R.B. Kitaj

Ronald Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied at the Cooper Union in New York in 1950 and in Vienna in 1951. He worked as a merchant seaman between 1952 and 1953 and served in the US Army between 1955 and 1957.

A G.I. scholarship enabled him to study at the Ruskin School of Art (Oxford) and then at the Royal College of Art in London where he was a contemporary of David Hockney, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips.

From 1960 he showed at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions and had his first one man show at the Marlborough Gallery in 1963. In 1962 he collaborated with Eduardo Paolozzi and began to use collage or collage-like elements in his work.

From 1961 to 1967 he taught at the Ealing, Camberwell and Slade Schools of Art. In 1967 he was guest teacher at the University of California in Berkeley.

There were retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1965; in Hanover and Rotterdam in 1970; the Hirshorn Museum in Washington (1981); the Tate Gallery, London (1994) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1995. His work is held by many public collections throughout the world.

Kitaj was seen as a leading Pop Artist and his work featured in the “Pop Art in England” show that toured Hamburg, Munich and York in 1976. His is a strong presence in most texts about Pop Art.

He undoubtedly influenced his younger contemporaries at the Royal College and both Allen Jones and David Hockney have described how his meticulous and dedicated professionalism impressed them. However, despite this, and his friendships with Richard Hamilton and Paolozzi, he did not see himself as a Pop Artist.

His pictures derive from a wide range of sources, not just popular culture or mass media. He was very widely read and fond of using literary, historical and poetic references. His work was often composed of discrete elements “collaged together”. Some themes recurred such as social and political issues, for example, racial or religious intolerance; political violence and social injustice, as well as Kitaj’s own Jewish identity; together with bereavement and loss and certain autobiographical elements.

In 1997, he returned to live in Los Angeles, where he taught at UCLA and the University of Southern California.