To coincide with Piano Nobile’s new exhibition, InSight investigates Kitaj’s sources for a painting from the early ’sixties.
InSight No. 197
R. B. Kitaj. Yamhill, 1961
In his memoirs, R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) remembered his first solo exhibition in February 1963 as a sell-out success. It won him immediate recognition from critics and institutions alike, and many pictures in the exhibition were quickly acquired then or over the next twenty years by museums in the UK and abroad. Isaac Babel Riding with Budyonny (1962) was bought by the Tate Gallery from the exhibition, and The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (1960) followed it in 1980. Gifts were made to Toledo Museum of Art in 1973 (Notes Towards a Definition of Nobody, 1961) and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 1976 (Austro-Hungarian Foot Solider, 1961). Tedeum (1963) was bought by the National Museum of Wales and Warburg as Maenad (1962) by the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf. In 1980, Hamburger Kunsthalle bought Reflections on Violence (1962). Many paintings were bought from the exhibition, or afterwards, by significant private collectors: Washington Allston in Rome by the architect Colin St John Wilson; Budyonny by the exhibition’s organiser Tony Reichardt.
Few critics failed to remark the diversity of subject-matter and styles in the exhibition. John Russell wrote in ARTnews that Kitaj’s ‘imagination is everywhere on the jump.’ As the artist explained to the curator Maurice Tuchman in 1965, ‘I would like to subvert the outstanding prescriptions for what [art] ought to be.’ In practice, this involved a series of collisions calculated to deliver the greatest possible sense of rupture. Kitaj was interested not in making pictures in different styles consecutively, but rather juxtaposing styles within a single painting. And the subjects of that painting were often drawn from a variety of disparate sources.
Few artists of the period had either the appetite or technical range to attempt this critical form of painting. His friend and Royal College of Art contemporary David Hockney was a rare fellow traveller. Like Kitaj, a worldly companion five years his senior, Hockney unpicked the threads that bind together technique and style. This resulted in paintings such as A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style (1961, Private Collection). Title and date were inscribed as a framing device and functioned as a caption within the painting itself. The ‘Semi-Egyptian’ style alludes to the depiction of the procession in profile. And the figures, along with the clouds and rain that encompass them, are realised with pure and literal mark-making. Along with artists elsewhere such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter who reacted against the constraints of non-representational art, Kitaj and Hockney were striving to create a new kind of non-abstract painting.
One of the paintings in Kitaj’s first exhibition was Yamhill. In the accompanying catalogue the picture’s name was caveated as an ‘interim title’, like a manuscript in draft, but it was quickly sold and the title stuck. Kitaj called his exhibition ‘Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary’, and Yamhill was a picture with commentary. He used the catalogue entry to name his sources, principal among them the art historian Gerta Calmann’s article ‘The Picture of Nobody’, which was published by the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in the year before Kitaj made his painting. An allegorical figure which fell from use in the seventeenth century, ‘Nobody’ is guilty of everything but cannot answer for himself; his lips are sealed by a padlock. In Yamhill, Kitaj depicted Nobody as a recumbent, comatose figure at the lower right-hand edge.
Kitaj was a Democrat with liberal instincts and likely adopted ‘Nobody’ to represent an abused minority. The title of the painting, ‘Yamhill’, evokes a county in Oregon. As Kitaj wrote, ‘the building on the left was meant to stand for an American County Courthouse’ — a symbol of repressive authority. When Sotheby Parke-Bernet auctioned it in 1967, the painting was tellingly called ‘Yamhill County Court House and Jail’. It is possible that Kitaj thought of ‘Nobody’ as the voiceless Indigenous population — the Native American Yamhelas tribe — which was forced from its eponymous land in the mid-nineteenth century. Or, as the art historian Ben Thomas suggested recently, the recumbent figure may represent ‘the civil rights struggle of African Americans’. Kitaj’s commentary was silent on this point. He simply noted that the source image for the court house was published by a London-based art periodical in 1891. Research published in Piano Nobile’s exhibition catalogue shows that the line illustration in question depicted a Parisian villa in the (since renamed) Boulevard de Boulogne.
The other half of the picture, ‘the list-like area on the right’, was inspired by a black-and-white thumbnail illustration in a volume of the art historian Fritz Saxl’s Lectures. It reproduced an oracle — a table that predicts the progress of an illness — from the Tiberius Psalter, a medieval manuscript codex, and Kitaj freely adapted the ruled lines while omitting the figures of Life and Death. But he retained a small L-shaped portion of the upper figure’s banderol; perhaps he considered including the figures at some stage in the painting’s development. The imagery adapted in Yamhill reflects the wide range of Kitaj’s imagination at a formational period in his career: illustrations from Warburgian histories of iconography; chance encounters with images printed in journals of the previous century; art in all its forms from antiquity onwards. Rather than become trapped in his sources, he capably reinvented them and made them anew in an original, ruptured mode of painting that continues to defy categorisation.
Images:
R. B. Kitaj, Washington Allston in Rome, 1961, oil on canvas, 19 x 15.5 cm
R. B. Kitaj, Notes Towards a Definition of Nobody, 1961, oil on canvas, 122 x 223.5 cm, Toledo Museum of Art © R. B. Kitaj Estate, courtesy of Piano Nobile, London
A page from The Portfolio: An Artistic Periodical, vol. XXII (1891)
The Tiberius Psalter, c. 1000–1100, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius C VI (folio 6v)
Installation photograph of R. B. Kitaj: From Fragments 1958–1975
