Philip Roth

Kitaj's friendship with author Phillip Roth began in 1985 in London where the present drawing was completed. During these years, Kitaj developed a renewed interest in his own Jewish identity, a process that led to his autobiographical and confessional work of the later 1980s and 90s. In The First Diasporist Manifesto, published in 1989, four years after his drawing of Roth, Kitaj discussed the relationship between Judaism and his artistic process. The Second Diasporist Manifesto, composed in 2005, contains his personal reflections on the "Jewish Question" in contemporary art. Like Roth, Kitjai was self-consciously engaged in the creation of Jewish art, not to recreate or celebrate traditional Jewish rituals, but to depict personalities and themes that embodied the marginality, iconoclasm and inventiveness of the modern Jewish man.own heads of E.O.W. 1956-57 which are even Phillip Roth (b. 1933) has earned a permanent place in American literature for over forty years. In the 1990s he won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). A novelist, essayist and short-story writer, Roth's works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a satirist's sense of politics, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love. His power as an author lies in his ability to investigate these themes through personal self reflection, blending contemporary psychology with the condition of being Jewish in the modern world.