ipad = 22:46 @ 54% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li... Critical Kitaj Essays on the work of R. B. Kitaj Edited by James Aulich & John Lynchipad = 22:46 @ 54% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aia * Critical Kitaj Essays on the work of R. B. Kitaj «o OC EDITED BY JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH ~ Manchester University Pressipad = 22:46 @ 54% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aia « Copyright © Manchester University Press 200 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter ‘may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press (Oxford Road, Manchester MI3 9NR, UK butp://wwemanchesteruniversitypress. co.uk Bri Library Catalin Pabication Dt ; Aig tovrd ar bk i eal bc he «o OC ish Library ISBN 07190 $525 3. hardback (07190 5526 1 paperback First published 2000 (07 06.05 04 03 02.01 00 109876543 Typeset by DR Bungay Associates, Burghficld, Berks Printed in Great Britain by The Alden Press, Oxfordipad = 22:42 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li wos alan = eS) ERG EES See ass] etm etek tit ie I a Contents Eee List of illustrations ate vil List of contributors. xi . Acknowledgements aii Introduction 20 all g sames AULICH AND JOUN ta NCH. 1 1_The impolite boarder: “Diasporist’ art and its critical response ANET WOLFF 2 Authority and visual experience: word and image in R. B. Kitaj ern nee * a; 3. The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg: monuments, documents, meanings tana JOHNLYNCH 8B ies ng Py 4 Natural history: Kitaj, allegory and memory GiLes PEAKE 3_R.B. Kitaj and Chris Prater of Kelpra Studio PAT GILMOUR $2 6 The history behind the surface: R. B. Kitaj and the Spanish Civil War SIMON FAULKNER a 7_ Secure objects and ancestor worship: Kitaj’s practice versus transactions of an Art & Language history TERRY ATKINSON 8. Kita), history and tradition JAMES AULICH 153, 9. Shootism, or, whitehair movie maniac Kitaj and Hollywood kulchur ALAN WOODS. 169 10 ‘The trace of the Other in the work of R. MARTIN ROMAN DEPPNER Kitaj (English adaptation by David Dickinson and Andrea Rehberg) 181 ‘Notes 197 Indexipad = 22:38 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - Marchese Urey Prose ! Introduction James Aulich and John Lynch o OCI Kitaj is a strikingly original artist. He is also one of very few painters in Britain since the 1960s to have inspired a generation of followers, and evidence of his prac: tice lingers in artists as diverse as ‘Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway on the one hand, to Andrzej Jackowski and Alexander Moffat on the other. This collection of «essays reveals Kit to bean artist who isnot easily defined within the existing dis- notice courses of art-historical analysis. His artis positioned on the shifting sands of com- sie peting critical approaches, not least those provided by the privileged readings of Lien Py the numerous notes, texts, commentaries and ‘Prefaces’ to the paintings written by the artist himself. These interpretations are further nuanced by the artist’s con tinual re-evaluation of the work in exhibition and published sources. This has entailed, for example, the attempt to devalue the screenprints and much of the carly work of the 1960s as too literary and dependent on Surrealist precedent. The desire to control belies a particular kind of anxiety! that can be found in the dif- ferent ways he signs his name. ‘There is the ‘R. B. Kitaj’ of the paintings, the R. K.’of the print series In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part’, 1969; the *Kitaj’ of the pastel drawings of the 1970s and 1980s; the ‘Ronald’ of the ‘Bad’ paintings from the early 1990s; the ‘Ron and Sandra’ of the 1996 Royal Academy exhibit; the mischievous ‘Stanley Hayter’ and “M. Rothenstein’ in letters to the printmaker Chris Prater during the 1960s; and the * from Franz Kafka of more general correspondence. “The authors in this book variously place Kitaj’s work between the visual and the verbal, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony. They situate it in that gap which exists between different systemsof signification and effectively structure the ‘work and its interpretations in fabrics of concealment and ambiguity of meaning. ‘The art exists in the spaces between memory and history, the private and the pub- lic, the abstract and the figurative, the painted and the drawn, the surface and its subject, symbol and allegory, allegory and its picture, tradition and radical avant- garde individualism, between Western liberal democratic and Jewish Talmudic traditions. In the end, it defies ultimateexplanation, and here lis its strength as rt ‘The pictures have powerful resonances of contemporary urban life, but unlike other figurative artists to whom he might be compared such as David Hockneyipad = 22:38 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - ne ny Pr 2 INTRODUCTION or Edward Hopper, he does not make pictures of things, so much as ideas. His practice i late modernist in so far asi i sure ofits own artifice: simultancous- Smt Iy itis engaged with postmodern issves of historical memory, individual liberty and identity. As the chapters by John Lynch and Simon Faulkner demonstrate, his art has gone orer the traces of histories obscured by the cultures of cold war and consumerism to recall the heroic role of individuals in the collective tragedy of the twentieth century. The work is devoted to an exploration of the ways in which the past haunts the present. He rediscovers in the streets of our contem- porary urban lives a Baudelairean subject matter variously culled from individ- ual lives, the brothel, the second-hand book shop, the library, the museum and the gallery. In portraits of friends and the historical personae he has discovered in the books of his library and imagination, he records the intellectual geography oo of his cultural mifieu. In many ways, the oeuvre is a portrait gallery of individ- tals who are marginal, yet whose existence is estenia wo the mainstream, a if they were part ofa repressed cultural subconscious. Kits} gives these obscured etaaeaealee figures new life: not Sigmund Freud but Aby Warburg; not Herbert Marcuse but Walter Benjamin, not Clement Greenberg but Edgar Wind, not Jacques Derrida entice but R. P. Blackmur, not Jean-Luc Godard but John Ford. Complex in their ref- sie crences, the pictures bear comparison to the work of Benjamin West, Larry Lien Py Rivers and even the contemporary state history painters of the communist bloc such as Willi Sitte and Werner ‘Tubke of the former German Democratic Republic. The subjects of his work and life have taken him on a journey via Vienna, New York, Paris, London, Frankfurt and Los Angeles from youthful bohemianism to studied anarchism and the discovery of his Jewishness. And, after the controversial retrospective exhibition at the ‘Tate Gallery in 1994 and the subsequent death of his second wife Sandra Fisher, the final break with English domicile in 1997.4 For the most part, Kitaj has worked in a traditional manner, representing for artist-teachers such as Terry Atkinson an uncritical acceptance of the ‘structur- al category of painting’. Kitaj shuns even the use of plastic paint in pictures, which are a return to, and secularisation of, history painting. Once considered the noblest of art forms, history painting involves the representation of human passions, intellect and history as symbolised in the iconographies of classical his- tory, mythology and Christianity. Modernists maligned the genre as too literary, a yessel too impure to carry the value and quality of the pure in art. This has been a criticism levelled at Kitaj by many commentators throughout his career. However, recognition came at the beginning of the 1960s when he was identified with ‘Pop art’ and a generation emerging from the Royal College of Art.’ ‘Tony Reichardt who was shortly to take up a post at Marlborough Fine Art noticed. his work at the seminal Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1960. He intro- duced Kitaj’s work to the gallery's co-founder Harry Fischer who was attracted to the central European themes and the expressionist textures of paintings such as Austro-Hungarian Footsoldier, 1958°'Two major one-man exhibitions followedipad = 22:38 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - eres ety Ps JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH 3 I at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1963 and the Marlborough-Gerson in New York in 1965. His reputation was assured with the purchase by the Tate Se Gallery of the painting Isaac Babel Riding with Budyonny, 1962. the early exhibitions, pictures and catalogues were heavily larded with literary allusion. Kitaj has often spoken of his ‘lifetime’ with Ezra Pound who, as fascist apologist and broadcaster for Mussolini in the Second World War, was no lover of Jews. In the light of covery of his own secular Jewishness di by Janet Wolff and Martin Deppner, his fascination with Pound is rev of a search for identity previously found in modernist American exile.” As one of i's prime obsessions in his pictures and writings, the ‘outsider’ is an analogue for the expatriate and dispossessed kernel of modernism: Pablo Picasso and James oa OGIg Joyce as Spaniard and Irishman in Paris, T: S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as Americans oa in London. That the pictures share a great deal in common with Pound’s poetry is certain: the quotation, the arcane learning, the montage-like construction, the free-form association, are all to be found in the painting as much as they are in the poetry. But there is much reading and erudition which is not referred to, and the observer must be wary of the sources and the written commentaries or prefaces to is redi notice the paintings provided by the artist. sie Since the early 1960s the oeuvre has bodied forth a sense of narrative conti Lien Py nuity self-consciously pursued in later pictures through invented characters such as Joe Singer in the picture The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding), 1980." Joe Singer is representative of one of the most consistent tropes to emerge from the work of the 1960s, where the individual in pictures such Aby Warburg as Maenad, 1962, is depicted as a twisted, crippled, afflicted and rejected individual. As the events of World War One drove the German art historian into madness, he is visually aligned to the subject of his study into the impact of Dionysiac pagan culture on Christian Renaissance forms. Similarly, as in The Ohio Gang, 1964 (Figure 1),’ the poet, Robert Creeley, appears as a distorted and grotesque trans- vestite." Another painting, Randolph Bourne in Irving Place, 1963 (Figure 2), depicts the literary bohemian and anarchist from the heyday of Greenwich Village. Pictured as a Wandering Jew as a hunchback with a stick from a fairy tale by the late German Romantic, Moritz von Schwind, the figure of Randolph Bourne epitomises the opposite of what Bourne had configured as the ‘herd intellect’, In Kitaj’s hands, Bourne the anarchist outsider who was rejected even by his own family for his pacifism becomes prophetic of the first steps along the road to the Second World War. As Giles Peaker quoting Juliet Steyn has shown, the figure becomes for Kitaj emblematic of Jewishness in the later part of his career as a ‘single unequivocal character, a common and unchanging identity — as outsider’. Until the early to mid-1970s Kitaj nostalgically associates himself and his work with an anti-bourgeois and late bohemian, bibliophiliac, leftist and anarchic pedi- sree drawn principally from American art and letters, remote from the later inter- cst in Walter Benjamin and specifically allegorical forms, Itis a tradition identifiediPad = 22:38 © 56x > & books.google.com.br ¢ 4 +a kita) expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google) Citeal Kita: Essays on the Work of F.8.Kital- Google Li vos aia «0 Co ‘ INTRODUCTION with figures such as Theodore Dreiser and Edward Dahlberg and includes others he does not mention such as John Dos Passos, whose novel, U.S.A. has a passage dedicated to Randolph Bourne: Ifany man hasa ghost Bourne had a ghost, a tiny twisted unscared ghost in black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets sill left in downtown New York, crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: Waris the health of the State. 