Place de la Concorde depicts elements taken from the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It includes an imagined view looking west towards the Eiffel Tower and past the monumental obelisk, one of the ancient Egyptian Luxor obelisks, which stands at the centre of the thoroughfare. The composition aligns the obelisk and the Eiffel Tower, and they are fused together in a striking, uncanny silhouette. The statue de Brest is depicted on the left-hand side of the picture. The upper section of a grand, ornamental lamp post is depicted at the far right-hand side. The tree on the left-hand side is bare of leaves and the drawing was presumably made in mid-winter. Kitaj composed this imagery with stark clarity, depicting the elements of the picture in a flat, frontal attitude and arranging them sequentially in their own space. This clarity betrays the pictorial illusionism of the work and it was often Kitaj’s intention to reveal the processes or technical constitution of his art.

The prints specialist Jennifer Ramkalawon has described this etching as ‘exquisite’. Kitaj began work by making a charcoal drawing (Private Collection, Paris), which Marco Livingstone described as a ‘preparatory drawing’. Between spring 1982 and April 1983, Kitaj lived with his partner Sandra Fisher at 61 rue Galande in Paris—a period which he almost immediately mythologised as ‘the year I lived in Paris’. Life drawing and a growing sense of Jewish identity were two strong impetuses in his work at the time. Whilst there, he worked closely with the printmaker Aldo Crommelynck, who had collaborated with Picasso and who introduced David Hockney to an efficient method of colour printing. This print and several other soft-ground etchings (mostly self-portraits) were printetd in Crommelynck’s studio.