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R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) is one of the most intriguing 20th century artists. Born into a Russo-Jewish family near Cleveland, Ohio, 17-year old Kitaj spent 5 years at sea aboard a Norwegian freighter. He went on to study art in New York and Vienna. A Royal College of Art stipend made him move to London where he became a celebrated artist. Curating The Human Clay, a 1976 show of figurative contemporary British artists, he coined the term "School of London" for the artistic circle around Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff. In 1991 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, one of only three American painters to be thus honored in the history of the institution. A major 1994 retrospective at London's Tate Gallery failed to produce Kitaj's international breakthrough, but was unanimously panned by British critics instead. This, and the unexpected death of his wife Sandra, induced his increasingly paranoid perspective. Embittered he returned to the USA and settled in Los Angeles, where he finally took his own life in 2007. Kitaj left behind a manuscript unmatched among 20th-century artist autobiographies -- Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Eloquently describing his vices and sufferings, it stands in the traditions of both St. Augustine and Thomas de Quincey. Now published for the first time, it is a sensation, from both a literary and art historical point of view.
R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) is one of the most intriguing 20th century artists. Born into a Russo-Jewish family near Cleveland, Ohio, 17-year old Kitaj spent 5 years at sea aboard a Norwegian freighter. He went on to study art in New York and Vienna. A Royal College of Art stipend made him move to London where he became a celebrated artist. Curating The Human Clay, a 1976 show of figurative contemporary British artists, he coined the term "School of London" for the artistic circle around Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff. In 1991 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, one of only three American painters to be thus honored in the history of the institution. A major 1994 retrospective at London's Tate Gallery failed to produce Kitaj's international breakthrough, but was unanimously panned by British critics instead. This, and the unexpected death of his wife Sandra, induced his increasingly paranoid perspective. Embittered he returned to the USA and settled in Los Angeles, where he finally took his own life in 2007. Kitaj left behind a manuscript unmatched among 20th-century artist autobiographies -- Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Eloquently describing his vices and sufferings, it stands in the traditions of both St. Augustine and Thomas de Quincey. Now published for the first time, it is a sensation, from both a literary and art historical point of view.
David Hockney was born in Bradford, UK, in 1937 and is one of the most prominent figurative painters alive. He was a close friend of Kitaj's. Eckhart Gillen, German art historian, was curator of the 2012 Kitaj retrospective Obsessions at the Jewish Museum, Berlin.
"Ten years after Kitaj's suicide in Los Angeles, a German publisher has brought out his Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. The editor, Eckhart J.Gillen, was one of the curators of the superb Kitaj retrospective mounted by the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2012. From a fragmentary and often repetitive typescript, he has put together a thoroughly readable text. Any thinness is well masked by plentiful illustrations--more than two hundred in all--not only of Kitaj's works but also his own intimate photographs and those of Lee Friedlander, his lifelong friend. With a preface by David Hockney and Gillen's epilogue and useful end matter, it is a handsome and necessary volume." -Timothy Hyman, New York Review of Books
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