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Looking back in anger.
A Fortnightly Review
Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter
by R. B. Kitaj, with an introduction by David Hockney
Schirmer/Mosel 2017 | 384pp | $40.00 £36.00
By ALAN WALL.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with credits, captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read captioned information, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice.
One of the striking features of modern art is that it frequently does not look ‘finished’ in the way of the post-Renaissance art that preceded it. It can seem provisional, even sketchy. There are precedents for this. Rembrandt grew less and less interested in finishing canvases as he grew older. One of his clients, having paid a hefty sum, sent the painting back and asked if the painter would mind finishing it. We see in some of the self-portraits how, having achieved his work on the central features, Rembrandt has no interest left for working on the hands at the margins. A brief diagram would have to do.
If Cézanne had become Kitaj’s artistic exemplar at the end of his life, he had been Picasso’s at the beginning of his. That difficult man, clambering off each day into the countryside at Arles or into his studio, was fumbling about, trying to discover the contours of modern art — a topography he was constructing, even in the moments of discovering it. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing,’ his widow said to the young disciples who turned up in 1906 to honour his memory. ‘You must understand: he didn’t know how to finish a painting.’
Not knowing how to finish a painting, or a book: this might not be a bad description of the modernist enterprise.
Not knowing how to finish a painting, or a book: this might not be a bad description of the modernist enterprise. Kafka’s writings (and Kafka was crucially important for Kitaj) explore their own state of radical incompletion. In many of Kitaj’s paintings the canvas showed through in sundry places to the end. But for those in Paris, who filled the salons and review pages, and knew only too well how to ‘finish a painting’, Cézanne was filled with contempt. He snarled. Flaubert was filled with the same contempt, and said so repeatedly, also frequently snarling, for the writers in Paris. Art at its most probing refuses the immediate fashions that garner praise.
In his exuberantly eccentric Second Diasporist Manifesto, Kitaj wrote: ‘“He who thinks that he has finished is finished.” — The Kotzker; never stop studying, and painting what Cézanne called “studies” and “researches.” UNFINISH, in the studio of an old isolate, beyond Art if possible, toward UNFINISHed life.’1 ‘The Kotzker’ here was Menahem Mendl of Kotz, the ‘Kotzker Rebbe’, another troublesome Jew. And ‘finish’ here, as an act of facile closure, seems to be, in effect, a state of intellectual bad faith. It is that act of completion which cuts off the source of questioning, the motivation of research, the imbalance in the question which perennially needs adjusting (and yet never can be, finally). And we have a curious prolepsis of this condition in William Blake. In his brief and unhappy time at the Royal Academy School, the young unteachable ranted at the eminent Keeper, Moser: ‘These things that you call Finish’d are not even Begun; how can they then be Finish’d? The man who does not know the Beginning never can know the end of Art.’
In anthropological terms, the canvas is a sacred space in its own right. What applies within its boundaries does not apply beyond them; it has that in common with the nave of a church, or a football pitch. That sacred space was where Kitaj chose to live for much of his life. His stated ambition was to draw better than any Jew who had ever lived. His engagement with modernism was life-long, but then so was his commitment to figurative art. He still believed that the easel painting was a revolutionary space, which had not been superseded by either installations or Duchampian ready-mades, though he loved Duchamp. Inside the sacred space of the canvas the struggle could continue, as Keats put it, ‘Betwixt Damnation and Impassion’d clay’. That the canvas becomes the designated area of negotiation between the sacred and the profane can be seen as one aspect of its ‘unfinishability’. What is going on here transcends any neat categories of ocular compartmentalization. It returns endlessly to that inexhaustible subject, the human clay.
He liked to quote Einstein: ‘I am a profoundly religious non-believer.’
