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Lot Essay
Both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound - fellow Americans who had chosen to live and work in Europe - had been literary and cultural heroes of Kitaj by the time he settled in England in late 1957 to continue his studies at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and then at the Royal College of Art in London. He published a long note on this picture, complete with scholarly references, when it was first displayed at his inaugural solo show in 1963, and identified the source of its title in line 372 of Eliot's most celebrated poem, The Waste Land, first published in 1922. As early as 1958, in Tarot Variations (The High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia) he had already made reference to images from that same literary masterpiece, aptly described by Stephen Spender as 'a poem of many voices', a term also richly suggestive of Kitaj's art. In the 1963 catalogue entries as well as on the surface of pictures such as Specimen Musings of a Democrat 1961 (Pallant House, Chichester) and this enigmatic quasi-abstraction from the following year, each replete with handwritten and printed texts collaged to the canvas, Kitaj directed the viewer to some of his many esoteric sources and to further reading that would expand one's understanding of the visual evidence.
Among several epigraphs for his 1963 catalogue, Kitaj chose 'as in painting, so it is in poetry' from Horace's Arts poetica, underlining his determination to explore the equivalences between the two distinct forms of expression. Unusually for a painter, Kitaj took direct inspiration from literature, going so far in the case of Cracks and Reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air as to compose the entire picture as if it were a (concrete) poem in its own right, or as a cryptogram, in which succeeding images have to be read and decoded in order for the final meaning to emerge. Colour samples on brown paper, collaged on the scumbled violet ground, are placed together with a fragmented reproduction of Mark Rothko's Sketch for Mural 6 1958 and photographs by Edward Steichen within a format of coloured rectangles reminiscent of the work of De Stijl painters. Taking abstract art as one of many approaches to image-making that can be quoted at will and reformulated as motifs within a representational context, the artist pointedly refutes the possibility of a purely formal and self-sufficient visual language.
Commenting on this key early painting in his text for the 1976 Pop Art catalogue in which it was again exhibited, Uwe Schneede remarked that Kitaj himself had stated 'that he had consciously copied the line structure from lyric poetry: the picture as poem.' As the artist stated even more explicitly in a letter to me dated September 1983, 'I was very very impressed with The Waste Land and I think I imagined it would be all right to append notes to and even in pictures. I thought maybe no one had done that before.' It was thus in the very act of appropriating images and texts alike, and reorganizing them as fragments subject to close analysis, that the young Kitaj paradoxically discovered his own highly original way of making art.
A decade and a half later, Kitaj's lifelong fascination with Eliot and specifically with The Waste Land was to bear fruit in one of the masterpieces of his maturity, If Not, Not 1975 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), another picture-puzzle but one in which the literary quotations are transformed into purely visual images.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
Among several epigraphs for his 1963 catalogue, Kitaj chose 'as in painting, so it is in poetry' from Horace's Arts poetica, underlining his determination to explore the equivalences between the two distinct forms of expression. Unusually for a painter, Kitaj took direct inspiration from literature, going so far in the case of Cracks and Reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air as to compose the entire picture as if it were a (concrete) poem in its own right, or as a cryptogram, in which succeeding images have to be read and decoded in order for the final meaning to emerge. Colour samples on brown paper, collaged on the scumbled violet ground, are placed together with a fragmented reproduction of Mark Rothko's Sketch for Mural 6 1958 and photographs by Edward Steichen within a format of coloured rectangles reminiscent of the work of De Stijl painters. Taking abstract art as one of many approaches to image-making that can be quoted at will and reformulated as motifs within a representational context, the artist pointedly refutes the possibility of a purely formal and self-sufficient visual language.
Commenting on this key early painting in his text for the 1976 Pop Art catalogue in which it was again exhibited, Uwe Schneede remarked that Kitaj himself had stated 'that he had consciously copied the line structure from lyric poetry: the picture as poem.' As the artist stated even more explicitly in a letter to me dated September 1983, 'I was very very impressed with The Waste Land and I think I imagined it would be all right to append notes to and even in pictures. I thought maybe no one had done that before.' It was thus in the very act of appropriating images and texts alike, and reorganizing them as fragments subject to close analysis, that the young Kitaj paradoxically discovered his own highly original way of making art.
A decade and a half later, Kitaj's lifelong fascination with Eliot and specifically with The Waste Land was to bear fruit in one of the masterpieces of his maturity, If Not, Not 1975 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), another picture-puzzle but one in which the literary quotations are transformed into purely visual images.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.