利用者:Koguma chan b/sandbox

R. B. キタイ
生誕	ロナルド ブルックス 1932年10月29日 アメリカ合衆国、オハイオ州 チャグリンフォールズ
死没	2007年10月21日(満74歳没) アメリカ合衆国、カリフォニア州 ロサンゼルス
国籍	アメリカ
教育	ラスキンスクール オブ ドローイング アンド ファインアート, オックスフォード 1958–1959 ロイヤル カレッジ オブ アート, 1959–1961
著名な実績	絵画, 版画
受賞	ロイヤルアカデミー会員、1991 ヴェネツィア・ビエンナーレ、ゴールデンライオン、 1995

ロナルド・ブルックス・キタイ (Ronald Brooks Kitaj　1932年10月29日 – 2007年10月21日)は、ユダヤ系アメリカ人の画家。

生涯

R.B.キタイは、１９３２年、ハンガリー人の父親とユダヤ系アメリカ人の母親の間にチャグリンフォールズに生まれた。父親はキタイの出世後、すぐに家を出てしまった。母親は、ユダヤ系オーストリア人のウォルター・キタイと再婚。幼少期は、クリーブランド美術館 の美術教室に通い、素描に熱中する。１０歳から１６歳までをニューヨーク州トロイで過ごし、この時期にホイットマン、ジョイス、ヘミングウェイ、ハート・クレインらの文学作品に親しむ。１７歳のとき、ノルウェーの商船の船員になる。その後、ウィーンのウィーン美術アカデミーとニューヨークのクーパー・ユニオンに入学、絵画の学を修する。２年間フランスとドイツでアメリカ陸軍に務め、復員兵援護法で イギリスに渡る。 ２６歳のときオックスフォードのラスキン・スクール.オブ・ドローイング・アンド・ファインアートに入学、セザンヌへの造詣を深める。卒業後、２７歳でロイヤル・カレッジ・オブ・アートに入学。デイヴィッド・ホックニー、デレック・ボシャー、ピーター・フィリップス、アレン・ジョーンズ、パトリック・コールフィールドらと勉学に勤しむ。中でもデイヴィッド・ホックニーは、キタイの生涯の友となる。

３１歳で最初の妻、エルシー・ロゼラーと結婚。息子に『KAFKA/迷宮の悪夢』や『イギリスから来た男』の脚本家レム・ドブス、娘にドミニエ。１９６９年に、エルシーが自殺で他界。１２年の同棲の末、アメリカの画家サンドラ・フィッシャーと再婚。サンドラとの間には、マックスという息子がいる。１９９４年、サンドラが脳動脈瘤で他界。キタイは、１９９０年に軽い心臓発作を起こした。７５歳の誕生日の８日前、ロサンゼルスのアトリエで他界。 死亡から７週間後、ロサンゼルス検死局により死因は自殺(プラスチック袋を頭から被ったことによる窒息死）と判別された。

来歴

キタイはイギリスに定住し、６０年代は、 イーリング・アート・カレッジ、キャンバーウェル・カレッジ・オブ・アーツ、スレード・スクール・オブ・アートで教鞭をとった。６８年には、カリフォルニア大学バークレー校でも教鞭をとった。 ６３年にロンドンのマールボロ・ファイン・アートで初個展"Pictures with commentary, Pictures without commentary"が開かれる。ドイツの美術史家・文化理論家アビ・ヴァールブルクの象徴形式分析を最大の影響に挙げ、絵画とカタログ内に広域の文学や歴史を参照したテキストを入れた。

スクール・オブ・ロンドン

１９７６年、アーツ・カウンシルの依頼を受け、グループ展 "The Human Clay"をキュレーション、同展覧会はロンドンのヘイワード・ギャラリーを皮切りにイギリス中を巡回した。キタイはカタログの中で、「スクール・オブ・ロンドン」(School of London)というフレーズを紹介し、フランク・アウアバッハ、フランシス・ベーコン 、ルシアン・フロイド、ユアン・ユグロウ、マイケル・アンドリュース、レジナルド・グレイとキタイ自身を紹介。

Style & influence

Kitaj had a significant influence on British Pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most abstraction and modernism. Allusions to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed together on one canvas to produce a collage effect. He also produced a number of screen-prints with printer Chris Prater. He told Tony Reichardt, manager of the Marlborough New London Gallery, that he made screen-prints as sketches for his future paintings. From then onwards Tony Reichardt commissioned Chris Prater to print three or four copies of every print he made on canvas. His later works became more personal.

Kitaj was recognised as being one of the world's leading draftsmen, almost on a par with, or compared to, Degas. Indeed, he was taught drawing at Oxford by Percy Horton, himself a pupil of Walter Sickert, who was a pupil of Degas; and the teacher of Degas studied under Ingres. His more complex compositions build on his line work using a montage practice, which he called 'agitational usage'. Kitaj often depicts disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumes a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives. This is best portrayed by his masterpiece "The Autumn of Central Paris" (1972–73), wherein philosopher Walter Benjamin is portrayed, as both the orchestrator and victim of historical madness. The futility of historical progress creates a disjointed architecture that is maddening to deconstruct. He staged a major exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965, and a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. in 1981. He selected paintings for an exhibition, "The Artist's Eye", at the National Gallery, London in 1980.

