In his thirties and forties, Kitaj had a talent for striking up new and lasting friendships. During a year teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967/68, he entered a literary milieu through regular visits to the bookseller Peter Howard. He met there the poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982), sometimes referred to as ‘the Godfather of the Beats’, and the Beat poet John Wieners (1934–2002), who had studied with Kitaj’s friend Robert Creeley. Kitaj understood the implications of ‘painters drawing writers’, and he later described it as a tradition in which his precursors numbered Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti. One of three epigraphs in the catalogue for his first solo exhibition in 1963 was Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis, ‘as in painting, so too in poetry’, and Kitaj relished the enhanced significance of the writer’s image in his work. He pursued an informal series of writers’ portraits in the sixties, all executed in tonal paintings of caput mortuum, which came to include Kenneth Rexroth and John Wieners, W.H. Auden, Hugh McDiarmid (1965) [L92] and Creeley (1966) [L98] among others. Kitaj occasionally depicted writers within complex montages as with Benjamin in The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) (1972-73) [L159]. Following this pattern, Robert Hughes suggested that one of the figures in If Not, Not (1975-76) [L196] was a portrayal of T.S. Eliot. Kitaj denied this, however: ‘It doesn’t even look like him’.

Several caput mortuum studies were adopted as a suitable subject for screenprints. Some of the portraits were probably made with this purpose in mind. First Series: Some Poets, which developed piecemeal between 1966 and 1970, came to include depictions of Rexroth, Wieners and Auden, all of them adapted from related tonal paintings. This painting of Rexroth and Wieners was separated into two finished prints, each with their own allusions and conceits.