Marynka Pregnant

Marynka returns our gaze; relaxed, proud and heavily pregnant. Hands behind her head, a pose of informality, the work feels like a snap shot, the model resting between more formal sittings. This casual nature gives the drawing an intimacy that is all the more heightened by Marynka's condition. Charged with sexual tension we celebrate her circumstances yet feel uncomfortable in our own. Incredibly, Kitaj manages to imbue in his pastel drawings of the 1970s and 80s the same emotional responses that artists such as Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec did in the late 19th century.

“I did love the grand masters when I was young but I did not know what to do with them…They were like roots deep in the earth (Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Van Gogh, Cézanne)…and like so many young people, I was attracted by the pretty, frail wisps growing on the surface – the dandelion weeds (Duchampism, collagism, montage, Surrealism, the chimerical `freedoms’ young artists cherish so). These dandelions are so easy to pluck, so much easier to get at than the deep roots…They seem now like fool’s gold in my own practice. I must leave their distinct potential to others.”
(Artist quoted, M. Livingstone, Kitaj, London, 1985, p. 33.)

In the mid-1970s, when Sandra Fisher, then Kitaj’s partner, started exploring the medium of pastel, he initially dismissed it as imprecise. However, he changed his mind during one of the many visits he made to Paris in the 1970s, when his friend, David Hockney, was living there. It was in 1975 that, during a visit to the Petit Palais, Kitaj saw an array of Degas’ pastels. Astonished by these works he sought out Henri Roche’s shop that had supplied Degas with his pastels and purchased his own. Kitaj had long been an admirer of late 19th century French artists. The intimacy of subject, from Toulouse-Lautrec’s brothel scenes and Cézanne’s bathers to Degas’s ablutionary nudes had all been previous sources of reference, however, now Kitaj absorbed these everyday subjects through the medium itself and reinterpreted them in his own personal paradigm. This desire to connect so intimately with the work of Degas through the medium allowed him to show reverence without pastiche. Drawing directly from life he was able to view the model through the contemporary lens of ongoing literary and historic concerns while paying direct homage to Degas through the use of material'.

This appears especially true in Marynka Pregnant, which has an air of intense though languid eroticism. The picture functions as an invitation into an intimate realm of the artist, a place infused with personal associations. This is not merely an image of a model reclining, but instead, by association, an insight into a world of sexuality. The nude, through her physical state becomes a figure in an unspoken narrative. Is Kitaj deliberately recalling the brothels that had so marked him as a young merchant seaman travelling from port to port? Are his own highly personal memories infused with the present through the art of Degas? Certainly, during this period, Kitaj had been creating pictures that explored the subject of sex, pornography and memory, and so surely, in part, it is in this context that we should view the present work.