Later years

In his later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish heritage, which found expression in his works, with reference to the Holocaust and influences from Jewish writers such as Kafka and Walter Benjamin, and he came to consider himself to be a "wandering Jew". In 1989, Kitaj published "First Diasporist Manifesto", a short book in which he analysed his own alienation, and how this contributed to his art. His book contained the remark: "The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once." And he added: "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist."

A second retrospective was staged at the Tate Gallery in 1994. Critical reviews in London were almost universally negative. British press savagely attacked the Tate exhibit, calling Kitaj a pretentious poseur who engaged in name dropping. Kitaj took the criticism very personally, declaring that “anti-intellectualism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism” had fueled the vitriol. Despite the bad reviews, the exhibition moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and afterwards to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1995. His second wife, Sandra Fisher died of a brain aneurysm in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery had ended. He blamed the British press for her death, stating that “they were aiming for me, but they got her instead.” David Hockney concurred and said that he too believed the London art critics had killed Sandra Fisher. Kitaj returned to the US in 1997 and settled in Los Angeles, near his first son. "When my Wife died", he wrote to Edward Chaney, "London died for me and I returned home to California to live among sons and grandsons - It was a very good move and now I begin my 3rd and (last?) ACT! hands across The Sea." Three years later he wrote: "I grow older every day and rather like my hermit life." The "Tate War" and Sandra's death became a central themes for his later works: he often depicted himself and his deceased wife as angels. In Los Angeles No. 22 (Painting-Drawing) the beautiful young (and naked) girl records the shadow of her aged lover (on whose lap she sits) in a pose directly taken from the Scots Grand Tourist David Allan's Origin of Painting. The latter was included by Ernst Gombrich in his 1995 National Gallery exhibition (and catalogue) on Shadows so that Kitaj would have seen it two years before he left England for ever.

In 2000, Kitaj was one of several artists to make a post-it note for an internet charity auction held by 3M to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their product. The charcoal and pastel piece sold for $925, making it the most expensive post-it note in history, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. Kitaj was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991, the first American to join the Academy since John Singer Sargent. He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. He staged another exhibition at the National Gallery in 2001, entitled "Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters".

In September 2010, Kitaj and five British artists including Howard Hodgkin, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield and John Hoyland were included in an exhibition entitled The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the Yale Center for British Art.

In October 2012 a major international symposium was held in Berlin to mark what would have been Kitaj's 80th birthday. It accompanied Obsessions, the first comprehensive exhibition of Kitaj's work since his death, held at the Jewish Museum, Berlin. The title is partly in reference to what he dubbed his "erratic Jewish obsessions". The exhibition is now on show UK in two parts at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (23 February to 16 June 2013) and the Jewish Museum London (21 February to 16 June 2013).

References

• Kitaj, R. B. (1989). First Diasporist Manifesto. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-27543-2 
• Livingstone, Marco (2010). KITAJ. Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7184-5751-0 
• Livingstone, Marco (2010). KITAJ. Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7184-5751-0 

Further reading

• Chaney, Edward,‘Kitaj versus Creed’, The London Magazine (April 2002), pp. 106–11.
• Chaney, Edward, "Warburgian Artist: R.B. Kitaj, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich and the Warburg Institute". Obsessions: R.B. Kitaj 1932-2007. Jewish Museum Berlin. Kerber Art, 2012, pp. 97–103.
• Duncan, Robert. "A Paris Visit, with R.B. Kitaj". Conjunctions, no. 8, Fall 1985, pp. 8–17
• Kampf, Avraham. Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth-Century Art. Exhibition catalogue. London: Lund Humphries and the Barbican Art Gallery, 1990.
• Kitaj R. B. First Diasporist Manifesto. London : Thames and Hudson, 1989.
• Kitaj R. B. The Second Diasporist Manifesto. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2007.
• Kitaj R. B. / Irving Petlin. Rubbings…The Large Paintings and the Small Pastels. Exhibition catalogue. Purchase, New York, and Chicago: Neuberger Museum and Arts Club of Chicago, 1978.
• Lambirth, Andrew. Kitaj. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-85667-571-7
• Palmer, Michael. “Four Kitaj Studies”, The Promises of Glass. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2000.

External links

• Studio International review
• KITAJ: LITTLE PICTURES & Embroidered Works by various artists feature at the Marlborough Fine Art website
• R. B. Kitaj 1932—2007 A cyber-tombeau at Silliman's Blog by poet Ron Silliman includes comments, tributes, and links
• R.B. Kitaj: views of a fractured century this article, by Ken Johnson, appeared as the cover story for the magazine Art in America in March, 1995.
• R.B. Kitag at the Vitro Nasu Blog Archive includes links to A Day Book (Text by Robert Creeley with 13 ‘graphics’ by R B Kitaj); Renewal and Resistance (David Cohen in conversation with R.B. KITAJ in Los Angeles) & A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with art by R. B. Kitaj
• Obituary, The Economist, 3 November 2007
• R.B. Kitaj in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection