BACON • FREUD • KITAJ

On Francis Bacon

DD: When did you meet Francis Bacon?

LF: I was friendly with [the painter] Graham Sutherland, and used to go down and see him in Kent. Being young and extremely tactless, I said to him: 'Who do you think is the best painter in England?' which, of course, he felt himself to be, and was beginning to be regarded to be. He said, 'Oh, someone you'd never have heard of. He's the most extraordinary man. He spends his time gambling in Monte Carlo, and then occasionally he comes back. If he does a picture, he generally destroys it,' and so on. He sounded so interesting. So I wrote to him, or called round, and that's how I met him.

SS: How did Bacon strike you as a person when you first met him?

LF: Really admirable. I'll give you a simple example: I used to have a lot of fights. It wasn't because I liked fighting; it was really just that people said things to me to which I felt the only reply was to hit them. If Francis was there, he'd say, 'Don't you think you ought to try and charm them?' And I thought, 'Well!' Before that, I never really thought about my 'behaviour', as such - I just thought about what I wanted to do and I did it. And quite often I wanted to hit people. Francis wasn't didactic in any way. But it could be said that if you're an adult, hitting someone is really a shortcoming, couldn't it? I mean, there should be some other way of dealing with it.

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in Bacon's studio, 1953
Photograph by Daniel Farson

Lunch at Wheeler's Restaurant (1962)
photograph by John Deakin © 1962


Left to right: Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud,
Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews

© Telegraph Media Group Limited

• Quite often I wanted to hit people   the nonist

• Remard the cat: March 2007   Old/New Friends

• leicester galleries   alex alien art

pass cursor over image Francis Bacon (1952) 17.8 x 12.8 cm, oil on copper Collection of Tate Gallery, London Copyright © Lucian Freud MORE HERE

FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992)


Self Portrait (1969)
oil on canvas, 14" x 12"
collection of Damien Hirst
$33 million at Sotherby's

        SELECTED FRANCIS BACON LINKS:

• The Estate of Francis Bacon
• Tribute to Francis Bacon | page 2
• Francis Bacon SlideShow
• Francis Bacon Links
• The School of London
• The Colony Room
• Ron B. Kitaj | The Human Clay
• Paintings Influenced by Francis Bacon

• Hugh Lane Gallery: Francis Bacon Studio

• UVUWEB - Film & Video: Francis Bacon
    video: The South Bank Show 1985 (avi file)
• Art Gallery of Alex Alien
• Described Thoughts: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon
• Le bac a sabel: Freud and Bacon in workshops...
• photo: Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, 1952
• photo: Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, 1953
• photos: Bruce Bernard: Nattional Gallery of Scotland
• Talking with Edward Lucie Smith
• O Mundo de Claudia: Oedipus and Sphinx
• George Szirtes

FRANCIS BACON on SOUTH BANK SHOW 1985

"I only paint portraits of myself because there's no one else around."

'The Wall' (detail)
Portrait of Francis Bacon, 3
© 2008 Scattergood-Moore

". . . if you look at walls covered with many stains . . . with the idea of imagining some scene, you will see in it a similarity to landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, tree, plains, broad vallerys, and hills of all kinds. You may also see in it battles and figures with lively gestures and strange faces and costumes and an infinity of things which you can reduce to separate and complex forms. And with these walls . . . it is as with the sound of bells; in their ringing you may find all the sounds and words that you wish to imagine."

Leonardo da Vinci, 1492

Portrait of Francis Bacon
34" x 42" charcoal drawing
by Scattergood-Moore
press image to enlarge

A TRIBUTE TO FRANCIS BACON

• slide show •

R. B. KITAJ (1932-2007)

"The artist, clothed in a red gown, at work in this painting looks as if he is some kind of wizard. The life-sized female figure, whose lower body extends outside the canvas, appears as if she is receiving the life force through the wizard's magic. The highly descriptive nature of the drawing indicates the artist's outstanding skills in this area, while the surface qualities of the boldly painted bright colors are one of the most typical characteristics of Kitaj's art." The Hoam Museum, Korea

view The Artist (1996) oil on canvas

"THE JEW, ETC." 1976-1979 oil and charcoal on canvas, 152.4 x 122 cm © 2001 R.B. Kitaj, Marborough Gallery, New York "The Jew, Etc. is the first picture that is about Kitaj's fictive figure Joe Singer. He is Kitaj's metaphor for the survivors of the Shoah. The historical event is turned into a current issue. The traumatic experiences are transferred into the present. The picture of the Jew in a train compartment visualizes the physical and mental restriction of the Diaspora. The crampedness of the compartment is passed on to the introverted person in the picture. The hearing aid stresses the isolation. Being on the move, in this case traveling on a train, is in Kitaj's sign system a symbol for the state of restlessness Jews were in. The picture of the wandering Jew who is driven from one place to another. The only safe place to escape to is the world of thoughts." The Legacy Project | Holocaust | The Jew, etc. •

