Whistler vs. Ruskin (Novella in Terre Verte, Yellow and Red) was selected by Kitaj for inclusion in his retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1994. In the context of that exhibition, he authored the following text to accompany the painting:

"Anyone who doesn't know about the famous and absurd Whistler-Ruskin trial a century ago should look it up because it's lots of fun and even though it ruined both of them. Whistler was bankrupted and Ruskin entered his final madness. The issues, aesthetics and dramas are still quite electric today, at least to me, but cockeyed and complicated by many of the subsequent heavyweight brawls in modernist history which overturn the Whistler-Ruskin decision time and again as, for instance, the theory called art for art's sake gets sanctified, damned, reborn, etc. until hell freezes over. My subtitle above means to say that the literary stigma in modernism is no more of a blasphemy than the musical analogy introduced by Whistler and perfected by some abstraction. The painting is based mainly on my fellow Ohioan, [George] Bellows, of course. Not on the picture I grew up with at the Cleveland Museum (Stag at Sharkey's), but the more wooden Dempsey and Firpo [1924], at the Whitney [Museum of American Art, New York]. Henry McBride, an art critic I liked in my youth, found the likenesses disappointing. What a fight that must have been - even Babe Ruth was there for the whole four minutes it lasted. I've followed boxing all my life and I've taken liberties with some of the strange events of those four minutes (it was Dempsey, the eventual winner, who was knocked out of the ring), but even though Whistler won his case, we're not sure he did, are we? Anyway, this painting is also about London American coxcombs getting our chops in, and about the way painting may be said to extend its aesthetic reach or punch beyond the sacred picture plane, into time, historical stream and vivid lineage or bloodline: the Ruskin figure is based on the amazing torso (which I've upended) of a Rembrandt Christ (the Munich 'Descent from the Cross'); which itself is based on a famous picture by his fellow Lowlander, Rubens. Rembrandt comments on this transcription of his. He wrote that he wanted to express the 'deepest inward emotion'. I think I projected my deepest emotion into the referee, which is a self-portrait, by an old body of the drawing school Ruskin founded at Oxford."