Kabbalist and Shekhina depicts the mysterious encounter between two deconstructed figures. The black shutters are thrown open and they meet at an opening in the wall, the tall figure within leaning out and looking into the face of a blue-haired woman. Much of Kitaj’s art was self-reflective and this work represents the artist himself and his late wife, Sandra Fisher, as the eponymous ‘Kabbalist’ and ‘Shekhina’ respectively. There is an opaque sexual undercurrent to this encounter and both figures appear to be naked. A Kabbalist is a practitioner of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah being an ancient ‘tradition’ brought to attention in the twentieth century by the scholar Gershom Scholem, whose work Kitaj knew and admired.

In the Kabbalah, a special topic of investigation was the nature of the divine and its relationship to creation. The Kabbalah defined ‘Shekhina’ as the feminine aspect of the divine, and Kitaj has as such elevated Fisher in Kabbalist and Shekhina to the status of a deity. After her sudden and premature death in 1994, Kitaj came to define his continuing relationship with Fisher in terms of ‘devekut’ – the Kabbalist concept of closeness or attachment to the divine. After a meeting with the Kabbalist scholar Moshe Idel, Kitaj wrote: ‘It was great, this being in touch with the living-Scholem, so to speak! I explained my emerging debt to Kabbalah: DEVEKUT – cleaving to Sandra as SKEKHINAH (GOD!) in my art and life.’

In 1997, R.B. Kitaj returned to the United States, the country of his birth, and settled in Los Angeles. The sunlight entered his paintings and affected his palette, contributing to the fulsome colour of works such as Kabbalist and Shekhina, in which the room is constructed from tightly controlled panels in pastel shades of yellow, blue and terracotta. The thinness of the paint complemented Kitaj’s rigorous pursuit of imagery, much as Stanley Spencer’s work half a century earlier grew thinner as painting became a vehicle to express visionary subject-matter. The underlying transfer grid, visible beneath the surface of the paint as in the later paintings of Walter Sickert, demonstrates that Kitaj used preparatory drawings to realise the work.

It was in middle age that Kitaj became suddenly and deeply interested in his religious and cultural identity as a Jew. His ‘First Diasporist Manifesto’ was published in 1989 and emphasised the experiences of rupture and dislocation which have affected Jews since the first expulsion from Israel by Nebuchadnezzar. The manifesto was illustrated with sixty works by Kitaj which pertained to his argument. Ever since his sensational first solo exhibition, held at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963 and titled Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary, Kitaj’s art was caught up in an endless cycle of digesting and re-iterating ideas. The imagery in his work is macerated by references to literature, philosophy, film, history and, above all, other art, though these allusions are consistently couched in the artist’s own terms. Like the iconography of the old masters, interpretation is often required. Kabbalist and Shekhina is a sophisticated product of Kitaj’s roving imagination, his appetite for arcane reference, and the urge to express in art searching ideas about his life and identity.