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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details RB KITAJ AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE Francis Marshall Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex January 2016 Volume I TEXT 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the course of researching this thesis I have made use of a number of publicly accessible research facilities. These are: The Print Room, British Museum, London The Library, Pallant House Art Gallery, Chichester The Special Collections Library, Leeds University The Special Collections Library, The University of California, Los Angeles The Archive of the National Gallery, London The Archive of the Philadelphia Museum of Art The Hyman Kreitman Archive and Study Room, Tate Gallery, London The Prints & Drawings Study Room, Tate Gallery, London Blythe House, Victoria & Albert Museum, London The National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London The Prints and Drawings Study Room, Victoria & Albert Museum, London In addition, many individuals have assisted me by providing first-hand information about Kitaj, providing important leads and avenues for research, responding to early drafts, allowing me access to the archives and collections in their care, dealing patiently with my persistent enquiries, or simply being generous with their time. In particular I would like to thank Tracy Bartley, Director of the Kitaj Estate; Stephen Finer; Professor David Alan Mellor; Dr Tanja Pirsig-Marshall; Anne Bukantas, National Museums Liverpool; Sophia Brothers, Science & Society Picture Library, Science Museum, London; Prof Edward Chaney; Andrew Dempsey; William Feaver; Eckhart Gillen; Genie Guerard and the staff of the Special Collections Library, UCLA; Frances Guy, formerly of Pallant House Art Gallery; Daniel Hermann, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Joachim Jaeger, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Catherine Lampert; Marco Livingstone; Simon Martin, Pallant House Art Gallery; Kirsty Meehan, National Galleries of Scotland; Sarah Norris, Librarian, Pallant House Art Gallery, Chichester;Geoffrey Parton, Marlborough Fine Art; Alice Purkiss, Picture Library, Tate Gallery; Jennifer Ramkalawon, British Museum; Tom Raworth; Aaron Rosen, Kings College London; Robin Simon, British Art Journal. Early, shortened versions of chapters 4 and 5 of this thesis have been published in the following journals: The British Art Journal and The Journal of Visual Culture in Britain. 4 SUMMARY RB Kitaj and the Idea Of Europe This thesis analyses European themes in the work of the American painter RB Kitaj. It focuses most closely on the 1960s, a relatively under-researched period of his work, certainly compared with the 1970s and 80s, in part because most of the existing literature follows Kitaj’s reading of his own oeuvre. Using canvases from the 1960s as examples, the thesis examines Kitaj’s concerns with the history of the European Left prior to World War II. Study of these paintings reveals how, even at this early stage of his career, Kitaj conflated autobiography and history. A comparison of Kitaj’s published and draft texts, written during and after these paintings were made, shows him altering their meaning according to his current concerns. This, in turn, shows how his revisions influenced later scholars’ readings. Furthermore, due attention is given to two important, though often overlooked, bodies of work from the 1960s: the screenprints and the installation made at Lockheed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both reveal a sustained engagement with European themes, such as the Industrial Revolution, Modernism and its legacies, and Jewish history. Whereas Kitaj emphasised the centrality of Judaism to his work throughout the 1970 and 80s, he downplayed his concern with technology and Modernism, although both continued to inform his imagery until well into the 1980s. His shift away from new technology (eg photo-screenprinting) and a Modernist aesthetic, in favour of life drawing, is analysed against contemporary artistic debates in Britain, together with his fascination with the evolving history of the European Left during the 1970s. Kitaj’s work reveals a sustained but constantly modulating, at times conflicted, meditation on European history and culture from an American perspective. In the final analysis, however, his engagement with Europe is, perhaps, the result of a spiritual and psychological impulse rooted in his personal and family history. 