1 The Ohio Gang, 1964 sil on canvas, 1829 1829,ipad = 22:38 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li =a =a fame JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH ' Chex Do Passos's poem also refers tothe “purplish normaly ofthe Ohio Gang, asi = Kitaj was using U.S.A. as a compendium from which to extract his gallery of ao protagonists, which he was not." But there are formal analogies to be made Soreness between Dos Passos’s literary modernism and Kitaj’s pictures. The use of ver- batim quotations of press headlines in ‘newsreels’ in oblique support of Dos Passos's gallery of characters in the novel is parallelled by the artist in the paint- ings in general and Randolph Bourne in Irving Place, in particular. The newsreel construction of Passos’s literary montage also points to another of Kitaj’s sources 2 Randolph Bourne in ring Place, 1963, and ellage on canvas, 1528x1825 o Ooipad = 22:38 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - en ek tint 8 INTRODUCTION board’ composition, particularly in the ways the imagery is spread as points of vsu- , al interest over the surface of the picture.” Similarly, the poets at Black Mountain regarded the pageas a field of points of poetic energy, considered as imagistic or @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - meee [€]>) en ek tint JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH ° Kitaj is a bibliophile and collector of books; his methods are haphazard, unre- ied by the strictures of scholarly inquiry. ‘The attitude has much in common with a rummaging among cultural artefacts which is peculiarly American, and it eo found contemporary expression in the work of Joseph Cornell and Robert enn Rauschenberg. According to the poet and writer Guy Davenport, Americans are “Foragers by destiny, we like to go into familiar places and make a new report on the contents ~ Henry Adams to Chartres, Pound to China, Olson to Yucatan. All too characteristically we have no notion of what we're looking for; we are simply looking." Inthe painting The Education of Henry Adams, 1991-92, the artist would seem to confirm this reading as he depicts Adams striding away from the viewer across a peopled landscape. Potential discoveries are determined by the contents of his ‘own backyard” as Jonathan Williams put it. John Lynch in his analysis of the painting The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960 (Plate 8), shows how the literal ao OCIg quotations in the early work are objects which can as easily be drawn from the worlds of books and pictures as the physical environment. In these contexts they invariably take on the aspect of a biographical experience mediated through the agency of his cast of actual or fictional characters. E. R. Curtius, a German schol- ar indebted to Aby Warburg and whom Kitaj cites, asserted the value of the com- notice plex traditions found in the history of civilisation in preference to the naive, and sacs subconscious dreams of the individual, ‘where tales are today is not in stories but rene Py in things’ ‘The materiality of the book, the page, the word, the photograph, the canvas fragment, the marbled and lined paper fragments, and the paint, in fact, place Kitaj’s work firmly in the tradition of the history of American art, ‘The some- times painted, sometimes literal imagery combined with the constructed ‘bulletin board’ composition recapitulates the illusionism and objectivity of nineteenth century precedent found in pictures such as William Michael Harnett’s The Artist's Letter Rack, 1879, John Frederick Peto’s Reminiscences of 1865, 1897, and John Haberle’s 4 Backelor’s Drawer, 1890-94. Like Kitaj’sart they are a romanc for what is about to disappear, as Robert Hughes commented: “They all bear the mark of recent social use. But the implication is that the society that used them. is vanishing or gone.”® These pictures have the painted appearance of assemblage oo collage and are the direct forerunners of a tradition of surrogate portraiture in American modernism seen in Marsilen Hartley's Portrait of a German Officer, 1914; Demuth’s poster portraits begun in 1924, such as / Sam the Figure Five in Gold, 1928; Charles Sheeler’s Self-Portrait, 1923; Arthur Dove's Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, 1924, and Gerald Murphy's Portrait, 1928, for example. None of these manifests a recognisable likeness; rather they submit the components of the design to modernist arrangements to evoke the presence of an individual through cryptic allusion. As Walt Whitman had once said, the objects with which a person surrounds himself are more revealing than the literal description of an individual likeness. In the quotation from William Carlos Williams on the title page to the second one-man exhibition catalogue Kitaj specifically aligns himselfipad = 22:39 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja * ee to int 10 INTRODUCTION with this tradition in American art and letters: ‘A local pride: spring, summer, ; fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to the Greek and the Latin with the bare hands.” “The point is that American feelings of cultural provincialism and of ‘separa- tion’ from Europe contrast with an idea of European sensibility, and construct a self-image of Americans as pioneers. They become, therefore, explorers in the tradition rather than its native inhabitants. ‘They bring back trophies from the history of the tradition, but are unable to distinguish them from any other cul- tural artefacts. It isthe cultural landscape of the exile and the autodidact, where ccultural value is learned rather than lived. The sense of being an American in London combined with an intuition that the continuity of the Judaeo-Christian and classical traditions had been in some senses compromised, as James Aulich o Go argues below, means that they are only really accessible through study and schol- ae arship. He had discovered in the theoretical writings and the poetry of his friend, Robert Duncan, for example, a marriage of the ‘lordly and the humble’ and of ‘mythology and folktale’. This was combined with a strong sense of the survival re cng mens of the past in the present through processes of rediscovery rather than any inter- action with a ‘natural environment’. Thinking of Duncan, Kitaj wrote, ‘I devour ainetae his sense of past, of heroism, his syntax, his wasp-talmudic take in an arcane aie myth-dredging tradition, the way his life and lines burn on in his own townism enc Py -» its late sunlight and westernamericaness, the expectation and surprise as so ‘much value is given out of the mouths of libraries" The attempt is made by the artist to give what Aby Warburg called the engrams of the past new life, through the employment of self-conscious parallelisms in the pictures and the texts to which they are so painstakingly related. Stories in the pictures are seen to connect. Juan de la Cruz, 1967 (Figure 4), for ample, depicts a negro in an interior ‘meant to evoke transport to Vietnam.” ‘There is a Negro Tragedy, a Black unhappiness I have felt deeply all my life which Pealso begun to treat, haltingly.”" The figure in the picture has Cross on his name tag, and he is depicted in the persona of Juan de la Cruz, the Spanish mystical poet. Kitaj commented at the time, ‘I had been reading Juan de la Cruz in Roy Campbell's wonderful translations, at the same time I wanted to make a composi- tion about the activist political situation in America and it seemed just right to have a negro, an American negro soldier stand in for Juan de la Cruz in this context. ‘The layers of association reach back from Los Angeles in 1967 to the Spanish Inquisition through the Spanish Civil War. Roy Campbell wrote of ‘the miserable cell so small that he could hardly turn round, and where he was all through the burning summer of 1567 and where as he said, through suffering came to him experience which he could express through poetry’.”” And Roy Campbell, transla- tor of the poem, hispanophile, Catholic and poet, was himself caught in the cross- fire in the battle for the Alcazar outside Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. As Simon Faulkner suggests, a romance of the past ambi the European Left resounds through the oeuvre from Kennst du das Land?, 1962 (Figure 34), to Go andipad = 22:39 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aia « «o OC 4 Juan del Cruz, 1967 oom canvas, 183% 152.4ipad = 22:39 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li Livros ale = meme [€]>) [8 en ek tint ik INTRODUCTION Get Killed Comrade ~ We Need a Byron in the Movement, 1966. Three distinct characters emerge ftom the literary and visual fabric of the picture. Firstly, there is St John of the Cross who suffered for his devotion to his faith. Secondly, there is Roy Campbell, a supporter of the Nationalist cause during the Spanish Civil War, Catholic convert, fierce defender of ‘genius’, and arrogant bibliophile with a romantic passion for adventure. And thirdly, there is Cross, the invented man in the picture who is trapped by the history of his race in his ‘most familiar guise .. in the United States Army ... he’s usually a tough specialist and he finds in the army a brand of socialism, a brand of democracy he never knew in civilian life, nd all the dignified trappings that go along with that’. Tt was at about this time that Kitaj discovered the writings of Walter Benjamin. Giles Peaker in this volume shows how Walter Benjamin provided Kitaj with one Dd of the most important encounters of his career. ‘The collection of essays oDGo Illuminations with ts introduction by Hannah Arendt was a vital way into the com- plex thought of this idiosyncratic critic and essayist. Arendt begins her essay with a reference to “The Hunchback’ and Benjamin’s essay, ‘Franz Kafka. On the Tenth rane ge Po Anniversary of His Death’, and defines a territory which in the context of his own ‘oeuvre the artist would find impossible to resist.” First published in English in ainetae 1968, the essays can be seen to provide intellectual justification for Kitaj’s biblio- na philia. The essay ‘Unpacking My Library’ might be said to provide inspiration for omen the print series of book-covers /n Our Time, 1969. “The ‘Task of the Translator’ might have provided a buttress for the transformation of secondary material such as poetry, literature, films, photographs and other art. In “The Story Teller’ the artist might have found critical justification for the construction of the artist as a liberal humanist, endowed with the power to tell stories. Significantly, the collection contained Benjamin's most famous of essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Kita) could not have helped but draw succour from it for his screenprints. This most Marxist ofall Benjamin's well-known works, placed great faith in the socially transformative capacities of the new reproductive technologies of the industrial age. But most important of all are the “Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which give theoretical credence for Kitaj’s working practice as a whole. Benjamin's thought shared many characteristics with Aby Warburg," and the artist could not have failed to notice the correspondences between Warburg’s the of the social memory, and Benjamin’s concept of history. Warburg had written of the survival of images crucial for the history of the race: It is in the zone of orgiastic mass-seizures that we must lock for the mint which stamps upon the memory the expressive movements of the extreme transports of ‘motion, as far as they can be translated into gesture language, with such intensity that these engrams of the experience of suffering passion survive as a heritage stored in the memory. They become exemplars, determining the outline traced by the artist's hand as soon as maximal values of expressive movernent desire to come to light in the artist's creative handiwork.”ipad = 22:39 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li Livros ale = meme [€]>) [8 en ek tint JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH 1s elements of the print to Prater and his assistants with only written instructions for its execution. Technologically progressive, potentially democratising and relative- ly cheap, it had a number of advantages for the artist. He could work easily and Erne ena effectively in series, developing and exploiting a theme by means of collage, a tech- ae nique which does not require the effort of the sustained facture of the artist Furthermore, the medium through its photo-lithographic processes has the facil- ity to portray a literalism which is both traditional, in so far as it looks back to Harnett, Peto and Haberle, and avant-gardist in the modernist sense of being able to accommodate the found object and the readymade. In this the prints are more Duchamp than Picasso: they are literary, distanced, playful and ironic. Often criticised for his literary tendencies, as James Aulich discusses, by the ‘middle 1970s he had become the focus for a figurative revival in mainstream con- temporary art in reaction to minimal, conceptual and performance forms. ‘The 0 ACIo compositions often appear at first glance to be whole and coherent, while still ascribing to an understanding of pictorial space within modernist convention in pictures instilled with a bricollage of associations. He also begins to focus more pee- ame cnporm mene cisely on the creation of what the artist called characters in paint, visual analogues for fictional presences which he hoped would be as memorable as those from notice Charles Dickens or even Fyodor Dostoevsky. The attempt was embodied in a series aie of single-figure paintings beginning with Barman, 1972, and Superman, 1972, find- rene Py ing fullest immediate expression in The Orientalist, 1975-76, and The Arabist (for- ‘merly Moresque), 1975-76. However, within contemporary structures of taste their authority is undermined by a pervasive decorative decadence reminiscent of Whistler and Klimt. 