In large paintings made in the ’seventies, R. B. Kitaj invented veiled narratives with luscious colour and compositions redolent of Hollywood and Cubism alike.
InSight No. 200
R. B. Kitaj, Malta (For Chris & Rose), 1974
In his regular column for Time magazine on 20 October 1975, the critic Robert Hughes said he had discovered ‘a new form of history-painting’. He was writing about R. B. Kitaj’s (1932–2007) painting Malta (for Chris & Rose), which was then on display in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition European Painting in the Seventies. Besides Kitaj, the exhibition included other adopted Londoners — Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud — and a variety of continental artists — Jean Dubuffet, Jean Hélion and Joan Miró among others. With his usual pithy nonchalance, Hughes wrote that Kitaj like ‘nobody else […] can bring off the mixture of lavish Matissean color, literary irony and veiled narrative — like disconnected stills from a Fritz Lang film’.
The exhibition also included Kitaj’s friend David Hockney, who told the curator Maurice Tuchman that Kitaj was ‘the artist who influenced me most strongly as an artist and a person’. But while Hockney’s work became less literary after he went to California in 1964, and had by the mid-seventies become increasingly naturalistic, Tuchman suggested that Kitaj’s had ‘contrarily become more literary, complex, and imaginative, yet more lyrically abstracted’. Robert Hughes took up this vein in The Shock of the New (1980), the book which followed his eponymous television series: ‘Kitaj’s enterprise is to see history through the lens of other media — books, photos, snatches from film and similar “raw” sources — combined in a painted montage.’ Although Hughes occasionally found such complexity disagreeable, ‘irritating as any over-footnoted text’, a picture was always ‘saved’ by Kitaj’s ‘visual flair and obsessively practised, virtuoso drawing’.
Between the early ’seventies and 1980 or so, Kitaj’s large paintings usually began with exploratory charcoal drawing on the canvas itself. In 1977, three pictures — Marrano (The Secret Jew), After Giotto and The Jew Etc. — were illustrated in their ‘first state’. A refined charcoal drawing had outlines that established the composition and delicate smudging that modelled the shadows and suggested tonality. There followed a kind of oil painting that complemented the initial drawing and made it a visible element in the finished work. The paint was applied thinly and transparently, even as the colours remained tangible and richly saturated. In stark contrast, localised areas were comparatively thick, dry and opaque, and Kitaj sometimes dragged the paint to create a scumble that partially revealed the underlayers. Although Kitaj had combined drawing and painting in the ’sixties, his work of the ’seventies differed inasmuch as the paint — previously opaque — became transparent, and the incipient drawing — which was often made previously with oil crayons — became a more assertive, distinct ingredient in his compositions.
Hughes wrote of ‘veiled narrative’ in Malta (for Chris & Rose), and the title holds two clues to the scenario it depicts. The dedication acknowledges Chris and Rose Prater, both of whom appear in the montage: Chris wears high black boots and riding jodhpurs, evocative of a circus master, while Rose reclines on one of the ledges that descend towards the swimming pool. They ran Kelpra Studios which collaborated with a large number of artists — among them Kitaj, Hockney, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley — most notably to make screenprints. Chris Prater was especially renowned for his dexterity as a stencil cutter, a crucial skill in the screenprint process, and it has been suggested that the knives in Malta (for Chris & Rose)allude to this talent.
The Praters also collaborated with Victor Pasmore, who had moved in 1966 to a house called Dar Gamri near Gudja in Malta. Chris and Rose regularly holidayed there with Victor and his wife Wendy, and on one occasion the Pasmores also hosted Kitaj. Discussing Malta (for Chris & Rose) with the print historian Pat Gilmore, Chris Prater said he thought the tall central figure was Victor Pasmore. Once a traditional farmhouse, Dar Gamri has domestic architecture that combines venerable rubble walls and cast concrete. Sculptural interventions include freestanding stone columns and, in the pool courtyard, a broad staircase. These distinctive surroundings are reconfigured in the architectonic structure of Kitaj’s painting, which cubistically collapses in contrasting lines of perspectival recession.
As Robert Hughes observed, artworks like Malta (for Chris & Rose) have the stature of history painting, and Kitaj used his multi-figure compositions to tell stories or to evoke the interplay of semi-fictitious characters. In some cases, his narratives have become less veiled as time passes: sources come to be identified, memories recorded, subtexts deciphered, titles interpreted. But in many more cases, the narrative subtext is only dimly suggested and seldom emerges in its entirety.
In film theory, critics and directors sometimes speak about the ‘MacGuffin’. It is the element which ‘motivates the characters to indulge in their activities on screen’, as Alfred Hitchcock put it. The MacGuffin can be anything: a powerful weapon that has gone missing, a job offer, a secret of any kind. It drives the narrative forwards but is itself inconsequential. Kitaj’s paintings are full of MacGuffins, and the unspoken prompt often remains elusive even as it enables the artist to produce his filmic visual poetry.
One of Kitaj’s unexplained motifs is the mysterious figure, viewed in profile, moving across the scene, whose head is cropped at the upper edge. Where are they going? What do they hold in their hands? Such a figure is central to both Malta (for Chris & Rose) and a work of the previous year, Pacific Coast Highway (Across the Pacific). (Of the latter painting’s subject, Kitaj later said that ‘I cannot spell out the secret life of the picture — the painful parts.’) Whether or not the central figure is identifiable, it has peculiar impact: to crop their head at the upper edge of a wide tableau makes the panorama seem wider still. The physicality of these figures — their great size, the fall of their clothes, the dexterous drawing of their limbs — gives them an insistent presence, and they strut across the film-set of Kitaj’s imagination like Humphrey Bogart or Gloria Grahame. As with the script for a motion picture, it is the scenario rather than the destination that matters.
Images:
A still from Scarlet Street (1945, dir. Fritz Lang)
R. B. Kitaj, Marrano (The Secret Jew) (first state), 1976 © R. B. Kitaj Estate, courtesy of Piano Nobile, London
Chris Prater, 1970
The living room and gallery of Dar Gamri, Malta, 2017, photographed by Allan Mulcahy © RIBA Journal
R. B. Kitaj, Malta (for Chris & Rose) (detail)
R. B. Kitaj, Pacific Coast Highway (Across the Pacific), 1973, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 396.2 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT © R. B. Kitaj Estate, courtesy of Piano Nobile, London
Installation photograph of Malta (for Chris & Rose) in the exhibition R. B. Kitaj: From Fragments 1958–1975
