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Descriptif du lot
After relocating to England in autumn 1957, R. B. Kitaj quickly established his taste for a complex collage-like orchestration of multiple historical sources and styles within a single painting. His staunch political stance, in particular his interest in twentieth-century history and in the idealism still represented during his American childhood by socialism, distinguished him at a time when pure abstraction held the upper hand.
Outlying London Districts (In Camberwell) (1969), composed on an elongated vertical format that was to feature prominently in Kitaj’s figure paintings from the early 1970s onwards, presents a narrative set in a street scene that could be located almost anywhere were it not for the title. The jagged planes of colour that describe an unsettling space take their cue in part from the history of modernist abstraction, despite Kitaj’s severe criticism of its ascendancy, but also from cinematic strategies that provided him with consistent inspiration. A key to the painting is the fragment of a male figure collaged to the lower-right corner. It is derived without disguise from a photograph by the great Hungarian-American photo-journalist Robert Capa that featured on the cover of a celebrated photobook published in 1937 as a propaganda tool for the Republican cause by the Press Department of the Spanish Embassy in London at the height of the Spanish Civil War. The image of a helmeted Republican soldier was appropriated first as the subject of one of a portfolio of fifty screenprints on paper created in 1969-1970 with the master printer Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library after the Life for the Most Part. Its insertion into the painting in severely cropped form, one of several test impressions printed on canvas, retains its original aura but now in dialogue with other elements. The monochromatic print is embellished here with touches of colour in oils to give the soldier’s face a fleshiness and painterly touch more consistent with the rest of the canvas.
The Spanish Civil War was of course emblematic not only of the rise of Fascism in Germany, Spain and Italy, which comprehensively and tragically changed the political map of Europe for many years to come, but of what Kitaj termed the ‘heroic failures’ of the Left during the very decade in which he was born (see S. Faulkner, ‘The history behind the surface: R. B. Kitaj and the Spanish Civil War’, Critical Kitaj: Essays on the work of R. B. Kitaj, Manchester, 2000, pp. 111-138). The monumental striding figure in an olive green trench coat, with a single female breast and genitals brutally exposed through the gashes to the garment, is deliberately intimidating in its dimensions and aggressive masculine demeanour as a personification of authoritarian menace. Sheltering well behind her in a doorway is an erotic vignette alluding to street prostitution, adding to the atmosphere of misogyny, belligerence and unease. There are striking parallels with the work of Kitaj’s friend and rival Francis Bacon, to whom he had just paid homage in a large colour-saturated diptych, Synchromy with F. B. – General of Hot Desire (1968–1969).
As a young man in 1961–1963 Kitaj had taught life drawing at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in a department headed by painter Robert Medley (1905–1994), who as founder of the Artists International Association in 1937 was himself closely associated with socialism and the Spanish Republican struggle. The South London neighbourhood of Camberwell was convenient to Dulwich Village, where Kitaj was already living as a student with his wife Elsi and infant son Lem. Only in 1971, two years after Elsi’s untimely death and after a short period in Los Angeles, did he move with Lem and daughter Dominie to the more central and upmarket London district of Chelsea to begin a new episode in his life. In 1972 he was to purchase a holiday home in the Catalan town of Sant Feliu de Guixols, which he had visited regularly since 1952.
In 1971 Kitaj produced a pair of photographically derived colour screenprints with the titles Outlying London Districts I and Outlying London Districts II, but these bear no direct relationship to the 1969 canvas (see J. Ramkalawon, Kitaj Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 2013, p. 156). His choice of In Camberwell for the painting’s parenthetical subtitle commemorates that formative period of his life spanning the 1960s, a time tinged with sadness but also with the network of friendships with poets and politically aligned artists that proved to be a bedrock for his future. Characteristically of Kitaj’s work, autobiographical elements are subtly embedded within a more complex and open-ended narrative involving history, politics, literature, art and culture.
MARCO LIVINGSTONE
Outlying London Districts (In Camberwell) (1969), composed on an elongated vertical format that was to feature prominently in Kitaj’s figure paintings from the early 1970s onwards, presents a narrative set in a street scene that could be located almost anywhere were it not for the title. The jagged planes of colour that describe an unsettling space take their cue in part from the history of modernist abstraction, despite Kitaj’s severe criticism of its ascendancy, but also from cinematic strategies that provided him with consistent inspiration. A key to the painting is the fragment of a male figure collaged to the lower-right corner. It is derived without disguise from a photograph by the great Hungarian-American photo-journalist Robert Capa that featured on the cover of a celebrated photobook published in 1937 as a propaganda tool for the Republican cause by the Press Department of the Spanish Embassy in London at the height of the Spanish Civil War. The image of a helmeted Republican soldier was appropriated first as the subject of one of a portfolio of fifty screenprints on paper created in 1969-1970 with the master printer Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library after the Life for the Most Part. Its insertion into the painting in severely cropped form, one of several test impressions printed on canvas, retains its original aura but now in dialogue with other elements. The monochromatic print is embellished here with touches of colour in oils to give the soldier’s face a fleshiness and painterly touch more consistent with the rest of the canvas.
The Spanish Civil War was of course emblematic not only of the rise of Fascism in Germany, Spain and Italy, which comprehensively and tragically changed the political map of Europe for many years to come, but of what Kitaj termed the ‘heroic failures’ of the Left during the very decade in which he was born (see S. Faulkner, ‘The history behind the surface: R. B. Kitaj and the Spanish Civil War’, Critical Kitaj: Essays on the work of R. B. Kitaj, Manchester, 2000, pp. 111-138). The monumental striding figure in an olive green trench coat, with a single female breast and genitals brutally exposed through the gashes to the garment, is deliberately intimidating in its dimensions and aggressive masculine demeanour as a personification of authoritarian menace. Sheltering well behind her in a doorway is an erotic vignette alluding to street prostitution, adding to the atmosphere of misogyny, belligerence and unease. There are striking parallels with the work of Kitaj’s friend and rival Francis Bacon, to whom he had just paid homage in a large colour-saturated diptych, Synchromy with F. B. – General of Hot Desire (1968–1969).
As a young man in 1961–1963 Kitaj had taught life drawing at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in a department headed by painter Robert Medley (1905–1994), who as founder of the Artists International Association in 1937 was himself closely associated with socialism and the Spanish Republican struggle. The South London neighbourhood of Camberwell was convenient to Dulwich Village, where Kitaj was already living as a student with his wife Elsi and infant son Lem. Only in 1971, two years after Elsi’s untimely death and after a short period in Los Angeles, did he move with Lem and daughter Dominie to the more central and upmarket London district of Chelsea to begin a new episode in his life. In 1972 he was to purchase a holiday home in the Catalan town of Sant Feliu de Guixols, which he had visited regularly since 1952.
In 1971 Kitaj produced a pair of photographically derived colour screenprints with the titles Outlying London Districts I and Outlying London Districts II, but these bear no direct relationship to the 1969 canvas (see J. Ramkalawon, Kitaj Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 2013, p. 156). His choice of In Camberwell for the painting’s parenthetical subtitle commemorates that formative period of his life spanning the 1960s, a time tinged with sadness but also with the network of friendships with poets and politically aligned artists that proved to be a bedrock for his future. Characteristically of Kitaj’s work, autobiographical elements are subtly embedded within a more complex and open-ended narrative involving history, politics, literature, art and culture.
MARCO LIVINGSTONE