1975 saw a return to drawing, inspired by the contemporary example of Sandra Fisher and the historical one of Edgar Degas. He shared the return with Jim Dine. ‘The association began with ‘Dine/ Kits): A Two Man Exhibition’ at the Cincinnat Art Museum in 1973. Writing of Dine in the catalogue, Kitaj spoke of the ‘art we grew up with’, ‘regional dialects’, ‘left-wing depression era dialects’, ‘forties dialect’, ‘the popular art published in Life and Time’, ‘Whitney Annual dialects’ and ‘the dialect of the big-city cafeteria life which still existed only twenty years ago’. Both artists’ ‘Americanness’ might be defined in relation to their attitudes to the facticity of the objects of their paintings — Dine with his tools, Kitaj with his books. By the end of the decade they had a substantial body of work made up of large-scale pastel drawings bearing a superficial resemblance to Degas’s explo- rations into the medium." In the context of postwar aesthetics the move was cer~ tainly a revisionist one, and the example of Degas was the most overt demonstration of self-conscious reference and quotation of the art of the past. His presence is continually asserted in The Human Clay" and was reinforced by anoth- er polemical exhibition, The Artist's Eye, organised by the artist in 1980 at the National Gallery. Kitaj was looking for a way to reinvigorate the tradition of figurative art, and as he had done before he looked to pornography, an area which lies outside theipad = 22:39 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja te et Pee 6 INTRODUCTION discourse of high cultural expression and, unrestricted by its boundaries, has the potential for experiment and innovation. These explorations led to a kind of coded I eo elaboration of subject matter in sexually explicit pictures such as Communist and Mamie Socialist, 1976, Asan image, the erect penis is an anarchic challenge to convention a and a transgression of sexual taboos in the public sphere. Yet, itis also an appeal toa wider audience in an allegorical picture with a subject matter which has todo less with personal human desire than the pursuit of a romantic politcal utopi- tet tat anism. The pornographic might seem wilfully capricious, but is in character as it responds toa secretive, conspiratorial pictorial tradition Ithas the attraction ofan . exclusive body of knowledge, and represents a shift from the recondite and the scholarly tothe ray, prohibited and populist in the most anti-bourgeos of senses Pornography has always attracted the unwanted attentions of the authorities, and ao OCIg in the case of art in England the hostility of the establishment. Pictures such as His Hour, 1975, The Yellow Hat, 1980, and The Red Brassere, 1983, for example, auldress auto-eroticism from a voyeuristic point of view. This was offensive to a public rehearsed in the ideology ofthe family and was condemned as “decadent™ expressions of the experience of modern city life. But they ae also illustrations of Duchamp’ allegory for the modern condition found in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23." Inthe mid-1970s Kitaj was on record as perceiving the atempr to make art more acoeesible as « political ect. It wea « comment perhaps tore pertinent than the artist realised, Taking the representation of the body asa starting point fr signif- icant art, his investigations had taken him into the areas of human sexual activity, and particularly that ofthe prostitute. For Benjamin, the prostitute was the polit. ical allegory of modernity, of the relationship between human relationships and commodity exchange: “The prosttuteis the ur-form of the wage labourer, selling herself in order tosurvive. An objective emblem of capitalism, a hieroglyph ofthe true nature of social realty, exposing the true synthesis ofthe form of the com- modity and its content." Asa figure it was also an allegory forthe artistas a par- ‘eyor of dreams and seller and commodity in one. The theme was treated most explicitly in the psinting Self-Portrait as Woman, 1984 (Pate 12). ‘AS parttime merchant seaman his first sexual experiences had been with prostitutes in encounters he has revisited in the paintings The First Time (Havana, 1949), 1990, and The Second Time (Vera Cruz, 1949), A Tale of Martine Boulevards, 1990. Frankfurt Brothel, 1976, was also born of autobio- graphical experience. Watching surreptitiously in the Frankfurt bar, La Sphinx, until noticed, Kits} would go back to his hotel room and sketch from memory. As confessionals they are the memory of fleting sexual encounters, not the life Jong relationships found in his portraits. Frankfurt is a city famous for its legalised prostitution, proffering a sanitised world of sex as transaction, but inex tricaby linked toa darker world of drugs, crime and disease, ‘The pictures run counter to feminism in art, and are in advance of feminist art-historical inter- pretations of Degas's Laundreses which describe their sexual undertow andipad = 22:39 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - Bee JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH ” implicit betrayals of wider and gendered power relations in society, ‘They ao assert an_anti-bourgeois sensibility comparable with Henry Miller, Ernest = Hemingway and, aterly, Charles Bukowski." os Frankfurt Brothel leads to Sighs from Hell, 1979. Benjamin had described modernity asthe ime of Hel, a configuration of repetition, novelty and death. In his critical analysis of William Burroughs, Eric Mottram wrote of the ‘desires of private fantasy [which] have been abe to seize power and realise themselves in pub- lic action as rarely before in history and have been rendered legitimate by a model of human nature and government as monstrous in its extreme versions asthe con- centration camp and the brothel’5* Hitler had identified the pimps in Frankfurt as Jews and condemned them as the perpetrators of a moral cancer in German soci- ety. What Hitler had failed to realise was that Jewish pimps were exploiting Jewish 70 GI g girls, and in doing so they had unwittingly aided the fascist cause: ‘Brothel life . its hellish sighs atthe heart of decaying cities, whose very streets would offer up victims to the death transports! ‘The work would seem to place the Holocaust at the core of modernity it is not presented as a peripheral aberration but is of its essence ‘Janet Wolff (chapter 1) analyses Kita’s growing engagement with Jewish iden- tity during the decade 1975-83, and at this time there is a retrospective assertion of Jewishness in relation to pictures such as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960 (Pate 8), feaac Babel Riding with Budyonny, 1962, Walter Lippmann, 1966 (Plate 16), and The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin), 1972-73 (Plate 9), for example. Explicitly Jewish themes had first emerged in If Not, Not, 1973-76 (Plate 3), and The Jewish Schoo! (Drawing a Golem) (Figure 6), 1980, before reach- ing their most intense expression in the Germania and Passion series in and around 1983. In an interview with ‘Timothy Hyman he spoke of memory, the fate of the European Jews, and the symbol of the Wandering Jew (Out of that maestrom I've begun a meditation on historical Remembrance and its attendant senses of exile and survival. And now the agony of the Palestinian Diaspora confounds historical Jewish agonies and those two battered peoples embrace in deathly lock step T intend to confront these impossible things in art some day, when Pm chased limping down a road looking at a burning city, I want the slight satifac- tion that I coulda’t make an art that didn’t confess human frailty, fear, mediocrity, and the banality of evil as clear presence in art-life.®* ‘The identification with modernism in exile, alienation and loneliness, combined with the portrayal of the artist as a kind of Jew, makes a nostalgic construction of the liberal democratic individual as someone who is sceptical of received opinion, and who protects their perceived freedoms from the intrusions of state and cor- porate orders. ‘These are all found in the 1989 publication, First Diasporist ‘Manifesto And so I've come to make myself a tradition in the Diaspora, until I can think of better place, where the terms of my own life have been staged. It is real AmericaniPad = 22:39 @ 55%— > & books.google.com.br ¢ 4 +a kita) expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google) Citeal Kita: Essays on the Work of F.8.Kital- Google Li vos aja o OCIo 6 INTRODUCTION rootless Jew, riddled with assimilationist secularism and Anglophiliac-Europist art ‘besieged by modernisms and thei skeptical overflow, fearful at the prospect and state of Wandering, un-at-homeness, yet unable to give myself to Ohio or God or Israel or London or California, Like Kafka, I've never made a frank deposit the Bank of Belief; not yet. ‘on Kramer described the manifesto asa ‘quintessentially American document? belonging ‘to the tradition of expatriate complaint and self-exculpation. In spirit, it reminds one of Pound’s Cantos. There is a similar, though smaller-scale, attempt to turn the accidents of autobiography, the fragments of eccentric learn- ing, and the loneliness of the exile into a myth for the modern world.’ Kitaj becomes preoccupied in the task of inventing an iconography of the Holocaust during this period. The Jemish Rider, 1984-83 (Plate 1), is generally held to be the most successful in this respect. It is a portrait of the art historian Michael Podro, it shows a man with a book ~and therefore intellectual — alone in a railway carriage passing through a landscape with a chimney. The chimney became the focus for most discussion, and it features in a large number of pictures from this period, most notably The Painter (Cross and Chimney), 1984-85 (Plate 2), the series Passion (1940-45), 1985," and Germania (The Tunnel), 1985 (Plate 4). The latter is a painting that Kitaj regards as one of his most difficult and it features the artist as a cripple with ie of the artist is none other than the out cast from the early part ofthe ocuvre. He embodies the ‘myth of the modern world of which Kramer speaks, but contained within that myth from the perspective of the second half ofthe century is the fate of European Jewry. As Deppner indicates below the perpetual encounters with the ‘outsider’ in innumerable guises is part of Kitaj’s negotiation with the modern romantic myth of the artist. As such, it a reassertion of one of the essential defining characteristics of modern art within the liberal humanist discourse of high art, to which ‘Terry Atkinson (chapter 7) lays down a challenge. Kitaj’s practice is a conscious act, it secks to preserve the capacity of art to coin images capable of taking on a social function through the collective memory. The tunnel, or funnel, or corridor, becomes an image for a jour- ney no longer able to support thoughts of exploration and adventure, rather the have become journeys of displacement to darkness and an uncertain fate. Kitaj notes in relation to Germania (The Tunnel), “The “way” to the gas has been given several names, I believe I saw “Tunnel” recorded somewhere. But subsequently, in Lanzmann’s great film, Shoah, he presses an SS officer from ‘Treblinka: “Can you describe this ‘funnel’ precisely? What was it like? How wide? How was it for the people in this funnel’? It is probably worth remarking on the relatively large number of pictures from this period which have a funnel-like composition, arti ulated in representations of alleys, corridors and passages: they all appear in Sighs from Hell, 1979; Cecil Court, London WC2 (The Refugees), 1983-84 (Plate 13); Drancy, 1984-86 (Figure 10); Bad Foot, 1990-93; and Bad Thoughts, 1990-93. Kita} ‘mentions that the original idea for the image had come from literature or possibly documentary film. It has a life of its own as a functioning iconography and hasipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - wees[Z13] [8 ne ny Pr JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH 6 been very successfully adapted to architecture in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin ———— ‘The paintings in the 1980s take on a more expressionist and spontaneous look. Sie ‘They have a deliberate awkwardness to stave off the mawkish and the sentimental. fed through the west- ‘ern, Western Bathers, 1993-94 (Plate 15), as easily as Titian’s Tempesta, Tempesta (River Thames), 1992-93, characterises the work. They have a painterliness rem- iniscent of what some have identified asa Jewishness in art found in Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka, for example. These references are complemented by those to Mare Chagall, particularly in the background of some of the later pictures. But in the end, the pictures of the 1990s seem to look more to American precedent. ‘The artist even refers to George Bellows, for example, in Whistler vs. Rustin o OCIo (Novella in Terre Verte, Yellow and Red), 1992, and indirectly in the painting London, England, Bathers, 1982, which in its gauche, demotic utopia is closer to Bellows's #2 Kids, 1907, than it ever was to Cézanne. In June 1994 Kita’s long-awaited retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery, organised by Richard Morphet. The number of new paintings and their patina of osnauace expressivity in line, gesture and composition, which was unfamiliar to the critical establishment, attracted a great deal of adverse, and sometimes personal, criticism. Janet Wolff interprets the reaction within the context of a peculiar kind of British anti-semitism, and the exhibition was much better received in the United States. In June 1995 Kitaj received the painting prize at the Venice Biennale amidst fals accusations of nepotism. While the artist wished that ‘all the old stories might whisper once more’, fora section of the viewing public many of the old favourites were absent from the exhibition. Nevertheless, in the paintings the emphasis on biography, interpreted through portraiture, history, literature and the history of art, was as sustained as it had ever been. ‘The written texts for the catalogue fol lowed the pattern clearly established in Marco Livingstone’s 1985 monograph, and showed a tendency towards narrative explication, rather than the ostentatiously modernistic and allusive nature of the texts produced for The Autumn of Ceniral Paris (Walter Benjamin), for example. Many of the texts were retrospective and modified earlier, perhaps more poetic or even scholarly commentaries familiar from the first two one-man exhibitions. Among the pictures on show and not seen in public before were two, in particu- lar, which proved to be prophetic in the circumstances of the adverse critical recep- tion, Whistler vs. Ruskin (Novella in Terre Verte, Yellow and Red), 1992, re-enacts the bitter legal conflict between Whistler and Ruskin. They are depicted as two boxers in a version of ‘Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, at the Whitney’. Whistler, the eventual winner of the trial, is seen to be knocked from the ring as Dempsey, the eventual winner of the fight, was knocked from the ring" In Against Slander, 1990-91 (Plate 7) the subject of the painting is not directly inspired by art, but by a book authored by'a Jewish saint’, Hafetz Hayim, Its title is translated as Hold Your Tongue and it was published ‘At the very moment Cézanne was showing in the firstipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li Los aja - meme [€]>) [8 tr kei a INTRODUCTION that can be traced back and identified to anchor subsequent interpretations; rather, the motive is, as recent historians have asserted, to make such arguments as =e informed and open to counter-argument as possible wicca Art history has over recent years been subject to many theoretical and method- ological challenges, from the objects it studies to its very coherence asa discipline.