R. B. Kitaj

Soutine (After His Self-Portrait) is a freely executed painting from a portentous series of transcribed paintings and self-portraits made by R.B. Kitaj at the end of his life. As the title indicates, Kitaj used a self-portrait by Chaïm Soutine as a model for his painting (fig. 1). Kitaj was partly interested by Soutine as an outstanding painter of Jewish heritage, and he painted another work after Soutine entitled After Soutine’s Only Nude (1997–2000). Kitaj also transcribed self-portraits by Camille Pissarro, Galician-born photographer Weegee, Piet Mondrian and David Bomberg. Soutine (After His Self-Portrait) takes liberties with the source image, frankly reinventing it and using it for Kitaj’s own artistic purposes. The subject’s protuberant ears have been exaggerated; the surroundings have been cropped out and replaced with a new decorative schema in monochrome areas of blue, red and black; and the sickly yellow skin is modelled using an inventive mode of fine brushstrokes in red, green and blue. The unnaturalistic palette possibly alludes to an uneven colour reproduction of Soutine’s painting. Kitaj made frequent use of colour reproductions throughout his career and maintained a library of images gathered together from Life magazine in the forties.

Kitaj’s use of reproductions later in his career has been described by Tracy Bartley, his personal assistant between 1997 and 2007:

"The drawings would be moved up and down the walls as he was working on them. […] Next to each, or on the floor below, would be newspaper and magazine clippings that he used as source material. When not in active use, these clippings were kept carefully in a folder. Kitaj would sometimes use the same image many times over. He referred to them as a kind of “repertory company” – going back to the same “actors” again and again."

In addition to newspaper and magazine clippings, he also used reproductions of other artists’ work. After moving to Los Angeles in 1997, he made pictures whose titles overtly refer to originating artists including Rembrandt, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hungarian-born photographer André Kertesz, Paolo Uccello, Winslow Homer, composer and amateur painter Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Cézanne, Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Frank Auerbach, El Greco, American sculptor Elie Nadelman, Michelangelo, Delacroix, Lucian Freud, Vincent van Gogh, the photographer Brassaï, Marc Chagall, Cimabue, Giotto, Leon Kossoff and Alberto Giacometti.

Kitaj’s transcriptions from other artists’ self-portraits intersect with his recurrence to autobiography in his Los Angeles period. He pictured himself as the deity-like protagonist in many spiritual dramas alongside his late wife Sandra Fisher. Kitaj also painted a self-portrait from Frank Auerbach’s etching of him, and other works show him adapting the self-portraits of other artists for his own self-expression, including Self-portrait as Mondrian (2001–3), Self-portrait after Rembrandt’s Last Self-portrait (2004) and Red Self-portrait (After Masaccio) (2005). These are telling works that reveal the vicarious nature of Kitaj’s transcriptions. To some degree, each transcription of another artist’s work involved Kitaj performing as that artist. His allusions to both Rembrandt and Bomberg’s ‘last’ self-portraits reveal the portentous aspect of self-portraiture in Kitaj’s imagination at the time. Both his own self-portraits and transcriptions from other artists’ are loaded with Kitaj’s sense of mortality. These are the subtexts that underpin Soutine (After His Self-Portrait).