Julián Ríos

R. B. Kitaj

Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations is both a conversation with and a meditation on the work of the American-born painter R.B. Kitaj, who has lived more than half his life in London. Together novelist, Julian Rios, and painter, R.B. Kitaj, in an exuberant exchange of wordplay and allusion, look at the formative experiences that lie behind the extraordinary eclecticism of Kitaj's art. They consider the influence on his work of artists ancient and modern, his fascination with the grim underside of city life, and the huge inspiration he has found in literature and the cinema. They also explore his increasing awareness of his Jewish identity and the quest to comprehend through his painting the conflicts and troubles of his century.

Pictures and Conversations

Kitaj

R.B. Kitaj

Jane Kinsman

R. B. Kitaj has emerged as one of the most independent-minded and influential artists since his student days in the late 1950s, producing an extraordinary body of work - not the least have been his prints. This study reveals that Kitaj's prints have functioned as a visual diary, documenting the vicissitudes of an artistic life, a life characterized by a constant search for new subject-matter and new means by which to depict it. Amongst other things, The Prints of R. B. Kitaj explores Kitaj's collaborations and associations with some of the most gifted printers of today, including Chris Prater, Aldo Crommelynck and Stanley Jones. It also demonstrates how he drew inspiration from some of the key figures in American modern literary life, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. As a life-long bibliophile, Kitaj initially found the direct impetus for much of his art in books. More recently, however, it is the images from his favourite artists which have proved influential. Jane Kinsman's study is notable for its insight into Kitaj's print oeuvre. Of equal importance is the light it sheds on the development of a complex artistic temperament. In addition R. B. Kitaj, himself, has contributed over 30 'Afterwords' which appear throughout the text. They form a running autobiographical commentary on his art and his life.

The Prints of R.B. Kitaj

This book, a follow-up to Kitaj's influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist's work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist's unusual life and work. From The Second Diasporist Manifesto is: 'But I swore to become myself - the new Jewish painter of a skeptical Diasporist art, born in Modernism, which cleaves to my own uncanny Jewish life of study, painting, unthinkable thoughts and near death...I admit that my Manifesto-poem is very personal, as a poem can be. But one would have to also unpack the cultural secrets of a book on Islamic Art, or Chinese or Egyptian or African Art. My Jewish Art lives a more Modernist Secret life. The Jewish Diaspora is not the only one. It's just mine.'

R. B. Kitaj

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