* ‘This volume reflects the impact of such challenges; and, we would argue, is stronger for it. What motivated us to begin the process of collecting the contribu- tions for the book was a desire to see Kitaj’s work subject toa rigorous reading that went beyond the boundaries of biography and proclaimed artistic intention; these are made elsewhere.” Even with this in mind it is still effectively impossible to transcend the desire for biography as it seems impossible to write of the work pro- duced by Kitaj without recourse to biography as the key tointerpretation. For the 70 OCI o sake of analysis it is possible to identify three biographical contexts for the work that define most accounts of artistic production: authorial intention, author’s life and social history. If each of these is considered in turn itis possible to see what presumptions and ideologies underpin their conceptual framework as they describe the work of Kita As part of his by now established practice, Kitaj produces a growing number of ‘prefaces’ to individual pictures. In the catalogue to his retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994, Kitaj produced a large number of these and they serve to provide for the viewer a map of influences, intentions and revealed meanings of individual pictures. Although Kitaj maintains that they are not in themselves explanations they have a privileged status on the scale of interpretative discourse given that they are made by the artist himself, who hasalso in this way become an author. But what can we say about such writings? They can provide clues as to individual icono- graphical detail ~ the figure here is based upon a friend, relation, historical char- acter ~ but the picture is much more than this. As the chapter by John Lynch explains, there may be private meanings to individual pictures but fundamentally they have a publiclif and the two realms are not necessarily compatible, which is not to imply that they should be. It is evident that Kitaj is motivated by a genuine desire to explain, to dispel the modernist myth of self-contained and self-present ‘meaning. However, as already pointed out, given the status of the artistas the priv- ileged figure within the discourse of art it can be said that the consequence of this isan impression ofa coherent and unified relationship between producer and cul- tural product that belies the actuality ofthe process. Not only may the public read~ ing be contested but it is also the case, perhaps, that the private readings of the artist himself are actually self-contested. It is not necessarily the case that ‘Kitaj’ the person is known even to himself, as the discipline of psychoanalysis has shown, ‘or a Marxist notion of ideology explores. What also has to be taken into consider- ation is the fact that, as the very name of the event suggests, such intentional accounts are produced retrospectively, long after the pictures themselves have entered the public discourse. One aspect, therefore, of such statements is the appearance of a fixing of meaning and limiting of potential interpretation. Again,ipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - ne ny Pr JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH 2 it must be said that this is not something that can be, or should be avoided. But the cultural resonance of art objects is that they work semingly to generate poten= aa mans tally infinite readings, and this volume is testament tothe desire to rework once 1 more the terrain mapped out by the work of the artist. Nevertheless, the notion of| intention as it is generally presented, that is as cause, is clearly not sufficient to offer an open inquiry into the determinations of art in a wider social sense.” ‘The mainetey of the inteotional eecount of the work of art ia biography. The role of biography asthe master-narrative in accounts ofan author's cultural pro- duction is still predominant, if suffering the ravages of various theoretical chal- lenges." Biography is what i usually offered as the structure tothe intentional act and iti from this thatthe picture ges its meaning. With Kita the centrality of biography is more obvious given his figurative style and overt historical references ao OGIo Itis used to help pin down the meaning of the painting. It is the key to ‘unlock- ing’ the intention behind the work and is usually offered asthe connection which traverses the space between art object and spectator to alow for effective inter- pretation, But such narratives, for thisis what they are, are not so straightforward as they are presented as being. Any biography is by necessity a process of selec- ‘uae tion, and that process is manifested in a written account within which events are simi ascribed significance on the basis ofthe end point ofthat narrative, its tlos. Kitaj ag 28a painter is unusual in that he has seemingly always relied upon writing to act 38a supplement to the painting tothe extent, as we shall se, that i is sometimes even included on the canvas In this way Kitaj has taken an active roe in work- ing to intervene into what isin many cases a passive relationship between specta- tor and art work, Faced with the sersation of vertigo from the unsecured and free-floating meanings generated by an art work we grasp atthe biography of the artist to determine intention from which we postulate a“truth’. In the case of some artists, such as Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock, the role of biography has come to play such a discernible roe in popular readings of the work that what is visibly apparent is a mythology, an ideological process of mystification underpinned by the demands of the art market.” In this way all biographies are myths used to underpin a particular version of history. ‘The catalogue othe Kitaj retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London in 1994 isan example of a multifaceted presentation of biographicil writing attempting to define an expressive and artistic presence, indicated by the ttle ofthe frst essay by Richard Morphet: “The Art of RB. Kit: “To thine own self be true"."* Further in the catalogue is a ‘Chronology’ As a distillation of biographical detail it establishes the preferred reading of Kita and his work. Out of the incompre- hhensible and unariculable range of possible events occurring since 1932, the year of Kita’s birth, particular events are identified that are deemed to have affected Kita’ development (frit is clearly presented asa singular process of becoming) tp until the moment of the retrospective. For instance, inthe entry forthe fist date, “1932 the significant event described is: ‘Hitler attains power and “casts his shadow on parts of my life and art from year one”."* This entry is then followedipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja Bee Py INTRODUCTION by a long series of accounts of other events, experiences and influences across the period of Kitaj’s life. Such accounts do provide an interpretative framework of =a ‘what can be seen to be important in relation to Kitaj’s work as it is expressed by inc eer the artist, But it isalso a procedure of selection and construction that, rather than a declaring itself as such, does not acknowledge its processes. ‘The problem is not that it relies upon biographical detail as elements of a historical narrative but that it presents these as singular, originary and unconsciously driven. It is not the case teat mana tt that art history can jettison biography, but it must be acknowledged that there i, in fact a plurality of biographies and that the uses of a monographical narrative . are limited.” ‘Once again it should be clear that what we are seeking to do isto open up the discussion to a wider scope of possibilities that exist in relation to Kitaj’s work ao OCIg rather than attempting to confine it to a limited range. If the chronology men- tioned above had een produced ten years previously pethaps the ‘significant events’ would be different from those selected for the 1994 retrospective; simi larly if in ten years another chronology is produced it could again be very dif- ferent. What this points to, then, is not a rejection of such accounts but the necessity for an awareness of their constructed and selective nature; it is the apparent naturalness and unproblematical presentation of such accounts that is mythologising and ideological. An interview with Kita} and his supporting ‘prefaces’ to individual pictures within the retrospective catalogue reinforce the primary role of biography in his accounts of his work, At the back of the catalogue there isa bibliography of writ- ings by, and on, Kitaj but again this is given a further twist by the fact that what is available is a ‘selective’ version compiled in ‘consultation with the artist’, and the reader has to visit the Tate Gallery Library for the complete version.” retrospective is once more writing the life ofthe artist. What we set out ro do was to make the discourse of Kita far less fixed and secare than it had, arguably, become. ‘This is not an attempt to replace what has gone before with another account but, on the contrary, to force open the space occupied by the work and to make it a realm of critical talk. In the same way that Paul de Man talks ofthe relationship between autobiography and fiction as one that does not resolve to either/or but is in fact an ‘undecidable’, so too do we see the work of Kiitaj as occupying an undecidable space between private and public meaning.” We would seek to avoid the dangers of privileging cither the authorial intention as the exclusive determinant of meaning or a sort of excessively semiotic celebration of the free-floating signifier." But we are not arguing fora form of postmodern anti-foundationalism that perccives the art work as merely ‘performative’ in oppo- sition to claims of meta-narrative theory. Agency is actually located historically, both in terms of production and in terms ofthe discursive context of its reception “The dialectical relationship between authors as agents working within the speci- ficities of histories, meanings and social locations is what gives rise to the various accounts of Kitaj that follow, What we are secking to do is to demystify those formsipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja x « mame (€)> | ee ee eo Ia) JAMES AULICH AND JOHN LYNCH as of explication that smooth out and elide traces of time, history and difference by an appeal to the psycho-biographical motivation of the author, where the implicit = assumption is a complete identity and unity between life and texts, as if they can ee be plotted out in parallel. It is our assertion that understanding the complexities of the particular works of Kita) is not deepened by any putative link between psy- | | cho-biography and content unless it isas part of a wider and self-declared process pa of reading. What we urge, then, is a growing awareness in the reader of the resis- te manatee tances within the work of R. B. Kitaj to a kind of aesthetic idealisation that is pre sented as a transcending of history and politics in the name of a mystified . organicism, whatever form that might take. “The essays that follow, in different ways, begin the process of tracing the inter- relationships between the work and the histories under discussion. Simon o OCIo Faulkner explores the relationships between Kita’ art practice, as located withit the changing strategies of painting in the early 1960s, and his attempts to engage with a tradition of political and historical subject matter, specifically the Spanish Civil War. Kitaj, like other artists of that moment, rejected pure form of abstrac- tion in favour of a declared flatness within which the motifs and figures were dis- tributed across the canvas. What is significant in this process is that Kitaj chooses as the substance of his pictures elements copied from found material or the liter~ al unmodified matter, that is, signs already in circulation, that become reworked and repositioned via the sensibility of Kitaj and sense of historical imagery and cultural memory is framed by his negotiation of the art practices of that moment. An interest in Left and anarchist romantic heroes feeds directly intoa form of bohemian artistic identity that ultimately celebrates liberal lualism in the face of the postwar technological estrangement. What becomes evident throughout this engagement is a working on the space between the subject of the representation and its re-presentation as framed by the context of the painting; that which is remembered and the act of remembering itself gen- crate a productive tension. James Aulich considers the work of Kitaj in relation to the context of figurative painting in Britain as articulated in what became known asthe School of London. Located firmly within a liberal humanist discourse the impulse behind the polem ‘was an attempt to salvage something from the perceived empty strategies of avant szarde practices with their denial of history and narrative, and the rejection of the traditional art object. Through the expressive struggle to reclaim, once more, an aesthetic of imagination and existential inter-subjectivity the return to painting and the human form was part of a wider ‘revision’ of the social role of art, most clearly articulated by the critic Peter Fuller. As Aulich makes clear, this is predi- cated upon is a notion of the work of artas repository of universal values and mean- ing, that is as part of the Tradition, accessible to an audience familiar with the artists’ sensitivities and themes to which they can have unmediated access. Whilst clearly problematising such notions, Aulich argues that the relationship between the painters of the School of London and history and tradition is more complex . Kitaj’s keenipad = 22:40 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - meme [€]>) [8 ne ny Pr 2% INTRODUCTION than it would appear at first glance, given that the material at hand is actually itself already mediated through a failed project. aman ‘Terry Atkinson, a practising artist himself, sees Kitaj’s practice much more as nee ‘a repetition of painting within the Tradition which is predicated upon a fetishised view of the very category of painting itself. Defining Kitaj as the ‘paradigmatic ‘modernist painter’ with an attendant