The Last History Painter

By ROBERT HUGHES

Expatriate R.B. Kitaj brings home the Bacon

One of the master images of 20th century art and literature was the City: the ville tentaculaire, condenser of populations and their unease, republic of anxiety, seedbed of desire. From Edvard Munch's top-hatted masks parading the streets of Oslo to Francis Bacon's pinstriped executives howling like caged baboons, the City secreted images of alienation. To the eye of modernist poetry it got more spectral as one came closer to it, as the capitals of Christendom did for T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, almost 60 years ago:

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

In painting today, the chief image maker of the City, apart from Bacon himself, is a 47-year-old American from Cleveland, Ohio, named R.B. Kitaj (pronounced Kit-eye). Kitaj has been living in London for more than 20 years, and has not shown regularly in the U.S. Consequently, he seems more of a name than a presence in American art. In England, his reputation is, if anything, exaggerated in the other direction. He is widely regarded as a reincarnation of America's cultural expatriates of the 1920s. When the catalogue essay for his present show of 50 drawings and a few paintings at New York City's Marlborough Gallery compares him with Idaho-born Ezra Pound in London-"the Yankee outsider who has the energy to float a circus, and the courage to initiate its polemics"-it reflects this startling English view.

Kitaj is not Pound. But he is one of the most inventive figurative artists at work today, and his ambition-to make the whole of modernist culture, literary, political and visual, available to painting as a subject-is a large brave one. "If some of us wish to practice art for art's sake alone, so be it," he wrote in 1976. "But good pictures, great pictures, will be made to which many modest lives can respond. When I'm told that good art has never been like that, I doubt it, and in any case it seems to me at least as advanced or radical to attempt a more social art as not to."

Kitaj's idea of a "more social art" has little to do with social realism. But he is the last history painter, and his enterprise is to see history through the lens of other media-books, photos, snatches from film and similar "raw" sources-combined in a kind of painted collage, the visual equivalent of spinning the radio dial and hearing snatches of different broadcasts on different wavelengths punctuated by silence and bursts of static. The work responds to an edgy sensibility: Europe of the '20s and '30s, and Northern Europe at that, the dictators' playground. When the Mediterranean world appears, it is not the, sumptuous place imagined by Matisse or Picasso, but either Catalonia or the seedier Levantine environment of Cavafy's Alexandria. Its heroes, whose ghostly presences are often quoted in Kitaj's paintings, are the shipless helmsmen of modernism, the rootless cosmopolitans like the couple in Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea (1964). Kitaj paints wandering Jews and victims of the power game: Walter Ben jamin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg. He has also talked about inventing "a figure, a character in a picture the way novelists have been able to do, like the people you remember out of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy." There are many openings for gratuitous nostalgia in Kitaj's literary art, and his paintings can be as irritating as any text that drapes its obscurities with belligerent footnotes; they sometimes reduce themselves to promiscuity among famous names. But what gen erally saves Kitaj's work from this failing is his visual flair and range of notation. He has a virtuoso's fist, and can with equal conviction parody the cartoony style of a '40s detective-novel cover or produce the near life-size portrait, The Hispanist, 1977-78, a nervous, delicate laying-on of paint, Klimt-like in its dandified preci on. One always feels that what is there is fully meant to be there.

Detachment, irony, variety: these are the hallmarks of Kitaj's art, as of the culture it pays homage to. It is anchored in life drawing (the figure, to Kitaj, is the supreme challenge), but this frees him to play with certain areas of art from the past century that are considered, in more orthodox circles, a taboo source. Thus the Picasso from whom one can properly take ideas is the cubist who emerged after 1906. Kitaj, on the other hand, devotes a number of his drawings to making strange pasiches of immature Picasso, the artist of the blue period, with his wistful clowns and phthisic women. Kitaj's three Bathers, with their iridescent blooms of pastel and general air of tentative anxiety, pay homage to the blue period. But they stare from the paper with the look of rough creatures trapped in an alien element, refugees from Goya and Velasquez as well as from the 20th century. This ability to suggest cultural continuity in the midst of a general malaise may be the final rea son why Kitaj's art haunts a corner of one's mind that no other living painter has contrived to occupy. -Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.