOLD - Mrs Gutierrez Describes What The Doctor Told Her - SOLD
Description
Limited edition, signed silkscreen print on canvas by the renowned artist R B Kitaj
69/200
Size 61.5cm x 41.5cm
Slight creasing in top right corner from storage but can be ironed out and will not be noticeable when framed.
Very light foxing dots above the head, again hardly noticeable, please view photographs.
For any further information or pictures please feel free to email me.
About
R. B. Kitaj
Ronald Brooks Kitaj RA (/kiːˈtaɪ/; October 29, 1932 – October 21, 2007) was an American artist with Jewish roots[1] who spent much of his life in England.[2]
Born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, United States, his Hungarian father, Sigmund Benway, left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born and they were divorced in 1934.[3] His mother was the American-born daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants.[1] She worked in a steel mill and as a teacher. She remarried in 1941, to Dr. Walter Kitaj, a Viennese refugee[1] research chemist, and Ronald took his surname. His mother and stepfather were non-practicing Jews. He was educated at Troy High School. He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter when he was 17. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. After serving in the United States Army for two years, in France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958–59) under the G.I. Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959–61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. Richard Wollheim, the philosopher and David Hockney remained lifelong friends.[4]
Kitaj married his first wife, Elsi Roessler, in 1953; they had a son, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and adopted a daughter, Dominie. His first wife committed suicide in 1969. After living together for 12 years, he married Sandra Fisher in December 1983; they had one son, Max. Sandra Fisher died in 1994, at age 47, from hyperacute haemorrhagic leuco-encephalitis (not an aneurysm, as is commonly written). Kitaj had a mild heart attack in 1990. He died in Los Angeles in October 2007, eight days before his 75th birthday.[5] Seven weeks after Kitaj's death, the Los Angeles County coroner ruled that the cause of death was suicide by suffocation, saying the artist placed a plastic bag over his head.[6]
"School of London"[edit]
He curated an exhibition for the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, entitled "The Human Clay" (an allusion to a line by W. H. Auden), including works by 48 London artists, such as William Roberts, Richard Carline, Colin Self and Maggi Hambling, championing the cause of figurative art at a time when abstract was dominant. In an essay in the controversial catalogue, he invented the phrase the "School of London" to describe painters such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews, Reginald Gray, Peter de Francia[9] and himself.[10][not in citation given][11]
Style and influence[edit]
Kitaj had a significant influence on British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most abstraction and modernism.[citation needed] Allusions to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed together on one canvas to produce a collage effect. He also produced a number of screen-prints with printer Chris Prater.[12] He told Tony Reichardt, manager of the Marlborough New London Gallery, that he made screen-prints as sketches for his future paintings. From then onwards Tony Reichardt commissioned Chris Prater to print three or four copies of every print he made on canvas. His later works became more personal.
Kitaj was recognised as being one of the world's leading draftsmen, almost on a par with, or compared to, Degas. Indeed, he was taught drawing at Oxford by Percy Horton, whom Kitaj claimed was a pupil of Walter Sickert, who was a pupil of Degas; and the teacher of Degas studied under Ingres. Meanwhile, Edgar Wind encouraged him to become a 'Warburgian artist'.[13] His more complex compositions build on his line work using a montage practice, which he called 'agitational usage'. Kitaj often depicts disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumes a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives. This is best portrayed by his masterpiece "The Autumn of Central Paris" (1972–73), wherein philosopher Walter Benjamin is portrayed, as both the orchestrator and victim of historical madness. The futility of historical progress creates a disjointed architecture that is maddening to deconstruct.[citation needed] He staged a major exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965, and a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.in 1981. He selected paintings for an exhibition, "The Artist's Eye", at the National Gallery, London in 1980. In 1981 he was elected into the National Academy of Designas an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1984.
