ART
Golden oldies
BRYAN ROBERTSON
It is easy to write informatively about R. B. Kitaj, the American artist, to be fairly entertaining about him and his exploits, and totally ignore his painting. For one thing, the work has a peculiarly distanced, some- what chilly, and alienating remoteness about it: in effect not unlike watching old movies on rv or suddenly coming across an enthralling if faded item on newsprint found at the bottom of a drawer in which one had been searching for something else. And there is his name; in itself sugges- tive of some figment of a novelist's imagina- tion.
Kitaj, in fact, is really rather like an in- telligent novelist's concept of an artist. Born in Ohio, moved around America from the proverbial mid-West origins, merchant navy, exposure to exotic parts, national service " Bill of Rights ticket to England and Oxford, the Ruskin School of Drawing, lively ex- changes with Edgar Wind, the art historian, Royal College and the gradual emergence as the seminal begetter of the freshly invig- orated (from American sources of subject matter and approach) wave of Hockney- Allen lones-Hoshier-Phillips-Procktor figura- tive painting, seminars back at Berkeley, etc. To say nothing of the fact that he is also a kind of amiable marxist-anarchist, book collector, an erratic but far from light- weight self-taught scholar, student of poli- tics, an affectionate rememberer of old nostalgic burn-ups that took place in the more private sectors of public life years before his time, a reader of Wittgenstein, etc. etc.
His large show at the New London Gal- lery called, like the Moussorgsky score, 'Pic- tures from an Exhibition' (with characteristic double-entendre since it comprises the size- able remnants of a larger show which toured several continental museums), is his first in London for seven years: there is nothing for sale except some recent portfolios of prints (including souvenirs of a London blitz which Kitaj never knew but which has clearly touched him in odd ways) because everything was sold ages ago, and there's a waiting list, internationally, for his entire production for a good many years to come.
First, Kitaj is an immensely skilled per- former: he has a sharp sense of presenta- tion and format, with remarkable powers c: draughtsmanship to back up this dramatic flair. Second. the work never quite comes up to expectations, because cool, intelligent, re- sourceful and bright as it unfailingly is, there is an oddly chalky. devitalised mood of yesteryear, of faded souvenirs, hovering in the air whist' makes all his paintings and drawings look like collector's items in the sense that they've been at the bottom of a dark drawer (Kitaj's imagination) for rather a long time with musty results. Third, although the figurative work—baseball players, Francis Bacon in purple homburg hat looking like a 'twenties tycoon caught with his mistress (a dishevelled figure re- clines nearby), Burgess Meredith as George (why no inseparable Lemmy?). The Ohio Gang. Walter Lippmann and so on—is vivid and explicit, it is quite often fragmented. split up or otherwise distanced in mildly irritating ways.
Fourth, although the structures in which these figurative elements are 'presented' or embedded are resourceful and painstakingly contrived, they have the cumulative effect of lay-out in two dimensions rather than composition in depth. The result is a mono- tonous flatness and thinness, not unlike an endless exhibition of lithographs. The paint- ings also lack the one crucial dimension of paint. One is aware of -coloured areas, care- fully mapped out and charted: an intricate interplay between planes of perspective, but no stuff, no matter, you might just as well be watching a magic lantern slide show. The extreme stylistic self-consciousness is frankly irritating. You are never sure if it is'R. B. Kitaj drawing like R. B. Kitaj or whether it is 'R. B. Kitaj' drawing like Edwin Dickin- son or Charles Sheeler or a Chicago news- paper cartoonist, operative c. 1943.
Having registered all those complaints with the management (R. B. Kitaj Inc), I must also say that, with Francis Bacon and Edward Burra, Kitaj is the best figurative artist working in England. The show is full of pleasures, surprises, high pictorial intelli- gence, and curiosities. The only trouble is that, like Bacon, Kitaj doesn't really com- prehend or apprehend the modern spirit in art of the twentieth century. so that he uses modernity as a self-aware device or dodge, coldly from the outside and wholly conceptually: it is never felt with the heart and gut, never truly experienced. Finally the abstract qualities involved are never greater than those of the highest grade pictorial journalism, and that is not quite enough, and certainly not to be superseded by astute comment on the very principles which Kitaj does not enjoin.
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