Death of Jewish-Viennese Artist, R.B. Kitaj
The documentary Servus Adieu Shalom: Jewish Life In Vienna highlights the many accomplished Jews who spent time in Vienna, including Sigmund Freud, Theodore Herzel, Gustav Mahler, Billy Wilder, and Franz Kafka. While producing their world-renowned work, these men were surrounded by highbrow coffeehouse conversation and the city’s ornate and stunning architecture. The documentary not only offers a history of Jews in Vienna but also tries to explain how Viennese and Jewish cultures have complemented one another to positively influence some of the world’s greatest thinkers and creators to this day.
One of the more recent creators to be influenced by Jewish-Viennese culture is a key figure in British Pop Art, R.B. Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE), who died last year at the age of 74 in his home in Los Angeles. His obituary in the New York Times details that he was the first American artist to be elected to the Royal Academy since John Singer Sargent, and retrospectives of his work have shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
But before he became friends with Allen Ginsberg or worked in a “Van Gogh yellow studio,” Kitaj was just a dissatisfied kid named Ronald Brooks from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Knowing he was destined for something more than the typical middle-American lifestyle, he dropped Ron and adopted the more sophisticated and exotic name of his Viennese stepfather, Kitaj. Then he headed to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he and his art were greatly influenced by the local culture.
Perhaps significantly, Kafka, who also spent time in Vienna, was a major influence on Kitaj, who the New York Times praised for having been able to draw from a range of thinkers and artists, “from Titian to Cezanne.”
Kitaj himself would have been wary of such critical praise. He distrusted, even despised, art critics. In fact, at one point, he accused them of murder. The Tate Gallery in London held a retrospective for Kitaj that received across-the-board horrendous reviews. Immediately afterwards, Kitaj’s second wife, Sandra Fisher, died of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Heartbroken and livid, Kitaj believed the critics’ harsh words were responsible for the tragedy, and he took revenge by painting “The Critic Kills,” which depicted the art critic as a monstrous, yellow-tongued creature.
This clash was just the peak of a long-raging feud. During the age of abstract expressionism, Kitaj was not producing what critics like Clement Greenberg wanted. At a time when it was cool to be abstract, Kitaj wanted to be literal, painting about specific events, attitudes, and experiences. In his words he wanted a more “social art.”
This idea of a “social art” seems to have come from Kitaj’s understanding of his Jewish identity, which in addition to Viennese culture, was a great source of artistic inspiration. He spoke freely about how being Jewish influenced his art, particularly the sense of exile, of being connected to a people but not rooted in a place. In his book,
In this Diasporist mode, Kitaj found connection as well as displacement. He was not just a Jew, but one of many Jews; and when Time magazine wrote that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive,” Kitaj made his identity clear, responding, “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived.”
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