.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Energy, inventiveness, conviction, unpredictability, focus and range, all of these are features of sometimes difficult, always vigorous art of unusual fullness. The intensity of Kitaj’s own engagement with a subject underlies the capacity of his works to engage, in turn, the attention and the imagination of the viewer’ (R. Morphet (ed.), exhibition catalogue, R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, p. 11).
Kitaj’s The Sensualist is a wonderfully expressive and dynamic example from his single figure portrait series that he explored during the 1970s. The monumental scale of these works, painted in oil on canvas in a powerful vertical format, were a direct contrast to the drawings that Kitaj also focused on during this period. Standing on a street corner The Sensualist towers in the foreground over the surrounding urban landscape, enhanced by our high viewpoint. The presence of three women in the lower half of the painting highlight the subject; framed by the window to the lower right and the archway to the lower left, they peer out towards the figure of the Sensualist. In contrast, the pastel pink head of the woman to the bottom seems disconnected from the scene happening above her, emphasised by the different treatment of the paint technique and controlled line. The brush strokes throughout the rest of the work are broad and quick, varying from intense black to bright primary vivid colours.
In 1972, upon returning from America, Kitaj moved into a large house in Elm Park Road, Chelsea, London and shortly afterwards he re-connected with Sandra Fisher, who he later married in 1983. Kitaj’s contemporaries and friends in London included Leon Kossoff, Eduardo Paolozzi and David Hockney who Kitaj studied with at the Royal College of Art, they would discuss their interests and ideas and comment on each other’s works. David Hockney appears frequently in Kitaj’s works with his distinctive hairstyle and round glasses with the figure of the Sensualist displaying many of Hockney’s trademark features.
Kitaj continuously collected work by his London contemporaries and prints by the French and Italian Masters who heavily influenced and inspired his works. Throughout his art, Kitaj masterly references his extensive knowledge in not only art but poetry and literature. The Sensualist is a wonderful pretext for a deceptive wealth of associations and references. Cézanne and Titian are cleverly alluded to in his selected contorted pose, in his handling of paint and tonal depth. The hand on the waist refers to Cézanne’s Male Bather, whilst the arm bent above the head references Titian’s Marsyas, viewed upside down, the figure now the other way up. There are further comparisons to be drawn in the dark black legs of The Sensualist which are taken directly from the Marsyas’s own fawn legs. The colour palette and strong chiaroscuro is taken from the Italian master, whilst the fluidity and brushstrokes echo that of Cézanne. Kitaj described the extent of his admiration for the French master: ‘Cézanne is my favourite painter … This picture belongs some [sic] to one of my hobbies: trying to figure him, trying to figure his little and big sensations all over again’ (R. B. Kitaj, quoted in R. Morphet (ed.), exhibition catalogue, R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, p. 126).
Kitaj’s widespread reading and inclination to take photographs and illustrations collected from books, newspapers and magazines as his starting point can make understanding and unravelling his works a fascinating journey. Kitaj wanted to do visually what modern poetry has done verbally – to make his works as difficult, multileveled, as tough, and as full of human purport as a work by T. S. Elliot or Ezra Pound (see J. Shannon, The Allegorists: Kitaj and the Viewer, in Kitaj, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, London, 1982, p.18).
This multitude of visual references and depth of context in Kitaj’s work is explained by the artist who stated:
‘This (canvas) began life the other way round, as a woman. You can still see her pink head upside down at the bottom. I don’t remember who she was but I think she represents the real woman in the Sensualist’s life in the repainted picture. This studio picture was painted not from life. First, I painted over the woman a kind of copy of the famous Cézanne male ‘Bather’ of 1885 […]. Then, the male Titian ‘Marsyas’ came to the Royal Academy and blew everyone’s mind. I’d put a postcard of it upside down on my wall and meanwhile Kossoff, who’d been drawing from the ‘Marsyas’, gave us one of those drawings as a wedding present. The drawing was lying on the floor, again upside down, looking like a man walking, so I painted that over my bather, which became the final version. All too artful, so I wrote ART over the mean street doorway, for Art’s sake. In the end oneself is the making of it; not after life but about life, I think Pound said, […] The depiction of human proportions would always now turn on the mystery of subjective styles - never more so before or since Cézanne’s bathers, bemused as they often are by a torsion like that in the dangling Marsyas, though not in the frontal magic of the New York Make Bather whose (implied) quadri-hip stance I grafted onto my tall canvas first. I left his right hand on his hip as you can see, as an action between the crisis of the torsion. In the end the muscularity comprises frontal breast, three-quarter hips and profile legs, the transition or joining of which Titian seems to have beautifully fudged, for the sake of, I suppose, an animality’ (R. B. Kitaj, quoted in R. Morphet (ed.), exhibition catalogue, R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, p. 126).
A second theme that ran alongside Kitaj’s enjoyment in reinventing and merging works of those he was inspired by was Kitaj’s self-perception and self-awareness of his American, English and Jewish heritage, the idea of which strongly influenced his work and developed in the 1970s. It is a constant in his art both consciously and subconsciously. The dichotomy of Kitaj’s heritage enforced the notion of not belonging to any settled society. We can see the effect of this in the titles he gave to his artworks, where there appears to be a need for identification and labelling, as portrayed in The Sensualist. As in all his works Kitaj aims to address human experience in terms of thought and feeling as well as visual fact. Joe Shannon explains, ‘Kitaj’s best works don’t spell out specific events so much as create an atmosphere of social calamity. These works are visualisations of human life, engaging man’s issues as worthy images. In them, Kitaj maintains the same ethical and moral commitment that he grants his loved ones, his friends, his nation (nations), and his planet’ (J. Shannon, The Allegorists: Kitaj and the Viewer, in Kitaj, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, London, 1982, p. 17).