concern for the defining opposition of inner and outer meaning, Atkinson sees Kitaj's self-proclaimed position as premised upon an ‘ancestor worship’, in this sense a call for continuity directed at individ- uals and at painting itself. Atkinson goes on to contrast the practice of the Art & Language collective of around the same time, the second half of the 1960s, which shifted the centre of production from the studio (with its concomitant ideologies o Gg of private and solitary expression) to a collective and public space contingently 8a located. Atkinson argues that Kitaj and most of those involved in Art & Language actually emerged into the same cultural milieu — 1960s London ~ having gone through similar institutions — art schools — but rapidly adopted quite opposite ame cnporm mene views on the potentials of a modernist conception of art and the artist. Art & Language, and Atkinson, had and have problems with precisely such notions as notice ner self, authenticity and the unconscious as repository of all this. In this way aie the question of Kitaj’s practice is subject to quite critical scrutiny rene Py David Peters Corbett is interested in the relationship between word and image in Kitaj’s work. As has been described above, Kitaj has always been an artist who has supplemented his paintings with textual accounts and readings. This raises the {question of quite what role the visual actually plays. Does it, for instance, remain the space of the finally unknowable in the way that the very experience of history for its subjects is unknowable prior to its narrativisation? The distinction between the visual and the verbal is that the former reflects the relative chaos and uncer- tainty of lived experience as opposed to the latter which is inherently organising, ‘ordered and coherent. Art history is therefore one attempt to reduce the visual to a coherent system of meaning that positions it as the precursor to textual explica~ tion. Kitaj’s written supplementation is evidence of an attempt, worked through in the 1960s, to overcome the loss of faith in modernist art practice to deliver on its promise to provide the connection between image and experience. By the 1970s Kitaj has shifted significantly to the visual order as the bearer of historical know!- ‘edge, fundamentally that of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, even in 1994 Kitaj con tinues to rework the visual through the verbal in his series of prefaces, as though ‘wanting to order the visual, when the resonance of the pictures is their continu- ‘ous resistance to rational discourse. Ina similar way John Lynch is concerned to explore the relationship between visual and verbal in Kitaj’s painting The Murder of Rosa Lucemburg, 1960 (Plate8), where Kitaj has actually collaged onto the canvas written account of Luxemburg’s murder. By digging over the sedimented layers of discourse around Kitaj’s painting Lynch considers what readings we can make of this image of the corpse of the Marxist Luxemburg and the relationship between the visual and written whenipad = 22:41 @ 55% > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aia «o OC 1 Phe Jeni Rider, 1981-85, com canvas, 152.4x1524 2 The Panter (Cros and Chiney), 1984-85, charcoal and pastel on paper, 78.1 11.1ipad = 22:33 @ 57%a> > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li. vos aja co rte meme [€)>) 8 ee ee eo roe The impolite boarder: ‘Diasporist’ art and its critical response Janet Wolff o Oo ma kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google vos aia 22:33 @ books.google.com.br aon + @ 57%a> ei x0 THE IMPOLITE BOARDER Jewish identity is constructed negatively, in terms of the oppression of the Jews (what Andrew Benjamin has called ‘the logic of the synagogue”), or whether there is not another, affirmative, basis for such an identity. Where Kitaj’s use of the sym- bols of the chimney and the cross suggest the negative definition which has been the product of the representation of the Jew in Christian thought (the ‘Other’ of Christianity), further elements in his work allow a different reading, at the same ing the artificial imposition of new symbols. Discussing another work, 5 The Jew Ee. (Pit Site), 176 ol and charcoal on canvas, 192.4 x 131.9. Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google LiiPad = 22:34 es > & books.google.com.br ¢ 4 +a kita) expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google) Citeal Kita: Essays on the Work of F.8.Kital- Google Li vos aja «o OC JANET WOLFE ” The Jew Etc. (First State), Benjamin explores the dual meaning of the train ~ as transport to the death camps (the negative definition of Jewish identity), and also as mobility (the Jew as wanderer). Of course, the wandering of the Jews has been, ‘much of the time, the enforced response to persecution, and hence a characteristic produced in the negative. But the lack of fixity contained in the image of travel, which returns us to Kitaj’s notion of Diaspora, exilic identity, and uncertainty, is the core of a different, affirmative conception of Jewishness. Andrew Benjamin, quoting Edmond Jabés, puts it like this “This absence of place, as it were, I claim. It confirms that the book is my only habitat, the first and also the final. Place of a vaster non-place where I live.”” The wandering Jew, alluded to in these lines by Jabas, takes place within a process which in philosophical terms privileges becom- ing over being. Itis this privilege that is captured, presented, by the train. tis thus that the train cannot be reduced toa simple image of the Holocaust’. ‘The signs of Jewish identity in Kitaj’s painting are more complex and more sub- tle than the Holocaust imagery which he self-consciously employs from time to time. They consist in the detail of physiognomy; the references to ‘Joe Singer" (his archetypal Jew, modelled on a remembered figure from his childhood"); themat- ic references (the Jewish school, Yiddish theatre); and, of course, in the textual clues given in his titles and his unusually extensive written texts which accompa- ry many of his paintings. Itis these written texts which have proved highly prob- Jematic with regard to the response to Kitaj’s work in England. ‘The astonishingly hostile reception by London critics to Kitaj’s 1994 retro- spective at the Tate Gallery has been widely commented on."? For the critic of the Daily Telegraph, ‘by the 1980s Kitaj had lost all sense of direction’." The Independent Sunday Review stated that ‘at the Tate, canvas after canvas tells us one simple fact: no amount of exegesis willimprove paintings that fail for pictorial rea- sons." Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard concluded a damning review with this sentence: ‘A pox on fawning critics and curators for foisting on us as h master a vain painter puffed with amour propre, unworthy of a footnote in the his tory of figurative art.”"In the weekly edition of The Independent, Andrew Graham- Dixon wrote: ‘Kitaj has finally allowed the myth of himself to be seen through. ‘The Wandering Jew, the T. S. Eliot of painting? Kitaj turns out, instead, to be the Wizard of Oz: a small man with a megaphone held to his ips." As some of these ‘comments indicate, a recurring objection to Kitaj’s work was his dependence on literary sources, and his inclusion in the exhibition of wall texts (‘Prefaces') refer~ ring to those sources. But Kitaj is surely not the only artist to work in this way Moreover, a long-standing commitment to connecting the visual image with liter- ary and philosophical figures and moments of inspiration did not prevent Kitaj from being elected to the Royal Academy in London in 1985 (the first American to be elected since Benjamin West in the eighteenth century and John Singer ‘Sargent in the nineteenth), and from being granted an honorary doctorate at the Royal College of Art in London a few years later.” The reviews of the same ex! bition in museums in Los Angeles and New York, to which it travelled after theiPad = 22:34 es > & books.google.com.br ¢ 4 +a kita) expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google) Citeal Kita: Essays on the Work of F.8.Kital- Google Li vos aja o OCIo u THE IMPOLITE BOARDER ism, I want to suggest that the critical discourses in this mid-1990s episode in British art history can be situated and interpreted in the social and torical context of an anti-semitism which has been well documented, return to my claim that these events should be seen as the product of the con~ vergence of three particular resistances in English art criticism. ‘The first is the objection to literary tendencies in art. In an earlier context, critics in 1912 ‘were suspicious of the seemingly literary basis of Futurism’.® Similar points of view ‘were part of the explanation of the difficulty many critics had with the radically new work of Pop artists and the Independent Group in the 1950s." So Brian Sewell’s comment (in the context of one of the more dismissive reviews of Kitaj’s 1994 exhibition), that Kitaj is ‘imprisoned by his library’, could stand without elaboration in a context in which over-literariness is assumed to be a weakness.* Kitaj knew enough about this to adopt a position of bravado in this regard: ‘I'm not afraid of the word “literary”, he stated in an interview in 1965. And it is ‘worth noting that a major commission in recent years has been the translation of his highly literary work, Jf Not, Not, into a tapestry to hang in the British Library —a work whose later accompanying text cites Eliot, Conrad, and Goethe." Buthis earlier experience of critical dislike of the textual annotations did nothing to pre- pare him for the savage nature of the new attacks on them. Nor can these be explained by the undoubted xenophobic (and particularly anti-American) tenden- cies among some British intellectuals. Kitaj puts himself in the company of fellow sufferers from such anti-foreign sentiment — Whistler, Wilde, and Pound" — but what sounds like grandiosity and perhaps paranoia in his own often repeated charge is confirmed by other commentators with more distance from the matter. A British art historian, reflecting on the Kitaj case, says, ‘I think there is some America-baiting here. It’s the irritation of a little country that used to be a big ‘country attacking an American upstart who seems to have ital: a big exhibition at the Tate where his work hangs next to Turner’; and historians and cultural erities have identified and analysed this political outlook.” Its manifestation in art crit ccism is not always indirect or disguised. Peter Fuller’s editorial statement for the first (1988) issue of Modern Painters is quite explicit about the ‘bankruptcy’ of American art and the general worthlessness of contemporary European modernist and post modern work.” And yet Kitaj had been working, and exhibiting, in England for over thirty years before the 1994 debacle. Perhaps the particular socio-cultural formation of the 1990s provided new reasons, and new licence, for a more hysterical and less guard- ‘ed reaction to the vocal expression of difference.‘ That aside, though, what was different by the time of the 1994 retrospective was that this American, too literary artist had become increasingly vocal about his Jewishness. Only a minority of the works in the exhibition dealt with Jewish themes, but they are unavoidable ~ and ‘emphasised in the Prefaces, which were written for the Tate show. Thus, the 1960 work, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (Plate 8), becomes inseparable from issues of Jewish history; Desk Murder, 1970-84 (Figure 12), an unpeopled display ofipad = 22:34 @ 57%a> > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja co tt == meme [€)>) [8 JANET WOLFF 5 furniture and other objects, seen as if through the black frame of a window, is about fon an SS officer; the concentration camps are foregrounded as ‘the second main se theme’ of If Not, Not, 1975-76 (Plate 3}; Self-Portrait as a Woman, 1984 (Plate 12), = is accompanied by a narrative in the voice of an Austrian woman who was Kia's Sees lover in Vienna in 1951, and who had been in trouble with the Nazi regime earl er for having sex with another Jewish man. ‘The works whose content was already explicit are sometimes elaborated in a text ~ for example, inthe case of The Jewish School (Drawing « Golem), 1980, (Figure 6). When asked in a 1994 interview when he became a ‘Jewish artist’, Kitaj replied, “There's nostraight answer to your question because Iseem to have been tempted by Jewish themes as early as the late Fifties and early Sixties with pictures “about” Warburg, Bubel, Rosa Luxemburg and so on, years before this obsession took hold in part of my consciousness.» But it was with the publication of First Diasporist Manifesto in 1989 that the subtle alu- wo BED 5 sions to Jewish themes, figures, and autobiographical moments gave way to a more © The Jon Scho! (Drawing 4 Golem). 1980,iPad = 22:34 es > & books.google.com.br ¢ 4 +a kita) expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google) Citeal Kita: Essays on the Work of F.8.Kital- Google Li vos aja «o OC x6 ‘THE IMPOLITE BOARDER vocal expression of interest and identity. To understand why this might provoke such a negative reaction, we need to consider the situation of Jews in Britain in the twentieth century. ‘The history of anti-semitism in Britain has been well documented, and its par- ticular manifestation in the twentieth century, especially in response to the immi- sation of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, has been explored by many historians. George Orwell reported, in 1945, that ‘{tJhere is more anti-Semitism in England than we care to admit’, quoting many anti-semitic remarks made to him by all types of people. In this context, Jews in England have been accustomed to keeping a much lower profile than Jews in the United States. In the early twentieth century, Jewish identity was acceptable if Jews were committed to assimilation ~ to not being too ‘loud! about their Jewishness. Jews already living in Britain colluded in this, particularly in relation to newly arrived Jews from Eastern Europe whose difference was, of course, highly visible. As is well known, the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to restrict immigration into the ‘country, was directed primarily at Jews from Eastern Europe, at that time arriving in large numbers. More assimilated English Jews were keen to distance themselves from the newcomers, and were even involved in plans for their repatriation.