Ronald Brooks Kitaj Memorial
Summer Exhibition 2008 - Royal Academy of Art, London
Every year the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition features exciting and innovative art by both known and unknown artists. Items on display include prints, painting, photography, sculpture and architecture selected from approximately 13,000 pieces presented to the selection panel for their consideration. This year's highlights include a memorial gallery dedicated to the work of the late RB Kitaj (1936-2007).
Ronald Brooks Kitaj, known simply as RB Kitaj, passed away in October 2007 and the memorial gallery features twentyfive of his most well-known works.
Kitaj spent so much of his life working in England that many people do not realise that he was actually born in Chagrin Falls, Cleveland, Ohio, to a Hungarian father, Sigmund Benway, and daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Jeanne Brooks. Kitaj took his name from his mother's second husband, Walter Kitaj.
Artistic Training
Kitaj studied at the Cooper Union, New York, the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford in the UK, and the Royal College of Art in London. He was strongly influenced by fellow American Robert Rauschenberg and his class mates included Peter Phillips, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Wollheim, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Adrien Berg and David Hockney.
Artistic Career
Although labelled a Pop artist Kitaj drew his inspiration (forgive the pun!) from multiple sources including political history, art, literature and Jewish identity. His fascination with Judaism and the Holocaust is a recurring theme in his work.
Kitaj settled in England in the late 1950s and worked as a teacher at various colleges including the Slade School of Art. In 1968 he returned briefly to the USA to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a major influence on British Pop art favouring vivid colours and overlapping planes. He particularly disliked abstraction and modernism. One of his major works on display in the Summer Exhibition is The Bells of Hell, painted in 1961 it shows his penchant for chunks of vibrant colour.
The "School of London"
There have been many solo exhibitions of his work and he has also been invited to select art for major exhibitions in many of the world's major galleries. In 1976 Kitaj chose works for an exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery entitled The Human Clay. This show featured work by 48 London artists and it was during this exhibition that Kitaj invented the phrase "School of London" to encompass artists like Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, William Roberts, Colin Self, Maggi Hambling, Richard Carline and himself.
RB Kitaj - Royal Academician
RB Kitaj was the first American since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the Royal Academy. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Kitaj died in Los Angeles in October 2007 just a few days before his 75th birthday.
The Royal Academy of Arts' Summer Exhibition 2008 will run until 17 August 2008 and full details will be found on their website.
Sources:
- Kampf, Avraham. Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth-Century Art. London: Lund Humphries and the Barbican Art Gallery, 1990, ISBN: 0853315833
- Richard Morphet (ed.). R. B. Kitaj: a Retrospective, London: Tate Gallery 1994, ISBN: 1854371371
The Bells of Hell (1961) RB kitaj
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