On Kitaj – John-Paul Stonard in LRB:

“In ‘Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter’, the unfinished typescript for which was discovered among his papers after his death in 2007, R.B. Kitaj describes the origins of his bookish approach to painting. As a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the late 1950s, he attended lectures by the German art historian Edgar Wind, so popular that they were held at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre. The lectures taught him about the intellectualised world of floating images. ‘Wind led me to his master, [Aby] Warburg, who died semi-mad in 1929; and Warburg led me to his legacy and to his legatees – Panofsky, Saxl, Bing, Wittkower, Otto Pächt, the younger Gombrich and all the rest.’ It wasn’t only Warburg’s poetic method that inspired Kitaj. What also mattered to him was Jewish culture, as represented in the Warburg Library, evacuated to London in the late 1930s. The people who had enabled its move were the ‘stunning face of the Jewish diaspora in one of its grandest moments’. His neighbours in Dulwich, where he lived while continuing his studies at the Royal College of Art, included Fritz Saxl and Gertrude Bing (‘But you know so much about us!’ Bing said, when Kitaj showed up for tea). These early experiences convinced him that ‘Warburg was to art history what Einstein was to physics, Wittgenstein to philosophy, Freud to the study of the mind, Eisenstein to film, and so on: Jewish founding fathers of modernism.’ Warburg was the prophet of iconology, just as Bernard Berenson, another Jew, had been the prophet of connoisseurship.
What it might mean to be a Jewish artist (‘that arguable creature’, as he put it) became Kitaj’s central obsession, giving him his subject matter but also shaping his approach to image-making, and in particular to drawing.” (…)

“The pose is derived from a detail of a monk painted by Giotto in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence (reproduced in Cesare Gnudi’s monograph of 1959); Kitaj usually showed his model, Marynka, from less than monastic angles. Although Giotto provided the pose, the drawing bears more affinities with Degas, whose drawings, Kitaj once wrote, ‘are one of those artistic achievements by which I measure all art’. After seeing an exhibition of Degas’s pastel works in the mid-1970s he went to La Maison du Pastel in the Marais, bought some Henri Roché crayons ‘from two ancient sisters who may have served Degas’ and determined to ‘draw better than any Jew who ever lived, as a riposte to my anti-Dreyfusard master’. Degas was one of his favourite antisemites, Kitaj wrote; the others were Pound and Eliot.”

(…)

“Kitaj discovered Walter Benjamin through reading an essay by Gershom Scholem, and more thoroughly in Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations. Montage and the disjunctures of photomontage are the structuring principles for the handful of paintings on which Kitaj’s reputation rests, many of which seem like drawings coaxed into colour. The same can be said for his greatest painting, If Not, Not (1975), a political-poetic landscape, displaying Eliot – with a hearing aid – underneath the gates of Auschwitz. (The picture is familiar to visitors to the British Library from the tapestry copy that hangs in the entrance hall.) Kitaj’s attempt at 20th-century history painting in these large works is somewhat compromised by their riddling, obscure meanings – but they don’t get in the way of his consummate drawing and unerring sense of colour and design.”

(…)

“The accent here is on the bizarre, the strangeness that Kitaj saw as essential to all good art: ‘No real artist would want to practise a normative art ... the best art is strange.’ You might see Kitaj’s written ‘prefaces’, short commentaries often presented alongside his paintings, as an attempt to anchor this strangeness, to give it some kind of verbal structure. Without them, his paintings can appear like half an equation, wanting some kind of explanation, however convoluted. His drawings are less reliant on exegesis, and for that reason often more satisfying as works of art.”

(…)

“he painting-drawing style reached its conclusion, for Kitaj, in his ‘little pictures’ of faces and heads, made in the final two years of his life. Arendt is drawn with deft touches of colour, compressed into the centre of the small canvas, returned to the scene of the Eichmann trial; while Kitaj’s own features appear in the sorrowful guise of the Hunter of Gracchus, Kafka’s mythical figure who roams the world, unable to die, caught, as it were, in a state of eternal diaspora.”

Read the article here.

Every Jew needs to have his favorite antisemite. That’s quintessential. Mine are: Weininger. Kraus, a case of doubt, but I mention him in case. Wagner. Céline of course.

Also, Kitaj gives us a definition of what’s a Jew, outside religion.

A Jew is someone who wants to be better than other Jews.

The diaspora as just nothing but the impossibility of dying. For the time being.