** Anglo-Jewish artists in the early twentieth century were affected by this expecta- tion of assimilation, which was problematic for those (like Mark Gertler and Jacob Kramer) whose work included Jewish themes.” A similar attitude prevailed among British Jews during the Second World War, in relation to refugees from Nazism, as Richard Bolchover has shown. At the extreme, ‘{T]he desire to be in keeping with the national spirit and to affirm their integration into British society led British Jews not only to frequent expressions of loyalty, but also to take what in retrospect appears to be an almost detached view of European Jewish life under Hitler ‘The expectation in England that Jews will keep quict about their Jewishness persists today. As A. Alvarez has said, ‘Being Jewish in England is not quite polite. It’s rather like dropping your ‘h’s when you speak.” A controversy in London a few years ago, about whether or not a group of Orthodox Jews should be granted planning permission to erect posts around a six-and-a-half-square-mile erue (a bounded geographical area within which Sabbath restrictions on carrying do not apply) has to be understood in the context of the unusual, and unwelcome, visi- bility of issues of Jewish identity in a culture in which the perfect guest blends politely into the landscape. As Calvin Trillin pointed out, reporting on this event for The New Yorker, English Jews ... have traditionally had to grapple with a prob- Jem that can be difficult for an American Jew to grasp: they are not English’. He repeats the observation of the South African Jewish novelist, Dan Jacobson, who lives in England, that ‘English Jews felt that they had been given a room in the hhouse but were not part of the family. They felt more like boarders." In the dis- pute about the enc, perhaps unsurprisingly its opponents included many Jews, whose invisibility was threatened by the public discussion of the issue (thoughipad = 22:34 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja - meme [€)>) [8 en ek tint JANET WOLFF 7 there were also many secular and non-Orthodox Jews who opposed it for other rea- sons). Philip Roth has a devastating version of this imperative to hide in his novel, The Counterlife, in which the anti-semitic Sarah accosts her new (Jewish, Err mates American) brother-in-law ~ Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman: You laugh very quietly, I notice. You don’t want to show too much. Is that because you're in England and not in New York? Is that because you don’t want to be con- fused with the amusing Jews you depictin fiction? Why don't you just go ahead and ‘how some teeth? Your books do ~ they're all teeth. You, however, keep very well hidden the Jewish paranoia which produces vituperation and the need to strike out = if only, of course, with all the Jewish ‘jokes’. Why so refined in England and so ‘course in Carnovsky?... Don’t worry about what the English will think, the English are too polite for pogroms." 0 ACIo ‘This cultural difference has been understood by some of the journalists reporting the Kitaj affair. The Forward (a New York based progressive Jewish newspaper) quotes the English critic David Cohenas saying of Kitaj, ‘He’s never acquired the English art of understatement ... They don’t like the fact that he is a brash American Jewish name-dropper. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like Americans notice or Jews." The incitement to ‘Englishness’ and to assimilation and conformity tie need not be based specifically on anti-semitism, but the effect is the Lien Py necessity to hide difference, My suggestion is that the response to Ki tion makes sense in this context. The hostility was not due simply to anti-semit~ ism or anti-Americanism. Nor was the excess of literary reference and written text the real objection. Rather, it was a combination of all these elements. Kitaj articu- lated in an explicit (American?) way his deliberations about Jewish identity, com- pounding the lack of politeness by reinforcing the visual image with mords. A complex and subtle visual text on this theme, like Jf Not, Not, may have been acceptable; the same work, accompanied by a wall panel directing such a reading, was not. Lesley Hazelton, an English Jewish writer who lives in the United States, has also written about the English imperative to discretion about Jewishness (how itis important not to ‘go on so about it’)*" She also cites Roth’s portrayal in The Counterlife, and adds that her own unthinking immersion in the British silence ‘meant that, ‘It never occurred to me that there was no English Malamud, no Roth, no Bellow or Potok, no Jews who wrote about Jewish life’, adding that if there had been, ‘I wouldn't have wanted to knov. Being Jewish was something to be played down, not written about.” Hazelton’s list of names renders unavoidable a consid- «ration of a problematic characteristic of much of this writing, namely its tendency to misogyny (or at least androcentrism and/or the unsympathetic portrayal of women). Feminist literary critics have taken issue with Roth, Bellow, and other writers on this count, and since it has been an issue, too, in relation to Kitaj’s work, I want to consider for a moment the possibility of a complex connection between, the struggle for the assertion of Jewish identity in gentile culture and the aggressiveipad = 22:34 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li vos aja * ES) et oid 3 THE IMPOLITE BOARDER denigration of women in the process Kita) himself has claimed to be a ‘strong feminist’ but there is no doubt that many of his images ~ of prostitutes, of women ‘naked for the men’ (his own phrase, in the Preface to The Ohio Gang of 1964, Sant Figure 1)," of views from the perspective ofthe male voyeur (The Rise of Fascism of ane 1979-80, Figure 7), of nude women with clothed men (Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea of 1964, Figure 8) ~ produce an uncomfortable viewing position for the ‘woman spectator. In Erie Shore, 1966 (Figure 9), the bound and naked torso of a ‘woman can be scen in a dinghy in which a man and woman enact some kind of encounter (both dressed, though the woman's pubic hair shows beneath her short skirt). The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960 (Plate 8), is graphic in its violence, and in this somewhat reminiscent of the Lustmord (sex murder) tradition in Weimar Germany. I don’t want to overstate the misogynist tendencies of these images, and Kitaj has certainly made many beautiful and sympathetic portraits of women, a Go including nudes (Waiting, 1973; Marynka Smoking, 198t; The Hispanist (Nisa Torrents), 1977-78, and portraits of his daughter, Dominie, and his Sandra Fisher). Nor is my objection to his interest in eroticism which, inevitably, is por- ame cnporm mene ‘trayed from the point of view of a heterosexual man, Nevertheless, Lam suggesting that his images too often collude with the visual discourses of misogyny. Most notice striking, and also amusing in its literal disempowering of the female, isa 1967 print sie entitled Vernissage-Cocktail, a collage whose centrepiece is the famous 1951 photo- Lena graph of the New York School painters, which Kitaj has cropped so that Hedda Sterne’s head is cut off, leaving only her fourteen male colleagues. In his 1994 ‘Afterword, written on the publication of a book devoted to his prints, Kitaj does not even mention Sterne’s radical elimination, and its evident insignificance to him increases its significance for the critical reader/viewer.** 7 The Rise of Faso, 79-80, pastel and oil om paper, 84.5 15ipad = 22:34 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li Los aja - meme [€)>) [8 en ek tint JANET WOLF a ‘work are more than matched by a central quality of provisionality. The meaning of Jewishness thus emerges more subtly in the juxtapositions, absences, and con- = tradictions of the images. Ken Johnson emphasises Kitaj’s attempt to register ‘the Siocon incoherence and instability of modern life’, by both narrative and associative ‘means, insisting even that the texts and wall labels (so condemned for their sup- posed fixing of meaning) ‘do not fully decode the often-enigmatic iconography of the pictures; rather, they tend to add more layers of reference and poetic expres- sion’.® In Norbert Lynton’s view, Kita has always operated with the split incli- I nations to tell and to withhold, to be both polemical and obscure ~a contradiction Lynton calls ‘Kitai’s fork’. Despite the insistent presence of the wall texts, partic~ ularly in the 1994 Tate exhibition, Lynton finds that the paintings themselves con- sistently evade singular oc simagle meaning This perception of complet, 0 Co fragmentation, contradiction, obliqueness, and provisionality in the works shared by other critics Kita} himself approves this reading of his work, and relates it directly to his conception of Diasporst ar: vem coer os People are always saying the meanings in my pictures refuse to be fixed, to be set- ted, to be stable: shat’s Diasporism, which welcomes interesting, creative misread. tne ing ... There is traditional notion thatthe divine presence itself is in the Diaspora ate and, over one shoulder, Sefirot (divine emanations and ‘intelligences’ according to ier uy Kabbalah) flash and ignite the canvas towards which I lean in my orthopedic back- ‘chair, while from my subconscious, from what can be summoned up from mind and nerve, and even after nature, other voices speak more loudly than the divines, in tongues learned in our wide Diaspora. These are the voices I mostly cleave to. Listen to them, They will tell you what a Diasporist has on his mind (Michelangelo said you paint with your mind) as he strokes his canvas.” I think it is clear that we cannot talk about ‘Diasporist art’, or ‘Jewish art’ in terms of intrinsic content or particular style.” Rather, the features of a work which make it Jewish’ will be a matter of the trace of experience in the text, a trace which is never immediate, but multiply mediated (by cultural meaning, aesthetic conven- tions, and other signifying practices). The focus on the nature of Jewish life in Western society leads us to understand its expression in the very mobility and provisionality of specific representations. The dual meaning of the train, which I referred to at the beginning of this essay, is only a simple example of this. If we return to the painting // Not, Not (Plate 3) ~ a painting whose 1994 Preface is one of Kitaj’s most elaborate — we can now see that not only does the text fail to “fix’ the image, or to provide a unified reading of the work; the painting itse the complexity ofits imagery and the mysteriousness ofits juxtapositions and allu- ons, resists summary. Its Diasporist nature cannot be equated with the Auschwitz gatehouse in the top left corner, since this is put in question by the inclusion, lower Con the canvas, ofthe figure of Joe Singer, which imports a very different set of con- notations of the Jew in Western culture In the case of the drawing entitled Drancy, 1984-86 (Figure 10), one of Kitaj’s most compelling images, and also oneipad = 22:35 © sex > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj expressionismo abstrato diaspora - Pesquisa Google Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj - Google Li Livros ala * = roma >) | 8 ES) = ™ . = tern ec eit JANET WOLFE “a oo of the less complex ones, itis only the title which insists on the work as a repre- ecctertt sentation of the Diasporist experience.” There is no polemic, no text, no question oe of any visual or verbal bombardment of meaning. It is ironic, then, in the light of Ec amine the critical hysteria about Kitaj’s ‘megaphone’ and his excessive ‘exegesis’, a reac- tion which I have suggested has everything to do with Kitaj’s expressed interest in Jewish identity, that in fact the signs of Diasporism emerge in silence, mobilised not by rhetoric or polemic, but by the play of images and their open-ended, and often contradictory, connotations.ipad = 22:12 61%) > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj first diasporist. Diaspora and Vis... Under Postcolonial Critical Kitaj: Essay. Under Postcolonial DIASPORA AND VISUAL CULTURE Representing Africans and Jews Edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff London and New Yorkipad = 22:12 61%) > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj first diasporist. Diaspora and Vis... Under Postcolonial Critical Kitaj: Essay... Under Postcolonial vos a (BIER oases ce as) First published in 2000 by Roudedge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE ‘Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge oem cane 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group © 1999 Nicholas Mirzoeff for selection and editorial material Individual chapters © 2000 contributors ‘Typeset in Bembo by J&L Composition Led, Files, North Yorkshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ. International Led, Padstow, UK. Al rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, ‘mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, inchiding photocopying and recording, or in any information storage oF retrieval system, without pern ‘writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congres: Cataloging in Publication Data Diaspora and visual culture/edited by Nicholas Mirzoef. ae Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-115-16669-1 (harbound + alk. paper). — ISHN 0~$15-16670-5 (pbk. = alk. pape) 1. Art, Jewish. 2. Are, Affican. 3, Art, Modem—I9th century 4. Art, Modern-—200h cemnury. 