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Lot Essay
Executed in 1975, Ron Kitaj outside the Akademie der Künste Vienna is a tribute to the skill, the history and the friendship of two artists: David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. Hockney has rendered this portrait of his friend with exquisite draughtsmanship, with a flawless, flowing line; he has allowed the brightness of the sheet to fill the work with light while also deliberately playing off the denser texture of the detailing of Kitaj's face with the deliberately sparser, looser definition of the rest of the picture, be it the subject's body, the bench or the background.
In this portrait of his friend, Hockney reveals himself as a virtuoso artist; in some areas the line acquires a slight convulsive jaggedness that perhaps pays tribute to the wealth of associations of the sitter with the scene. For, over two decades earlier, Kitaj himself had been a student at the Akademie der Bildenden Künst in Vienna. There, he had been taught by Albert Paris von Gütersloh, who had, some decades before that, been a friend of Egon Schiele. Kitaj was an artist fascinated by the history of images, the ancestry of ideas, and was therefore hugely aware of this short hop skip and jump into history. Hockney appears to have reflected the multi-layered, reference-laden nature of Kitaj's pictures by here showing an image that reflects not only the character of the subject, not only the scene on that day, but also something of the thick web of memory and association that fuelled Kitaj's own pictures.
Hockney had met Kitaj at another school, the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj, who was older than many of his contemporaries at the RCA, had been an important influence on many of the younger artists there, not least Hockney himself. The pair remained fast friends until the end of Kitaj's life. During the 1970s, Kitaj was frequently a visitor to Paris where Hockney lived for a couple of years; this was also a period of trips throughout Europe for Hockney, hence the distinctly European feel and theme to this portrait of the wandering expatriate American artist. It is again a tribute to the friendship between these artists that it was given by Hockney to Kitaj with such a personal dedication.
In this portrait of his friend, Hockney reveals himself as a virtuoso artist; in some areas the line acquires a slight convulsive jaggedness that perhaps pays tribute to the wealth of associations of the sitter with the scene. For, over two decades earlier, Kitaj himself had been a student at the Akademie der Bildenden Künst in Vienna. There, he had been taught by Albert Paris von Gütersloh, who had, some decades before that, been a friend of Egon Schiele. Kitaj was an artist fascinated by the history of images, the ancestry of ideas, and was therefore hugely aware of this short hop skip and jump into history. Hockney appears to have reflected the multi-layered, reference-laden nature of Kitaj's pictures by here showing an image that reflects not only the character of the subject, not only the scene on that day, but also something of the thick web of memory and association that fuelled Kitaj's own pictures.
Hockney had met Kitaj at another school, the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj, who was older than many of his contemporaries at the RCA, had been an important influence on many of the younger artists there, not least Hockney himself. The pair remained fast friends until the end of Kitaj's life. During the 1970s, Kitaj was frequently a visitor to Paris where Hockney lived for a couple of years; this was also a period of trips throughout Europe for Hockney, hence the distinctly European feel and theme to this portrait of the wandering expatriate American artist. It is again a tribute to the friendship between these artists that it was given by Hockney to Kitaj with such a personal dedication.