Tzara After Giacometti is one of Kitaj’s ‘little pictures’. A genre of small-scale figure painting, each work typically included just one, two or three characters painted on unprimed, roughly woven canvases. Kitaj began using them in 2005 and they belong to a final phase of creativity after the ‘Los Angeles’ series concluded. Even as his failing health prevented him from regular work on larger pictures, the small format of these canvases – often measuring no more than 18 inches along one side – enabled him to continue painting with abandon and unfailing invention. The little pictures were generally painted in a draughtsman-like idiom in which touches of brilliant colour covered the surface in a loose net. Many of these paintings were exhibited together in 2006 at Marlborough Fine Art, London, and posthumously in 2008 at Marlborough Gallery, New York. Some aspects of the late little pictures are comparable to Kitaj’s caput mortuum paintings from the late sixties, and the similarities were emphasised by the inclusion of these paintings in the Little Pictures exhibitions.

Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto was dedicated to ‘a precursor Manifestoist, Tristan Tzara (Sammy Rosenstock) [1896–1963], founder of DADA’. Tzara’s volume of poetry Phases (1949) included a lithographic portrait of the author by Giacometti. Giacometti’s print was the source for this broadly adapted painting. As with most of the historical figures upon whom Kitaj fixed his attention later in life, Tzara was Jewish.