Kitaj’s The Sensualist is a wonderfully expressive and dynamic example from his single figure portrait series that he explored during the 1970s. The monumental scale of these works, painted in oil on canvas in a powerful vertical format, were a direct contrast to the drawings that Kitaj also focused on during this period. Standing on a street corner The Sensualist towers in the foreground over the surrounding urban landscape, enhanced by our high viewpoint. The presence of three women in the lower half of the painting highlight the subject; framed by the window to the lower right and the archway to the lower left, they peer out towards the figure of the Sensualist. In contrast, the pastel pink head of the woman to the bottom seems disconnected from the scene happening above her, emphasised by the different treatment of the paint technique and controlled line. The brush strokes throughout the rest of the work are broad and quick, varying from intense black to bright primary vivid colours.
In 1972, upon returning from America, Kitaj moved into a large house in Elm Park Road, Chelsea, London and shortly afterwards he re-connected with Sandra Fisher, who he later married in 1983. Kitaj’s contemporaries and friends in London included Leon Kossoff, Eduardo Paolozzi and David Hockney who Kitaj studied with at the Royal College of Art, they would discuss their interests and ideas and comment on each other’s works. David Hockney appears frequently in Kitaj’s works with his distinctive hairstyle and round glasses with the figure of the Sensualist displaying many of Hockney’s trademark features.
Kitaj continuously collected work by his London contemporaries and prints by the French and Italian Masters who heavily influenced and inspired his works. Throughout his art, Kitaj masterly references his extensive knowledge in not only art but poetry and literature. The Sensualist is a wonderful pretext for a deceptive wealth of associations and references. Cézanne and Titian are cleverly alluded to in his selected contorted pose, in his handling of paint and tonal depth. The hand on the waist refers to Cézanne’s Male Bather, whilst the arm bent above the head references Titian’s Marsyas, viewed upside down, the figure now the other way up. There are further comparisons to be drawn in the dark black legs of The Sensualist which are taken directly from the Marsyas’s own fawn legs. The colour palette and strong chiaroscuro is taken from the Italian master, whilst the fluidity and brushstrokes echo that of Cézanne. Kitaj described the extent of his admiration for the French master: ‘Cézanne is my favourite painter … This picture belongs some [sic] to one of my hobbies: trying to figure him, trying to figure his little and big sensations all over again’ (R. B. Kitaj, quoted in R. Morphet (ed.), exhibition catalogue, R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, p. 126).
Kitaj’s widespread reading and inclination to take photographs and illustrations collected from books, newspapers and magazines as his starting point can make understanding and unravelling his works a fascinating journey. Kitaj wanted to do visually what modern poetry has done verbally – to make his works as difficult, multileveled, as tough, and as full of human purport as a work by T. S. Elliot or Ezra Pound (see J. Shannon, The Allegorists: Kitaj and the Viewer, in Kitaj, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, London, 1982, p.18).
This multitude of visual references and depth of context in Kitaj’s work is explained by the artist who stated:
‘This (canvas) began life the other way round, as a woman. You can still see her pink head upside down at the bottom. I don’t remember who she was but I think she represents the real woman in the Sensualist’s life in the repainted picture. This studio picture was painted not from life. First, I painted over the woman a kind of copy of the famous Cézanne male ‘Bather’ of 1885 […]. Then, the male Titian ‘Marsyas’ came to the Royal Academy and blew everyone’s mind. I’d put a postcard of it upside down on my wall and meanwhile Kossoff, who’d been drawing from the ‘Marsyas’, gave us one of those drawings as a wedding present. The drawing was lying on the floor, again upside down, looking like a man walking, so I painted that over my bather, which became the final version. All too artful, so I wrote ART over the mean street doorway, for Art’s sake. In the end oneself is the making of it; not after life but about life, I think Pound said, […] The depiction of human proportions would always now turn on the mystery of subjective styles - never more so before or since Cézanne’s bathers, bemused as they often are by a torsion like that in the dangling Marsyas, though not in the frontal magic of the New York Make Bather whose (implied) quadri-hip stance I grafted onto my tall canvas first. I left his right hand on his hip as you can see, as an action between the crisis of the torsion. In the end the muscularity comprises frontal breast, three-quarter hips and profile legs, the transition or joining of which Titian seems to have beautifully fudged, for the sake of, I suppose, an animality’ (R. B. Kitaj, quoted in R. Morphet (ed.), exhibition catalogue, R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, p. 126).
A second theme that ran alongside Kitaj’s enjoyment in reinventing and merging works of those he was inspired by was Kitaj’s self-perception and self-awareness of his American, English and Jewish heritage, the idea of which strongly influenced his work and developed in the 1970s. It is a constant in his art both consciously and subconsciously. The dichotomy of Kitaj’s heritage enforced the notion of not belonging to any settled society. We can see the effect of this in the titles he gave to his artworks, where there appears to be a need for identification and labelling, as portrayed in The Sensualist. As in all his works Kitaj aims to address human experience in terms of thought and feeling as well as visual fact. Joe Shannon explains, ‘Kitaj’s best works don’t spell out specific events so much as create an atmosphere of social calamity. These works are visualisations of human life, engaging man’s issues as worthy images. In them, Kitaj maintains the same ethical and moral commitment that he grants his loved ones, his friends, his nation (nations), and his planet’ (J. Shannon, The Allegorists: Kitaj and the Viewer, in Kitaj, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, London, 1982, p. 17).