5. Jewish diaspora, 6, Affican diaspora, 7. Identity (Psychology) in art, 1. Mirzoeff, Nicholas 1962- N7417.6.D53_ 1999 701" 03—de21 ISBN 0 415 16669 1 (hbk) ISBN 6 415 16670 5 (pbk)ipad = 22:12 60%) > @ books.google.com.br ¢ m+ Aa kitaj first diasporist. Diaspora and Vis Under Postcolonial Critical Kitaj: Essay. Under Postcolonial vos | @ (BRAS ete = —s) Ge CONTENTS List of illustrations viii ‘wna List of contributors xi rt Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION The multiple viewpoint: diasporic visual cultures 1 PART I Points of departure 19 1__Cultural identity and diaspora 2 STUART HALL 2__First diasporist manifesto 34 R.B.KITAI PART I Diasporic identity in the nineteenth century 43 3__Mary Edmonia Lewis's Minnehaha: gender, race and AUANITA MARIE HOLLAND 4. Pissarro’s passage: The sensation of Caribbean Jewishness in diaspora 57 NICHOLAS MIRZOEFFmn kitaj first diasporist... vos aja © Diaspora and Vi 22:08 61% @ books.google.com.br 9+ @ Under Postcolonial... | critical kita:Essay... | Under Postcolonial. Diasporist painting, which I just made up, is enacted under peculiar historical and personal freedoms, stresses, didocation, rupture and momentum. The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once. Diasporism, as 1 wish to write about it, is as old as the hills (or caves) but new enough to react, to today’s newspaper or last week's aesthetic musing or tomorrow's terror. | don't know if people will liken it to a School of painting or attribute certain characteristics or even Style to it. Many will oppose the very idea, and that is the way of the world, My embarrassment at pressing upon my dubious pictures’ and upon you the case of the Jews, against the advice of wiser heads, begins co feel less uncom- fortable. It is, of course, a universal art, something which speaks to the world, to the common reader, which every painter desires, as religions and poetry wish to speak of and to our world. The world being what it is, like our art, its a poor listener and it remains divided, but artists at least tend to gentler, less killing divisions. For a while, I will presume to bore you with pictures of an imperilled world you may know only as imperfectly as I do, if at all... or I should say — pictures of part of my world just now. My case is built on a cliché which may also be an insightful art lesson. It is that the threatened condition of the Jews witnesses the condition of our wider world. It is a radical witness. One hundred and fifty years ago, Heine warned that where books were burned, human beings would be. Keep in mind that art and life get quite con joined (art-time) in our modern tradition and sometimes blur. Later, when we are dead, the art is (life-less?) alone in the room. For the moment, Diasporism is my own School, neither particularly unhappy practice nor proud persuasion. | would simply say it is an unsettled mode of art-life, performed by a painter who feels out of place much of the time, even when he is lucky enough to stay at work in his room, unmolested through most of his days. His Diasporism, to the extent that it marks his paint- ing, relies on a mind-set which is often occupied with vagaries of history. kin. homelands, the scattering of his people (jf he thinks he may have a people). and such stuff. Is that not a general meaning of Diaspora? More particular meanings may leave deeper marks or even scars on painting. Its not for me to 34mn kitaj first diasporist... vos aja © Diaspora and Vi 22:08 61% @ books.google.com.br 9+ @ Under Postcolonial... | critical kita:Essay... | Under Postcolonial. (Rises eee a eS rte spell out the quite various Diasporic conditions proliferating everywhere now, cxcept to say that Jews do not own Diaspora; they are not the only Diasporists by a long shot. They are merely mine. As if they were not in enough trouble right now, as usual, the Israel-Diaspora problem is as difficult to contemplate as the more usual problem of Jewish survival itself. Keening to seismic readings now that Israel is reborn, the awful historical problem of Jewish political impotence is lessened, but I would greatly fear the consequences if most Jews were concentrated in the Holy Land, where it would be easier than ever to finish them off in a place the size of Greater Indianapolis, with a bomb or two! Being Jews though, there’s energy enough left over, while enduring siege by a billion enemies, to argue the very finest points among ourselves concerning the question of Diaspora ~ not uninteresting arguments you can look up your- self, which I won't rehearse here except to say that the Jewish problem, which never seems to go away (pace George Eliot), gave birth, about a hundred years ago, to a serious Palestine-Diaspora equation which was to have delivered a normalcy” to the bloodied Jews and which now looks as elusive as the Messiah and the End of Days. Since this is a manifesto, albeit not a very aggressive one (I haven't read Breton or Lewis ot Marinetti and such since I was 18), 1 want it to be some- what declarative because | think art and life are fairly married and I think 1 owe it to my pictures to put their stressful birth with some idiosyncratic pre cision. ‘What I owe to my pictures, I guess I owe to my readers, mostly to those few attentive or curious enough to interest themselves in the peculiar genesis of these disputed works I call Diasporis. Like an aging bear, 1 am not often brave or cunning. I try to proceed from my cave with caution because I tend to blot my copybook, as the English say. Out I come at the wrong season, when the world is bemused daily by Jews and their Holocausts, past and pending. As if that were not enough, I just read in an art column that the time for manifestos has passed. So I thought Td write one, the Belated Bear stumbling forward, brandishing his paintbrush, into the at the end of the light In my time, half the painters of the great Schools of Paris, New York and London were not born in their host countries. If there is nothing which peo- ple in dispersion share in common, then my Dissporiit tendency rests in my mind only and maybe in my pictures . . . but consider: every grain of common ground will firm the halting step of people in dispersion as surely as every proof of welcome has encouraged emigrés before in cosmopolitan centers. Rootedness has played its intrinsic and subtle part in the national art modes of Egypt, Japan, England, Holland and the high Mediterranean cultures and city- states. | want to suggest and manifest a commonality (for painting) in disper sion which has mainly been seen before only in fixed places; but, not unlike painters who leave those centers or those modes, such as Cézanne, who left Paris behind for his epochal old-age style at home, or Picasso who left > 5 ro)22:08 1% a & books.google.com.br ao+ a kita first diasporist... © Dlasporaand Vis... Under Postcolonial... | Critical Kita Essay... | Under Postcolonial. I tire aja (alm = GE Se =a = ae © (classical) Cubism in the lurch, Diasporists alo exchange their colon, for mS instance, to che extent that they begin to really feel at home somewhere, or practice within a School, or indeed, refuse what I say here . range, If a people is dispersed, hurt, hounded, uneasy, their pariah condition con- oe founds expectation in profound and complex ways. So it must be in aesthetic ——— matters. Even if a Diasporist seems to assimilate easily to prevailing aesthetics, as he does in most currents of life, the confounding, uneasy side of his nature may also be addressed, that deeper heart, as magical as anything the Surrealist ‘or Mystical-Abstractionist ever sought within himself. I can only posit a new aesthetic for myself (to recreate myself) because I don't want to become a mouthpiece for the traditions of general art, and because some things in dis- persion (ancient and modern) have come of age now for me. As the quasi Diasporist Gauguin said,“I wish to establish the right to dare anything.” Aside from the always still endangered Jews (in a Masadic Israel and in Diaspora), there are other resounding Diasporists — Palestinians prominent and suffering among them. Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) placed the Armenians at “the pit of Hell,” and in 1920 bowed before their “higher majesty of sorrow.” There is a Black African Diaspora as terrible and outstanding as any other, which has disturbed my thoughts since early boyhood. Murderous Stalinism and Pol Potism must have all but unsung Diaspora trails of their bloody own. ‘What is left of these dispersed peoples finds as little peace as Ahasuerus him- self. If the art of these Diasporists, as they emerge from historical fog, is not touched by their separate destinies, God help them. He has so often not. Like most human events, Diasporism is not clear-cut, hard or fast (many movements in art are not), neither in its usual and historic explications nor in the meanings I have begun to feel for myself as a painter. As a Diasporist painter, like the Realist, the Cubist, the Expressionist and other painters, I ‘would resist exacting codification (rightly). Nor can I speak cogently for even more complex and speculative realms of the painter's make-up, for “internal exile” the condition of the self-estranged sexual Diaspora and such, The Diasporist appears among emigrés and refugees, among the heirs of Surrealism, Naturalism, Symbolism and other aesthetics, among the home- ‘grown, among nationalists and internationalists, pariahs and patriots, in every polyglot matrix, among the political and religious as well as those who do without politics and religion or are uncertain. dn the end, the Diasporist knows he is one, even though he may one day settle down and sort of cease to be one. Many do not settle and that is a crux which will affect and, I think, effect the art. [f human instincts for kin and home are primordial, as they so often seem, the Diasporic condition presents itself as yet another theater in which human, artistic instinct comes into play, maybe not primordial (2) but a condition, a theater to be treasured. As [ write these words, I also know that if Diasporists become treasured, their theater will close, and open under a new sign and name, maybe with a curse upon it, Diasporism is my mode. It is the way I do my pictures, If they mirror my 36ipad 22:09 1% a & books.google.com.br ao+ a kitaj first dlasporist.... @ Dlasporaand Vis... Under Postcolonial... Critical Kitaj: Essay Under Postcolonial vos a life, these pictures betray confounded patterns. I make this painting mode up as I go along because it seems more and more natural for me, so natural that [ think I've been a Diasporist painter from the start without knowing and then sat cnotrss slowly learnt it in a twilit period, until it began to dawn on me that I should ena act upon it. Diasporist painting is unfolding commentary on its life-source, the ——i contemplation of a transience, a Midrash (exposition, exegesis of non-literal ee meaning) in paint and somehow, collected, these paintings, these circumstantial allusions, form themselves into secular Responsa or reactions to one’s transient restlessness, un-at-homeness, groundlessness. Because it is art of some kind, the I act (of painting) need not be an unhappy one. Although my Diasporist paint- ing grows out of art, as for instance, Cubism or Surrealism did, it owes its greatest debt to the terms and passions of my own life and growing sense of myself as a Diasporist Jew. I have spent half my life away from my American homeland, that most special Diaspora Jews have ever known. Until now, I've only rarely painted there and I set down these first exilic ruminations still from a bittersweet abroad, but written in my homesick, Americanist tense, haunted by the music of Diaspora. I've always been a Diasporist Jew, but as a young man I was not sure what a Jew was. I was unaware that such questions were debated within Jewry, even in the Knesset itself. Jews were Believers, I thought, and I assumed you were whatever you believed in, that if you became a Catholic or an atheist or a Socialist, that’s what you were. Art itself was a church, a universalist edifice, an amazing sanctuary from the claims and decrepitude of modern life, where you could abandon self and marry painting. My friend Isaiah Berlin says:“A Jew is a Jew like a table is a table.” Now, that interests me greatly, but the thing was blurred in my youth. This was, I learned later, a classic assimilationist pose. My maternal grandfather had been a Socialist Bundist in Russia, on the run from the Czarist police. He passed on his religious skepticism to my mother, who brought me up asa freethinker with no Jewish education, Ours was a house- hold full of secular Diasporists who seemed to be Jews only by the way. It would be many more years before I learned that the Germans and Austrians who did what they did in that time, when I was playing baseball and cruising girls, made no distinctions between Believers or atheists o the one and a half mnillion Jewish infants who had not yet decided what they were when they got sent up in smoke. One-third of all Jews on earth were murdered in my youth. It is well known that a Silence fell upon our world for some years after what Winston Churchill called “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” It was the break with tradi- tional evil, its own archetype, someone said. The classic texts on the Holocaust are fairly recent and as I got around to them and the paradox of Jewishness began to enthrall me, the Diasporist painter in me started to grow alert, after a numbing, morbid period. The mystery of dispersion now seems to me as real as any located School known to art. I didn't know it at first, but 1 had stumbled upon a tremendous lesson, taught long ago by many conflicting 3722:09 1% a & books.google.com.br ao+ a kitaj first diasporist... © Diaspora and Vis Under Postcolonial.. Critical Kitaj: Essay... Under Postcolonial eS Livros aa) (alemls 6) een — noes [€)>) (= | mse 244 2s Ana rt mane = Yee “ean CEs R.B. KITAS t personalities both Jewish and Gentile (Sartre, etc:),by such absorbing figures as oie Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927), that it is Jewishness that condemns one, not the Jewish religion. It became reasonable to suppose that Jewishness, this complex ‘of qualities, would be a presence in art as it is in life. In