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Lot Essay
This previously unrecorded painting must date to Kitaj's period as a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, between autumn 1959 and spring 1961, during which time he exerted a considerable influence on fellow painters in his year including in particular David Hockney and Allen Jones. It was particularly during his first academic year there that he allowed free rein to a painterly spontaneity, rooted particularly in Expressionism and Surrealism, that he was soon to expunge from his art. The impulsive application of paint and saturated colours evident here owe something to the swashbuckling dynamic of the Abstract Expressionism he had encountered at first-hand as a young art student in New York in the early 1950s. Willem de Kooning was a particular object of his admiration for his continuing devotion to the human figure within a language of abstraction; one of his key early paintings, Erasmus Variations 1958 (Tate, London), which he had made as a student in Oxford, explicitly refers to the Dutch-born painter's style.
Kitaj saw himself as 'a grandchild of Surrealism', admiring the ethos of the movement and its parallels with the studies in iconology by Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofksy and Aby Warburg, among others, in which he had become immersed during his short spell in Oxford from January 1958 to summer 1959. He looked closely at the collages of Max Ernst in book form, which had a profound impact on his own collages and collage-based prints, but on the whole was more inspired by the Surrealist tendencies in the work of great artists affected by Surrealism, including Picasso and Miró, than he was by the work of the 'orthodox' Surrealists. Writing to Marco Livingstone in January 1980, he remarked that 'Surrealist ideas like bringing images together in unlikely and unfamiliar conjunction (in hope of producing magic), and other such ideas, attracted me when I was young. [...] I still like the surrealist-symbolist tradition ... but in those days I embraced it in the raw [...]'.
The strident brushstrokes, smudged paint handling and abrupt shifts in gear to suggest naive art and even cartooning bear comparison with what Kitaj termed the 'plural energies' of early works such as Oh Lemuel and The Bells of Hell, both of 1960, and Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before 1961, the title of which quotes from André Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. The improvised figurative images in this painting, hybrids of painterly improvisation and of styles borrowed from obscure illustrations in scholarly journals, testify to Kitaj's fascination with Surrealist automatism, a technique that Breton described as accessing true thought 'in the absence of any control exercised by reason.' Out of the painterly improvisation primordial figures begin to coalesce, as if arising from the artist's subconscious. The figure striding energetically across the central axis of the canvas seems to embody the young artist's own astonishment at its emergence from the chaos of the creative act.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
Kitaj saw himself as 'a grandchild of Surrealism', admiring the ethos of the movement and its parallels with the studies in iconology by Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofksy and Aby Warburg, among others, in which he had become immersed during his short spell in Oxford from January 1958 to summer 1959. He looked closely at the collages of Max Ernst in book form, which had a profound impact on his own collages and collage-based prints, but on the whole was more inspired by the Surrealist tendencies in the work of great artists affected by Surrealism, including Picasso and Miró, than he was by the work of the 'orthodox' Surrealists. Writing to Marco Livingstone in January 1980, he remarked that 'Surrealist ideas like bringing images together in unlikely and unfamiliar conjunction (in hope of producing magic), and other such ideas, attracted me when I was young. [...] I still like the surrealist-symbolist tradition ... but in those days I embraced it in the raw [...]'.
The strident brushstrokes, smudged paint handling and abrupt shifts in gear to suggest naive art and even cartooning bear comparison with what Kitaj termed the 'plural energies' of early works such as Oh Lemuel and The Bells of Hell, both of 1960, and Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before 1961, the title of which quotes from André Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. The improvised figurative images in this painting, hybrids of painterly improvisation and of styles borrowed from obscure illustrations in scholarly journals, testify to Kitaj's fascination with Surrealist automatism, a technique that Breton described as accessing true thought 'in the absence of any control exercised by reason.' Out of the painterly improvisation primordial figures begin to coalesce, as if arising from the artist's subconscious. The figure striding energetically across the central axis of the canvas seems to embody the young artist's own astonishment at its emergence from the chaos of the creative act.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.