So he liked to quote Einstein: ‘I am a profoundly religious non-believer.’ Kitaj was obsessively Jewish, in his own idiosyncratic way, but Yahweh seems to have disappeared somewhere between Kafka’s boundaries of mysticism and nihilism. Yahweh became like the canvas in some of Cézanne’s exercises in passage: there as a grounding to be merged into and risen out of, taking its colouring (chameleon-like) from our spiritual combat, the chiaroscuro of our intellectual itinerary. Our delineations of spiritual truth can only be oblique. And here Kitaj might be largely following Scholem. Any god whom we might seek to formulate, the Almighty himself has already transcended. The question is not whether one believes in God, but whether one can accede to or acclaim any formulation of ‘God’ that is intellectually available. In one sense, all studies of religion finally come down to questions of philology. Any manifestation of God in art or theology can only ever glancingly touch that kabbalistic Ein-sof, which is the infinite power. The Lord might utter himself forth as sefirot, or emanations, but an emanation is neither a definition nor a portrait. All we can ever discover are traces, either in a text or within the sacred space of the canvas. A mystery explained is a mystery betrayed or exploded. You are permitted to provide a commentary, even a critique, but never an explanation. All philology ultimately approaches ‘the word of God’, the way Nicodemus approached in the dark to find out what these seemingly salvific words might actually mean.
The classic artistic response to fragmentation is montage. The advantage of montage is a universal allusiveness not just to one tradition, but to all of them.
Kitaj was a visual artist in an age of fragmentation, and he never forgot the fact. The classic artistic response to fragmentation is montage. The advantage of montage is a universal allusiveness not just to one tradition, but to all of them simultaneously. Its danger is a slick eclecticism. At the height of his powers, in a painting like ‘The Hispanist’, Kitaj seemed able to recapture the vividness of the pictorial portrait at its greatest, together with an acknowledgment that the canvas had flattened, that after Cézanne the table would always tip forward into the plane of its own composition. And that after Picasso, the sacred space of the canvas was now open to suggestion, sometimes from the ancient past. The ancient past offers forms that still elude the present.
Kitaj was also a midrashist. Such an interpreter usually operates in words, but he (word-obsessed as he was) functioned through images. Midrash returns to a canonic text, and asks of it questions it could not ask of itself. It is, in the sense of both Walter Benjamin and Gerhard Scholem, a critique. In their sense, critique is an awakening from textual entrapment. Our textual entrapment is a necessity: it represents our only possibility of freedom, since it provides us with the necessary literacy to understand our labyrinthine situation. Critique never abandons tradition; it puts it into suspension while granting considerable autonomy to the informed intelligence. Kitaj endlessly returned upon history and belief in the spirit of critique. That critique frequently takes the form of montage: lay one image beside another and they silently comment upon one another. Like two integers multiplied, they can produce a third neither left to itself could have predicted.
T
here is a great deal of dreaming in Kitaj’s pictures. The dreaming process is central to his way of conceiving compositions. This is evidently the case in a picture like ‘The Philosopher – Queen’ where the female figure bilocates in a progress back to her own dreaming room, or ‘The Symbolist’, whose somnambulism would surely have struck a chord with Breton. The streets of Surrealism are filled with the contents of bedrooms, including some of the bodies. ‘I came out of Surrealism,’ Kitaj said. His form of the method lent itself to allegory, since the trouvaille always points in two directions. Firstly towards the contingency of its arrival in this space, but secondly to the causality of its manufacture and its embodied meaning.
Kitaj felt this way about the critics who savaged his 1994 exhibition, where the paintings had been accompanied by his own midrashic commentaries. His beloved wife died shortly after, and at first he held those critics responsible for her death. Later on he came to realise that this underestimated her. She had gone, all the same. He longed to follow. He painted his way towards her over the following years, always edging towards the grave. Emily Dickinson had called it ‘the white exploit’ – that last departure that awaits us all.
So it was that in 2007 a man lay on a couch in America with a plastic bag tied over his head. On the table there was a bottle, filled the day before with tablets. And a quart of Bourbon, half-empty now. He was dead. He was an artist, at times a great one. He died in the city of angels, Los Angeles, driven from London by the vinegar and bile of a number of hireling critics of the Zeitgeist. That and his wife’s death. His posthumously published autobiography is as engaging and outrageous as he was, both as man and artist.
RBK 1932-2007
Requiescat
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Note: The editors wish to express gratitude to the R.B. Kitaj Studio Project for their cooperation.
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Publication: Monday, 23 April 2018, at 11:20.
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