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Lot Essay
The American novelist Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) would have interested Kitaj as a literary figure with a popular following some of whose detective novels, The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934), were turned into celebrated Hollywood film-noir movies. His left-wing activism and his blacklisting in 1953 by Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist witch-hunt, would have further contributed to his heroic and principled stance in the artist's eyes. Both these paintings are loosely based, like most of Kitaj's portraits of historical figures, on vintage photographs he found in books and magazines, in this case on photos of the writer in a double-breasted pin-striped suit and fedora. His decision to picture the elegant Hammett as he looked in about 1934, the year in which he published his last novel, adds a further poignancy.
These previously unpublished works have a sparse elegance, consisting as they do exclusively of a linear charcoal drawing as if still waiting to be completed with the areas of densely pigmented oil paint typical of his paintings at that time. Their unusual format - perhaps chosen partly as a visual pun on 'the thin man' - prefigures a series of full-length single figures painted on canvases in extremely elongated proportions, such as Batman (private collection); Superman (private collection) and Bill at Sunset (private collection), all of 1973, culminating in such masterpieces as The Arabist (1975-6) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), The Orientalist (1975-6) (Tate, London) and The Hispanist (Portrait of Nissa Torrents) (1977-8) (Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao). Kitaj treated these figures, some fictional and some real, as part of a cast of characters, the visual equivalent to those he admired in literary fiction. That the first tentative steps towards such pictures should have been in the form of portraits of an actual novelist was particularly fitting. Soon afterwards, Kitaj printed the two images together as a lithograph on two sheets, also titled Dashiell Hammett, which was proofed but never editioned (see J. Ramkalawon, Kitaj Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: British Museum Press, 2013, p. 150, no. 151, illustrated)
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
These previously unpublished works have a sparse elegance, consisting as they do exclusively of a linear charcoal drawing as if still waiting to be completed with the areas of densely pigmented oil paint typical of his paintings at that time. Their unusual format - perhaps chosen partly as a visual pun on 'the thin man' - prefigures a series of full-length single figures painted on canvases in extremely elongated proportions, such as Batman (private collection); Superman (private collection) and Bill at Sunset (private collection), all of 1973, culminating in such masterpieces as The Arabist (1975-6) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), The Orientalist (1975-6) (Tate, London) and The Hispanist (Portrait of Nissa Torrents) (1977-8) (Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao). Kitaj treated these figures, some fictional and some real, as part of a cast of characters, the visual equivalent to those he admired in literary fiction. That the first tentative steps towards such pictures should have been in the form of portraits of an actual novelist was particularly fitting. Soon afterwards, Kitaj printed the two images together as a lithograph on two sheets, also titled Dashiell Hammett, which was proofed but never editioned (see J. Ramkalawon, Kitaj Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: British Museum Press, 2013, p. 150, no. 151, illustrated)
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.