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 right-hand side of the picture. The upper section of a grand, ornamental lamp post is depicted at the far left-hand side. The tree on the right-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.

This work is the transfer drawing for a related soft-ground etching (fig. 1). The print specialist Jennifer Ramkalawon described the etching as ‘exquisite’. This drawing shows the imagery of the print in reverse. 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 transfer drawing was probably traced for soft-ground etching in Crommelynck’s studio, as were several other soft-ground etchings (mostly self-portraits) that Kitaj made in Paris. The colour in this drawing corresponds with the atmospheric washes of plate tone that appear in the soft-ground etching. Yet this colour charges the subject with a richness of modelling and formal variety that is autographic and distinctive from the print. Despite its function in the print-making process, this transfer drawing was made on Kitaj’s favoured type of hand-made, pulpy, oat-coloured paper. He also signed the work, and these factors suggest a degree of creative ambition beyond the narrow purpose which the drawing fulfilled.

In soft-ground etching, a plate is prepared with a highly responsive ‘soft’ wax ground. The ground is covered with a piece of paper and the artist draws onto the paper directly. The design is thereby transferred through the paper and into the surface of the ground, and the plate is then etched in an acid bath. Place de la Concorde is the original, autograph ‘transfer drawing’ that was used to prepare the etching plate.