5 RB KITAJ AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE VOLUME I TEXT 6 RB KITAJ AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE CONTENTS Volume I TEXT Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Americans in Europe 29 Chapter 2 Luxemburg – Warburg 72 Chapter 3 His Cult of the Fragment 117 Chapter 4 Lives of the Engineers 163 Chapter 5 A Popular Front 216 Conclusion 243 Bibliography 249 Volume II ILLUSTRATIONS 7 INTRODUCTION Ronald Brooks Kitaj (1932-2007) was an American painter who spent much of his working life in Europe. Although for a time he attended Cooper Union, New York, most of his artistic training took place in Europe, at art schools in Vienna, Oxford and London. At various times he maintained homes in Oxford, Dulwich and Chelsea, as well as the Catalan coastal town of Sant Feliu de Guixols and, more briefly, in Paris. Although he regularly returned to the USA, Europe clearly played an important role in his life. Europe is, however, of greater significance than mere geography or topography. Subjects from European literature, history, philosophy and politics abound in Kitaj’s work. Through their titles, and the notes and texts he appended to them, his paintings, pastels, prints and drawings make direct reference to the social and political upheavals of Europe between, roughly, 1900 and 1950, with frequent allusions to the broader history and culture of Europe often being made. Kitaj’s family provides some personal context for this engagement with European themes. His maternal family were Eastern European Jews who fled Russian Pogroms; his father’s family came from Hungary; and his stepfather’s family were Austrian Jews who had escaped Vienna just before the Second World War. In addition to this personal impetus, the long-standing American cultural dialogue with Europe needs to be taken into account. Numerous American painters from Benjamin West in the 18th to Cy Twombly in the 20th century have crossed the Atlantic to experience European culture at first hand. It was arguably in this country that Kitaj made his greatest impact and histories of British art rarely fail to mention him. During the 1960s, he was a leading figure 8 associated with British Pop Art, providing both advice and an example to his younger fellow students at the Royal College of Art, such as David Hockney.1 In the 1970s, he became something of a polemicist, arguing for a return to figurative art in a time of abstraction and conceptualism. Thesis Outline This account takes the form of five extended chapters, divided into a series of sub- chapters, each examining particular aspects of Kitaj’s work as they relate to the topic of Europe. Themes run across and between these discussions, reflecting on and amplifying the points raised in each. They are arranged in broadly chronological order, ranging from the 1950s until the mid-1970s, with a particular focus on the 1960s. My interest in this period reflects a desire to excavate areas of the artist’s output that, when I began my research, had rarely been discussed and, in some respects, remains so. As his ideas developed through the 1970s, Kitaj began to adopt a dismissive attitude to earlier work, especially if it contradicted the view he then wished to project. The Human Clay, the 1976 exhibition he curated on British contemporary figuration, his focus on drawing the figure, and his increased interest in Judaism and Jewish themes, which preoccupied him from the 1970s onwards, tend to dominate much of the current literature. These publications were largely written with Kitaj’s involvement and post-date 1980. Since 2012, however, a major retrospective staged at the Jewish Museum, Berlin, and a catalogue raisonné of his prints published by the British Museum, have begun the process of broadening out the scope of Kitaj studies. 1 David Hockney ited in Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 41. 9 Chapter 1 sets the scene for Kitaj. It begins with a brief account of American artists’ engagement with Europe since the 18th century, which will show that there has been a longstanding dialogue between the United States and Europe. This can be characterised as an escape from a perceived restrictive provincialism towards an immersion in a rich cultural heritage that the USA is, paradoxically, part of and apart from. The chapter then develops into a discussion of the situation around 1950, when many young Americans, including Kitaj, travelled to Europe to study and gain first- hand experience of European culture. Consideration is also given, in this section, to Kitaj’s position within British Pop. It asks the question: to what extent does Kitaj’s output resemble the work of his British contemporaries? Within this discussion I will examine the idea of nostalgia within British Pop, as proposed by Erica Battle in 2015, and its implications for Kitaj’s own fascination with the history 20th-century Europe.2 It then hones in to examine his early experiences of Europe, in Vienna and Spain, before discussing a group of his early paintings on the theme of the Spanish Civil War.