In 1958 he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and then to the Royal College of Art at the same time as David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. He became lifelong friends with Hockney.
Through the 1960s he taught at the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art. Kitaj had a significant influence on British pop art with his work featuring collages, prints and paintings but he was also recognised as a superb draughtsman. He often used political history, classical art and literature references in his work, assuming a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with prevailing historical narratives.
In his later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish heritage with reference to the Holocaust and influences from Jewish writers such as Kafka. His paintings moved firmly away from pop art and he viewed his collages and prints as inferior to his figurative canvases. A second retrospective was staged at the Tate Gallery in 1994 but the reviews in London were almost universally negative and the British press savagely attacked him and his work.
Kitaj took the criticism very personally believing it to be pure vitriol based on anti-American and Anti-Semitic views. Just afterwards, his second wife died of a rare disease which caused severe inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. He blamed the British press for her death, stating that “they were aiming for me, but they got her instead.” Hockney concurred and said that he too believed the London art critics had killed her. Many people observed though that Kitaj could not separate his personal life from his art.
Kitaj returned to the US in 1997 and settled in Los Angeles writing that “London died for me and I returned home to California to live among sons and grandsons – It was a very good move and now I begin my 3rd and (last?) act!” He died in Los Angeles eight days before his 75th birthday. The coroner ruled that the cause of death was suicide by suffocation.
Buy his artwork from mainstream galleries here.
