Los Angeles No. 16 (Bed) is an autobiographical fantasy from the final phase of R.B. Kitaj’s career, a period he spent in Los Angeles from July 1997 until his death in 2007. The work depicts Kitaj himself at the upper right-hand corner, in a kneeling posture, and his late wife, the artist Sandra Fisher (1947–1994), on the left-hand side. Both are shown in profile, which lends considerably to the picture’s schematic formality. They are separated by a bed, which is viewed from an elevated perspective and fills the centre of the picture. The two figures join hands in a gesture of communion. Both are naked, their features exaggerated, the limbs swollen. The palette is wildly non-naturalistic, with unmodulated areas of bright green, red, blue, purple and orange, and this contributes to the picture’s intensely literal, hallucinatory imagery.

When this work was first exhibited at L.A. Louver in 2003, as part of the Los Angeles series, Kitaj contributed to the exhibition catalogue the following explanation:

"This painting is a sequel to an amazingly prophetic picture of mine painted 20 years ago called I Married An Angel (named after the Rodgers and Hart musical). Of course, the arms bonding Sandra and me are more of a stretch now in Los Angeles."

Kitaj evidently considered I Married An Angel to be ‘prophetic’ because, in retrospect, it seemed to foretell Sandra Fisher’s death and her subsequent apotheosis as a supernatural talisman in his life. His reference to a ‘stretch’ is both metaphorical and literal. His bond with Fisher was intimately connected to his attachment to London, and he commented on several occasions that ‘London died for me when Sandra died’. From beyond the grave she became inaccessible to him, but even more so when he left London for Los Angeles where his memory of her was dimmed by distance. A literal ‘stretch’ is created by extending the arms in his Los Angeles series pictures.

For Los Angeles No. 16 (Bed), Kitaj adapted several aspects of composition and detail from I Married An Angel (fig. 1). The figures were stripped of their clothes and Kitaj’s appearance in the later work is aged by a hoary white beard and sunken facial features. The same composition was adopted for several other works in the Los Angeles series, including Los Angeles No. 1 (2000) and Los Angeles No. 3 (2000). Both paintings show a male and female figure in profile, Kitaj and Fisher, their bodies separated on either side of the picture space yet conjoined by their augmented, outstretched arms. These contortions of the figure were sanctioned by Cézanne’s bathers (fig. 2), which Kitaj had long appreciated for their eerie, unnatural handling of human bodies.

One abiding concern throughout the Los Angeles series was Kitaj’s sense of mortality. Speaking in 1997, he referred to himself as belonging to a ‘Geriatric Avant-Garde’. He used autobiography and self-exegesis as a tool in his pictures from the early eighties onwards, and a growing sense of age was apparent in his ‘Bad’ series of pictures made between 1990 and 1993. His Los Angeles series continued this theme, with many works – including Los Angeles No. 16 (Bed) – construing Kitaj as a ravished, white-haired figure. Giving Los Angeles No. 16 (Bed) as an example, the art historian Mirjam Knotter has noted how ‘in the Los Angeles series, Sandra is a timeless angel who never ages, with variously colored hair and wings, while Kitaj grows older in his depictions.’ The series included twenty-nine numbered works, which were painted between 2000 and 2005.

A preference for producing cycles of work allowed Kitaj to elaborate his ideas, sustaining overarching themes across several pictures, even as he varied his chosen subject from picture to picture. The Los Angeles series is similarly eclectic to Walter Sickert’s late ‘Echoes’, made in the late twenties and thirties, which involved the broad translation of nineteenth-century prints and photographs. In both cases, sentimental (Sickert) or personal (Kitaj) subjects were treated in a detached, painterly, formally exaggerated mode. In Kitaj’s case, unmodulated colour was set against areas of otherwise untouched white canvas, thereby allowing the marks and colours to resonate and jar against neighbouring sections of paint. Los Angeles No. 16 (Bed) is a characteristic example of this approach to colour, using heightened contrasts and an exaggeratedly flattened finish to emphasise the tableau.