R. B. Kitaj: From Fragments 1958–1975

1 October - 27 November 2026

  • 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 his paintings, drawings, collages and screenprints, 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.
  • R. B. Kitaj, Yamhill, 1961

    R. B. Kitaj

    Yamhill, 1961

    Oil on canvas
    101.6 x 127 cm
    40 x 50 in
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  • As a teenager Kitaj was ‘besotted’ with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and in the ’fifties and ’sixties his art echoed the poem’s chaotic, disjointed quality. The Waste Land was appended with notes about its sources and Kitaj too began to acknowledge the books and illustrations he plundered for imagery. This activity defined his first solo exhibition held in London in 1963. It was called Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary and the accompanying catalogue furnished many paintings with bibliographical references. In Yamhill (1961), the figure with padlocked lips revives the sixteenth-century iconography of Nobody — a victim of blame unable to answer his accusers — which was suggested by an article published a year earlier in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. Referring to the remarkably varied materials and subject-matter in Kitaj’s work, the critic John Russell wrote in 1963: ‘His imagination is everywhere on the jump.’

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  • R. B. Kitaj, Untitled [Heart/I've Balled Every Waitress in This Club], 1966

    R. B. Kitaj

    Untitled [Heart/I've Balled Every Waitress in This Club], 1966

    Collage on paperboard
    81.3 x 55.9 cm
    32 x 22 in
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  • Around 1965, Kitaj largely stopped using papier collé in paintings and instead, over the next decade, he used the technique to make collages. These works served as material for his screenprints, which he made in collaboration with Chris Prater of Kelpra Studios who is depicted along with his wife Rose in Kitaj’s painting Malta (for Chris & Rose) (1974). While the collages playfully push fragmentation to new extremes, the paintings of this time compose and transcribe found material more coherently. His painting Still (The Other Woman) includes a profile lifted from a painting by Picasso, probably Les Demoiselles des Avignon. Only when his focus shifted to life drawing in the mid-seventies did Kitaj seek even greater spatial and thematic continuity. Except for a brief revival of the practice in 1996–2002, he altogether ceased to use collage.
  • R. B. Kitaj, Purple Tower (from Art and Tech.), 1969

    R. B. Kitaj

    Purple Tower (from Art and Tech.), 1969

    Graphite and pastel on paper with collage
    57 x 39.3 cm
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  • R. B. Kitaj, Untitled [Horses], 1970

    R. B. Kitaj

    Untitled [Horses], 1970

    Untitled [Horses], 1970
    Oil on canvas
    30 x 143.5 cm
    11 3/4 x 56 1/2 in
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  • Like Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot and other modernists before him, Kitaj drew from the heap of broken images and in turn made a lasting and expressive contribution to it. Beneath such pointedly disparate images lay the cataclysms of war, forced displacement, genocide and nuclear weapons. Where Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and others used collage and quoted imagery to critique the advent and uses of mass media, Kitaj’s fragments register existential ruptures in the history of the twentieth-century. As he titled a small painting of 1968, Kitaj’s approach in the first half of his career truly amounted to a ‘cult of the fragment’.
  • R. B. Kitaj, Malta (for Chris & Rose), 1974

    R. B. Kitaj

    Malta (for Chris & Rose), 1974

    Oil and collage on canvas
    153 x 245.8 cm
    60 1/4 x 96 3/4 in
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  • R. B. Kitaj, Abstraction Création, 1969/2000

    R. B. Kitaj

    Abstraction Création, 1969/2000

    Oil and charcoal on screenprint on canvas
    152.4 x 120.7 cm
    60 x 47 1/2 in
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