In 1985, Kitaj stated that ‘the still hotly debated question – What is a Jew? – has never been resolved, except perhaps by murderers.’ He was referring to the Holocaust. As he wrote, ‘[t]hat epochal murder happened during my youth’, and by the early eighties it had become ‘[t]he subject that interests me much of the time now’. Kitaj occasionally used the train carriage as a metaphor for the chaotic, uncertain position of Jewry in the twentieth century, alluding to the forced movement of people during the Holocaust, and the eponymous figure in The Gentile Conductor is a persecutory presence. The painting is one of many in which Kitaj adopted an overtly Jewish perspective and alluded to the ambiguous threat of antisemitism. The figure is silhouetted against a yellow background and his approach down the train’s side corridor is further dramatised by the extended strip of red carpet that connects him to the space occupied by the viewer.

The Gentile Conductor adopts as its subject a narrow segment of The Jewish Rider (fig. X). In that work, the conductor brandishes a crop in his right hand. In The Gentile Conductor, the crop is omitted even as a ghost-like pentimento of the raised arm suggests a veiled Nazi salute. Kitaj’s activity of isolating and re-presenting fragmentary images was a response to the epochal conditions fostered by the mechanical reproduction of images as Walter Benjamin described them. This interest was apparent from his use of details when reproducing his own and other artists’ pictures. In the catalogue accompanying The Artist’s Eye, an exhibition Kitaj selected for the National Gallery in 1980, cropped illustrations of pictures in the Gallery’s collection included Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and Cezanne’s Bathers, from which only individual figures were shown. In The Gentile Conductor, a figure from one of Kitaj’s own paintings was extrapolated and reimagined in a new and intensified pictorial field.

The painterly construction of The Gentile Conductor is typically vibrant and experimental for the period in Kitaj’s career that began in 1980 and concluded around 1985. It was painted on a dark, almost black ground. Drawing overlapped with painting, and fine lines of charcoal were locally applied to the dry paint surface. The figure’s silhouette is indicated and reiterated with sinuous lines. The red carpet in the lower portion of the canvas was painted and then, still wet, scraped into with a plasterer’s comb or a similar utensil. The comb was pulled downwards in undulating strokes that echo the rounded limbs of the conductor above. The palette, dominated by primary and secondary colours, is consciously jarring and effusive. These varied techniques reflect the vigorous research into painting that Kitaj was pursuing at the time.

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R.B. Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. He studied at the Cooper Union Institute in New York, the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, the Ruskin School, Oxford, and the Royal College of Art, London. His first solo exhibition - Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary - was held at Marlborough Fine Art, London, in 1963.

In 1976, Kitaj was invited by the Arts Council of Great Britain to select a group of British works connected by a common theme. His selection formed the basis for the seminal exhibition The Human Clay. The show included works by Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Moore, Hodgkin, Hockney, Kitaj himself, and many others. In his essay for the catalogue, Kitaj referred to ‘a School of London’, an influential concept which has shaped perceptions of art in post-war London ever since. Kitaj has been consistently identified as one of the leading artists in this milieu and was included in the 2016 Getty Museum exhibition, London Calling, and the 2018 Tate Britain exhibition, All Too Human.

Alongside his art, Kitaj was a profound thinker capable of penetrating self-analysis and cultural commentary. In 1989, he published the First Diasporist Manifesto, the longest and most impassioned of his many texts discussing the Jewish dimension in his art and thought. From the beginning of his career, his interests in history, politics, philosophy and identity supercharged his art with a rich array of connotations.

His various honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. In 1984, he became the first American since John Singer Sargent to be elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. Numerous retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held, including those at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1997 he left London and moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 2007.

Writing in 2017, his great friend David Hockney wrote of his respect and admiration for Kitaj. ‘Ron was a great influence on me, far more than any other factor’. It was Kitaj’s seriousness that impressed Hockney the most. Combined with the visual and intellectual clarity of his work, it is that seriousness which assures Kitaj of his place in art history.