Kitaj is aware that a Jew who paints figures has crossed a proscribed line, has violated a rule against making graven images. He even dares to contemplate painting God, a transgression of Hebraic law, although not of Christian (thus, for encouragement in this exercise, he turns to William Blake and various Italian painters). Perhaps as a kind of compensation for such defiance, Kitaj also spends a good deal of time concentrating on Cabbalism, the mystical study of the Hebraic scriptures which emerged among Jews in Spain in the 1300s. The Cabbalist employs the Hebrew alphabet as a lens through which to glimpse the Names of God, a means of piercing the veil of the sacred. Kitaj is especially concerned with a variation on Cabbalism developed by the Spanish Mystc Ramon Lull, whose aim was to categorize, and thereby comprehend, the entire cosmos. fron the blog: Remembering Art: RB Kitaj •   •   •   •   •   • "Kitaj draws better than almost anyone else," Robert Hughes "I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived." - R. B. Kitaj •   •   •   •   •   • While Kitaj's former friend and neighbor, the painter Francis Bacon (now dead), actively mirrored the century's tendency toward senseless violence in the twisted, smeared, and flayed flesh of his figures, Kitaj, rather, has endeavored to refract his times. Like the traveler gazing out the train window in the unfinished, almost monochromatic "The Jew Etc." (1976), we are all exiles, cast into an uncertain pilgrimage wherein we act out our "own unfinish." Against this diaspora, and against the obdurate fact of the Holocaust, Kitaj places our "elective affinities," the friendships and families we forge in the midst of loss and horror. In a world where the center will not hold, Kitaj turns for succor to those who, faced with the violence that is the world's constant refrain, themselves affirm life in their writing and painting, in their allegiances and convictions. To glimpse homages and icons in Kitaj's paintings, ghosts of others who went before, is to see what may be the only beauty vouchsafed us on our doomed journey through an alien countryside. from: RB Kitaj and the Art of Memory by Gina Maranto

Synchromy with F.B. • General of Hot Desire (1968-69)
Diptych: oil on canvas, 152.5 x 91.5 cm per panel
Private Collection, London

      Left panel: Synchromy wlth F.B. (Francis Bacon);
      Right panel: The General of Hot Desire from Shakespeare's Sonnet CLIV:

The little Love-god lying once asleep,
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep
The fairest votary took up that fire
Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;
And so the General of hot desire
Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.
This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
Which from Love's fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy,
For men diseased; but I, my mistress' thrall,
Came there for cure and this by that I prove,
Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.

"Synchromy with F.B. - General of Hot Desire (1968/9) . . . contains certain conjunctions of image, the meanings of which are not readily apparent, but these serve to embellish what in the first instance is a clear statement of homage to a painter Kitaj has long admired, Francis Bacon. One needs only the most basic familiarity with Bacon's work and its homosexual eroticism to appreciate the mischievous inclusiion of a disturbingly disjointed and overtly sexual female nude. What continues to come over most powerfully is the massive presence of the figures themselves, nearly life-size and enveloped in an environment of luscious colour." (Marco Livingstone)

 

THE HUMAN CLAY
An exhibition selected by RB Kitaj
Arts Council of Great Britian, 1976
• view contents here •

 

R.B. Kitaj who has just died was a literary kind of painter which was one reason certain art critics did not like him and poured scorn on him in his later career, but he was an excellent draughtsman and a gorgeous colourist. To his critics he seemed heavy and somehow pushy, a man of dense intelligence leaning on a paintbrush. To me, and to figurative but non-representative artists, he was a kind of difficult beacon. He was a friend of Hockney's, but whereas Hockney remained light and decorative and witty, Kitaj felt the weight (there goes that heaviness again) of history. Germanic rather than French and certainly not English. No lyrical nostalgia, no enchanted grove, no vanished empire, just a luminous truculence.

George Szirtes

 

pass cursor over image image 1: "THE NEO-CUBIST," 1976-87 oil on canvas, 70" x 52" The Saatchi Collection, London image 2: "DAVID," (unfinished), 1976-77 oil & charcoal on canvas, 72" x 60"

 

". . . I began the portrait of Hockney in the 'seventies. I didn't care much for it, and it lay in storage for many years. In the later 'eighties, David described to me the death of his friend Isherwood in California. I took up the old portrait again and drew a kind of alter-figure across the original full-frontal one, with Chris Isherwood in mind. Like Hockney, and unlike me, he had been a very optimistic and sublime personality, so I made of them a sort of Cubist doppelganger, representing both life and death in the particular, widely perspectival California setting they made their own in exile and, I hope, in some harmony with David's recent neo-Cubist theory for pictures."

from R.B. Kitaj's statement in: Exhibition Road, 1988

"The Neo-Cubist is Kitaj's most astute comment on the state of painting today. It pokes gentle fun at artists' aspirations to follow on where the Cubists left off, but also it shows how painting has evolved in the last seventy-five years. Between 1976 and 1987 Hockney, a close friend ever since their first year at the Royal College together, has been experimenting with photo-montages and prints. These works have been heralded by some as the natural successors to the great Cubist masterpieces. Kitaj as been doing the same in oils. In The Neo-Cubist Hockney is dislocated in a Cubist manner to reveal more sides than normally possible on a two-dimensional surface, but the painting is not restricted by the rules of Cubism. It shows Hockney stepping out from a mammoth egg shape. He floats in a landscape rich with references to Matisse, other Kitaj works, and his own Splash paintings.

