Kitaj

This is a revised and expanded edition of the highly praised study of the art of R.B. Kitaj, the first monograph on his work. It provides the fullest visual documentation to date of his paintings, pastels and drawings, and arises from an extraordinary series of interviews and letters between the artist and the author and from the artist's active participation in the design. The monograph concludes with a personal testament by Kitaj in the form of prefaces to some of his paintings, specially written for this book.

American born, Kitaj has lived half his life in London. He is a controversial figure and enjoys a considerable audience for the protean complexity of his pictures, having been elected to both the Institute of Arts and Letters in New York and the Royal Academy, London (the first American since Sargent). In his wide-ranging art he has attempted to rework the grand alliance between books, poetry and painting, seeking to accommodate historical, political and sexual urgencies within modernism. Around 1970, two even larger passions emerged: a concentration on drawing the human form (under the spell of what Kitaj was convinced was a neglected modern legacy) and the exciting discovery of his own sense of Jewishness. It led him to an immersion in Jewish studies and enigmas, which has changed the course of his art.Kitaj quotes Cezanne's famous ambition, "To do Poussin over again, after Nature,' and says he would like 'To do Cezanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz.' Kitaj's original and restless pictures reflect the terms of his own life to a confessional degree not often found in modern painting.