R. B. Kitaj: From Fragments: 1958–1975

In the first half of his career, R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) gathered and sifted a vast array of source material. It included film stills, illustrations from old books and magazines, book covers and spines, and thumbnail images from art historical scholarship. In pictures, drawings and collage, he made these fragments into new images dense with juxtaposition and ambiguity. His own work also became source material; many of his collages include torn-up reproductions of his paintings and, briefly in 1961–62, he cut-up and collaged some of his own paintings.

With paintings, drawings and collages, R. B. Kitaj: From Fragments 1958–1975 explores the unexpected ways that Kitaj combined source imagery in the early years of his career. It provides a fresh overview of an important period in the artist’s work and includes significant large-scale paintings and collages.

Throughout his career Kitaj made arresting, self-conscious combinations of style and subject-matter. In the early ’sixties he developed an ambitious kind of modernist history painting that sometimes incorporated collaged elements of found imagery. The process of working from fragments had begun to take shape, and when he began to make screenprints in 1964, his activity in papier collé shifted to the making of collages. Between 1965 and 1975, even as they eschew direct collage, Kitaj’s paintings transcribed and combined fragmentary sources in a process that gave rise to strange and beautiful images. Only when his focus shifted to life drawing in the mid-seventies did he begin to seek a more integrated, less ruptured art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication that includes new research into the artist’s sources and his bricolage technique. Piano Nobile represents the R. B. Kitaj Estate.