Kitaj as usual is best at describing his own imagery. 'The "egg" shape,' he writes, 'is my mimicry of that grey Cubist ellipse which sometimes frames classical analytic Cubist compositions. I meant the lush plant life to stand for the artificial garden paradise one finds in Los Angeles, and in Hockney's own garden there. I began the painting as a nude (of D. H.) about twelve years ago. It had been in storage all these years - then a year or so ago, when his dear friend Isherwood died and Hockney related his last days and hours to me, I got the old failed painting out in order to transform it, with Isherwood's ghost dislocating (as you say) Hockney's form, after his newfound Neo-Cubism . . . I even gave Hockney bathing trunks (barely) . . .'

Hockney's many arms are firmly bound to his side. He is tied by the limitations of his art. Though he shares aims with Picasso, Braque, and Hockney, Kitaj is not a Neo-Cubist. His paintings demonstrates the ultimate failure of Cubism to resolve its spatial context. He doesn't rely on a distortion of perspective; he doesn't attempt to physically force an extra dimension into the canvas. He simply places the contrasting thoughts, references, and experiences on one canvas."

The School of London: the resurgence of contemporary painting
by Alistair Hicks
Phaidon Press Limited, Oxford, 1989

 

RON B. KITAJ
Two London Painters, 1979
(Frank Auerbach and Sandra Fisher)
pastel and charcoal on paper, 33" x 30 1/4"

 

In 1997, three years after the tragic and unexpected death of his wife Sandra Fisher at the age of 47, Kitaj returned to live in the United States and London lost one of its most colourful and influential personalities. "He is increasingly reclusive." notes Alistair Hicks in his book on the Saatchi Collection, "Yet through the written word, the telephone and meeting people for lunch, he has frequent contact with many fine minds. He observes the world with a frightening clarity." An exhibition at The National Galllery, London (Novemer 2001 to February 2002) was the first showing of the work of RB Kitaj in London since his controversial retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994.

 

SANDRA FISHER
Study for Kitaj in Jerusalem, 1981
charcoal on paper
22 3/8" x 30 1/2"

 

Selected Links:

• Ron B. Kitaj | The Human Clay | more
• The Legacy Project | Holocaust | The Jew, etc.
• The-artists.org: R B Kitaj | Freud
   Bacon | Balthus | Giacometti | Antonio Lopez Garcia
• Paintg It Jewish!. Jude Stweart
• Who is Buried in Desk Murder?
• Vitro Nasu: A Day Book | A Coney Island of the Mind
• David Cohen in conversation with R B Kitaj
• WebMuseum, Paris: R.B. Kitaj
• Wikipedia - R.B. Kitaj

 

Ronald Brooks Kitaj, artist, born October 29 1932; died October 21 2007

R.B. Kitaj, who died on Sunday aged 74, was an American painter domiciled for 40 years in England and became a leading member of the group of artists known (in his own phrase) as The School of London; alongside such contemporaries as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud he raised the stature of English painting to one of international significance... The Telegraph 24/10/2007

In 1976 Kitaj organised an exhibition called The Human Clay, after Auden's phrase, at the Hayward Gallery that reflected his interest in figurative drawing that attempted to convey "the delineation of the face and fortunes and torments of us all." His introduction to the work of 34 London artists was controversial, but it became a key text in the debate about the purpose of art.

 

I and Thou by R.B. Kitaj (1990)

Kitaj was a connector, an engager, both in the complexity of the themes that he embraced in his painting and in the richness of the social world that he inhabited. He had the old-time bohemian feeling for the life of art as an adventure to be savored, to be approached with a certain deliberateness, and maybe even with a certain sense of ceremony. Whether you were going with him to an exhibition in London or, more recently, after he moved back to the United States, having a glass of juice with him at the little table in his kitchen in Los Angeles, there was a sense that something important might happen--that feelings and ideas were in the air.

excerpt by Jed Perl on R.B. Kitaj, New Republic

Selected Obituaries:
• The Daily Telegraph
• Michael McNay, The Guardian
• Richard Morphet, The Independent
• Jed Perl, The New Republic
• David Cohen, New York Sun   artcritical.com
• Martha Schwendener, New York Tiimes
  Times Online
• The Economist
• eduardo1dacosta

 

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