Monsignor Ungar is a vivid, freshly painted head-and-shoulders portrait from an early phase of R.B. Kitaj’s career. The flattened, blurred quality of the paintwork may imply that a source photograph was used. The scraped, blended brushstrokes in the face are especially suggestive. Areas on the forehead and around the mouth are unpainted, the canvas tone being used to create highlights in the picture’s scheme of tonal relations. The back of the subject’s head disappears into the orange background, the heightened colour of which is distinctively non-naturalistic. The sitter’s face is characterful, with partially closed eyes, a wide mouth with thin lips, a broad chin, and spectacles the shape of which appears to have been distorted. The left-hand lens seems to ripple across the eyebrow.

The sitter’s white collar and black cassock suggest his identity. This painting depicts a Roman Catholic priest that Kitaj knew in Vienna. Kitaj lived there for a year in 1951 and 1952, studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste and courting his first wife Elsi whom he met in an anatomical dissection class. He became acquainted with Monsignor Ungar through a friend, painter and compatriot who lived in the city:

I was a searcher I guess, and the Catholic faith attracted me in Vienna through my closest comrade at the Akademie, a much older American, an aristocratic ex-soldier called Frederick Leybourne Sprague. He lived in Schubert’s rooms and moved in a Roman Catholic milieu into which I was drawn when I wasn’t courting.

In the eighties and nineties, when his interest in Jewish culture had matured into an obsession, Kitaj spoke of the Monsignor on several occasions. His heightened interest in antisemitism and Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism, such as the composer Gustav Mahler, led Kitaj to reconsider Ungar. In 1981, Kitaj said: ‘[Sprague] got me as far as weekly private sessions with one of the loveliest men I’ve ever come across, Monsignor Ungar, a leading Roman Catholic scholar in Vienna. (I painted a little portrait of Ungar.)’ In 1997, Kitaj went on:

I believe he was a Jew, wasn’t he? I used to visit him in his austere little apartment and we had some kind of gentle dialogue about the concept of God. I remember being tempted by his Catholic faith but I can’t remember if he tried to convert me. Convert me from what? I had no Jewish faith to convert from. But maybe the good Monsignor didn’t either?

The date of Monsignor Ungar has been disputed. Kitaj had no recollection of making paintings when he lived in Vienna, but he did remember buying Schmincke oil colours, which allows for the possibility that the work was painted in 1951 or 1952. This is most likely since Kitaj was personally acquainted with the sitter in those years. It was dated to 1951 when reproduced in 1994, and dated to 1952 when reproduced in 1996. It has also been dated to 1958, in which year Kitaj briefly returned to Vienna for the summer while he was a student at the Ruskin Drawing School in Oxford.