Ronald Brooks Kitaj was an American painter born in Cleveland, Ohio, who had a significant influence on British Pop Art. Before receiving formal art training at the Cooper Union, New York, he worked as a merchant seaman and travelled extensively in Europe. He studied in Vienna at the Akademie der bildenden Künste and received a GI grant to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, and then at the RCA, 1960-62.
Kitaj's personal brand of figurative art broke stylistic conventions, and he became known as a catalyst for many artists associated with the Pop Art movement. He met the screenprinter Chris Prater in 1962 and began working with collage print. He held his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and his first British solo at Marlborough Fine Art, London.
Read more...
Kitaj was responsible for coining the phrase "the School of London" in his catalogue introduction to the exhibition titled "The Human Clay" at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. He taught at various London art schools, including Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts and the Slade School, and was a Guest Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 1967-68.
In the 1980s, Kitaj's work showed a heightened obsession with Jewish history and individuality. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in 1984 and a full member in 1990, the first American to be so honoured since John Singer Sargent at the end of the 19th century. His Tate Gallery Retrospective of 1994 received harsh criticism from London art critics, and Kitaj blamed them for the death of his wife Sandra soon after. He left London for California, spending the last decade of his life in Los Angeles.
Kitaj was awarded the Golden Lion for painting at the Venice Biennale of 1995. The majority of his later output depicted images of himself and his late wife Sandra. He presented an exhibition of 100 works at Marlborough, New York, in 2000, under the title 'How to Reach 67 in Jewish Art'. Examples of his work are in collections both public and private around the UK and in America and elsewhere, including the collection of Dundee University and the Ben Uri in London.
Hide content again