Diaspora, life has a force of its own. So would Diasporist painting, never before particularly asso- ated with pariah peoples. For me, its time has come at lst. Diaspora (dispersion in Greek) is most often associated with Jews and their Regge ,000 year old scattering among the nations (longer by other accounts). What rt the Jews call Galut (Exile in Hebrew), had become a way of life (and death), I consonant with Jewishness itself, even though Israel is reborn. I am one of those who are posessed by the consonance of art and life. Some are not. I think that memories, events and beliefs are sacred dreams for painting and so the mode of my life is translated into pictures. In translation there is not ulti mate accuracy, only an illusion of truth, as in art. Because neither Diaspora nor Israel can live really happily ever after anyway (or so it increasingly seems) and a normative co-existence replaces the “normalcy” once wished upon the state, many of us who make our lives in dispersion follow its peculiar, various, often very homelike (America), very complex destinies where, as someone put it, Jews have achieved emancipation without auto-emancipation. The compelling destiny of dispersion is one’s own and describes my Diasporism, which describes and explains my parable-pictures, their dissolutions, repressions, asso- cations, referrals and sometime difficulty, their text-obsessions, their play of differences, their autobiographical heresies, their skeptical dispositions, their assimilationist modernisms, fragmentation and confusions, their secular blas- phemies, their longing allegiance to the exact art-past which corresponds co the historical moments when Jews became free to pursue a life in art (1 mean from the late nineteenth century on) Diasporist art is contradictory at its heart, being both internationalist and particularist. It can be inconsistent, which is a major blasphemy against the logic of much art education, because life in Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day. To be consistent can mean the painter is settled and at home. All this begins to define the painting mode I call Diasporism. People are always saying the meanings in my pictures refuse to be fixed, to be settled, to be stable: that’s Diasporism, which welcomes inter- sting, creative misreading; the Zohar says that the meaning of the book changes from year to year! And now as I come to life again after 50, the room in which I paint becomes a sort of permissive cheder (room, the room or school where one studies) in which art becomes what I think, dramatizing my mind’s life, while the ancient religion itself whispers its Covenantal, mythic, Midrashic, ethical, exegetical, schismatic, Zaddik-ridden, arguments. There is a traditional notion that the divine presence itself is in the Diaspora, and, over ‘one shoulder, Sefrot (divine emanations and “intelligences” according to Kabbalah) flash and ignite the canvas towards which I lean in my orthopedic back-chair, while from my subconscious, from what can be summoned up 38.22:09 1% a & books.google.com.br ao+ a kitaj first diasporist... Diaspora and Vi Under Postcolonial... Critical Kitaj: Essay... Under Postcolonial vos fiom mind and nerve, and even after nature, other voices speak more loudly than the divines, in tongues learned in our wide Diaspora. These are the voices I mostly cleave to. Listen to them. They will tell you what a Diasporist has on emmy his mind (Michelangelo said you paint with your mind) as he strokes his = canvas. == The voices speak nervously about things unheard in painting (or long for- —_ gotten) ~ of ethnic, of historical memories and cultures, of ancestry myths and —— of heroes. Abraham's journey from Ur becomes, in the name of “good” pic- eae ture-making (at my own easel), Joe Singer’ secret lives, escapes, deaths and res- urrections, reconstructed from Diasporic myths which began when I did in 1932 and will die with me ~ or live on, as for instance Daumier’s Ratapoil has, as Cézanne’s mountain has. Those art models were not only radical patterns representing spatial enquiry (which they also are) but profound ethnie (belong- ing to Paris, Provence, shared history). Yes, Cézanne’ mountain represents shared tribal (French) history — the history of a bitter old Provengal genius wrestling with his art angel on his own sacred southern ground. That's what I want to be, a tribal remembrancer, wrestling with my Diasporic angel; I feel a great affection for this emancipating muse wherever I am at my painting. She is my favorite model. She suggests my frail entitlements and shaky destinies and let’s-pretend art aspirations. One of the most recent of my hundred negative critics wrote in his review ‘of my 1986 exhibition that it was “littered with ideas.” Heavens to Betsy, 1 hope that’s true. My poor Diasporist mind urges me to wander among ideas without rest, always the false-scholar, which is often how we painters make our mark. The pursuit of ideas, both religious and secular, at any cost, is often attributed to Jews by both well-wishers and doubters. Hitler is said to have accused the Jews of inventing conscience. Ideas and painting are inseparable. The Diasporist pursuit of a homeless logic of ethnie may be the radical (root) core of a newer art than we can yet imagine . .. those of us who think we can relate our past experience of Diaspora to a present understanding of it in painted, hopefully universal, pictures which may speak to many people. Speaking of homeless logic, | must declare or confess my most complex cre- dential — one of the outstanding facts of my life and Diasporic condition: utterly American, longingly Jewish, School of London, I spin my years away from both my heartlands, up to now anyway (age 54). [ suppose a case could be made for a Jewish heartland of the mind (the case of this text in fact), rather than Jerusalem or even New York. But the Americanist credential has another pedigree, surely touched upon by James, Cassatt, Sargent, Pound, Whistler, Epstein, Eliot, Stein and all my other forebears. Joyce and Lawrence were early hero-exemplars (art and life) and must have suffered/enjoyed a same confu- sion, but it is not my intention to drag all that expatriate weight across my pre sent Diasporist musing and open up the membership. What did Groucho say? Something like he wouldn't want to join a club that would let people like him in?22:09 1% a & books.google.com.br ao+ a kitajfirst diasporist... @ Dlasporaand Vis... Under Postcolonial... Critical Kitaj: Essay... Under Postcolonial ETS Livros aja (Blas « wonar [e)>) (1 “Aamo epee ieosones CEs R.B. KITA = In one of its self-definitions, Diasporism, my sort of Diasporism, has been i: lived and acted out in the free, Western, privileged, uninhibited, uncensored, _— permissive, élitist cloud-cuckoo lands of Modernism. Diasporism in art has emmy been largely Assimilationist and Modernist, played on a diffuse stage with few ete constraints. Assimilationism is the prevailing mode in the art of our time. a Young people are taught that they must strike chords which agree with art (‘advanced” or not) without much regard (© origin, milieu or creed — and so they may in our very few democracies. My own Diasporist mode resists (gen tly) the absolute wisdom of assimilationism in art. | would rather find the energy to do for Jews at least what Morandi did for jars. Then I could take I sammers off like he did and paint landscapes or something. The Diasporist in me would deny neither painting, as it asks to be continued, nor the themes and obsessions which quicken my mind and heart. Looking back before my own time, I'd like to identify a First Aliyah (ascent) in Diasporic painting, which, in its time, accorded with a faith in Modernism and which was assimilated to it more than to any idea of one’s origins. These Diasporiss, aside from those Jews who ascended to Paris, may include honorary Jews like Mondrian, Picasso, Beckmann, Hofinann, the Surrealists and the Bauhaus people, many of whom escaped the Enemy of the Jews, often to find refuge among Diasporist Jews themselves, especially in New York. Painters like Picasso, Bonnard, Matisse and Munch who did not have to flee, were touched and encouraged throughout their lives by what may even be called a (lewish) Dissporist aura of friends, collectors, dealers, writers, audience, explainers and colleagues, some of whom were to go up the chimneys (another ascent in Diasporist destiny). Although Diasporism in refugee Gentiles may be my own speculative construct, it is very real for Jews. ‘And what is real for Jews is real for Jewish painters. I suspect that even those who go out of their way to isolate art from the imagined merits or ¢ of being Jewish are, in the very doing, anointing art with the troubled wand of Jewish Diasporism. To my mind, something instinct with one’s culture enters into one’s art. And so the lost and soon to be murdered world of East European Jewry cultured the art of many Jewish painters, even as they asimi~ hated to the powerful charms of the new Modernism. We know that from the School of Montparnasse. These early modern Diasporists lived and worked outside my own experience. The Kingdom of Death they left in the Pale, and the bittersweet Paris of their brief freedom is not for me to reconstruct. Nor is the amazing American sanctuary from 1900 to the present moment, where Diasporism achieved its Golden Age according to many people, and Diasporist painting reached its second modern coming (in my litle history lesson). Before 1900 doesn’t concern me here because Jews were only just preparing to arise from a Diasporic sleep of dreams and one-third of them would (in the last days, of humanity) unknowingly sleepwalk into an oven. After 1900 begins to touch my own pictures, first of all because my Yiddish- and Russian-speaking grand- parents fled to America. So did my father. Then, after the Anschluss, so did my 40mn kitaj first diasporist... vos aja © Diaspora and Vi 22:09 61% @ books.google.com.br 9+ @ Under Postcolonial... | Critical Kita Essay... | Under Postcolonial stepfather Kitaj and, after the war, my grandmother Kitaj. I am not only a Diasporist but a Biographical Heretic, among other things, and so I have a peculiar faith and interest in the influence not only of past art acting on one’s pictures — everyone agrees about that — but also of one’s youth, upbringing, friends, milieux. Can anyone doubt that we are fatally rooted in the first part of our life? I am given to my time in art as any painter is, It tells in our pic- tures. Our pictures speak our particular culture and the languages of general as well as tribal cultures which interest us most. That picture-speech is urtered through personality, which is something perceived in its very achievement, like all cultural stuff. I'm not content that the vivid marriage of forms and contents in painting be known aside from our particular, even singular cultures and predicaments. I like to think this cultural marriage drama may be seen to be done up in pictures. Picasso said it: “It is not sufficient to know an artist's works, It is also necessary to know when he did them, why, how, under what circumstances.” Post-Holocaust Diasporism then. I can’t speak for the Jews or Gentiles of the Abstract School of New York and their explainers, Diasporists though many ‘were, except to express a hunch that they kept to only some avenues of their cre~ ativity, large scale though it was, nor for any of my comrades in what I have called (in The Human Clay, 1976) the School of London, some of whom are Diaspora Jews and some of whom may wander in a sexual Diaspora. I will only say there is no doubt in my mind that this Second Diasporic Aliyah (pray God will forgive me this impertinent usage), roughly from Rothko to Auerbach, has been touched by its destiny, a destiny which is driven and driven to remember (ike some great art before), the worst thing imaginable. Diasporism didn't exist in painting until I invented it, but it has antecedents, like Surrealism had in Dada and Symbolism, and Abstractionism had in, say, theosophy and ornament. Since we artists tend to create our precursors, as Borges said, Diasporist painting now, for me, began in the great art of the West which nourishes all painters, including those of the briefly fluttering congeries of modernist styles, Yiddishkeit and doomed café freedoms which ended at Drancy and the Eastern railheads. Using the Hebrew term, the present Pope, John Paul II, just said:"“This is sill the century of the Shoah.” Indeed, my own Diasporism turns on my century still, both in the sense the Pope meant and, 2 painter, in the cosmopolitan (and early Diasporist) moments in a modern art which was to live on and flourish, after Paris, mainly in the English- speaking world, my world. For the Diasporist Jew and Gentile (as for the Isracli) it is a world in the making and fraught with danger and mystery. For me, art is in the making in that world. Some years ago, | thought this might be 2 period I would puss through, but Diasporism, one’s Jewishness itself, changes all the time, Any exciting life of the mind will keep changing one’s art. The more I throw in my lot with the Jewish destiny or cultural tribe or nation or whatever it is, and the closer I get to my own death, the more a vision of Diasporic art draws me forward. 4iPad = 22:09 os) a @ books.google.com.br ef +a kit fist dlasporist.. © Dlaspera and Vis... Under Postcolonial... | critical Kita Essay... | Under Postcolonial eS tian ale (alain « =D) = a i If any curious people have followed this stuff of mine thus far, my gentle manifesto is also a primitive and belated answer to those who have written to me during recent years asking for advice I could only rarely give. I don't want to enlist them as Diasporists — Jewish or otherwise. My tendency is to throw these few crumbs down at the feet of our modern art and run like hell into hiding. Notes 1 The illustrations that accompany the text can be found in RB. Kitaj (1989) First Diasporist Manifesto, London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 19-49.ipad = 22:18 @ 59% a> ma @ books.google.com.br 9+ @ Under Postcolonial Eyes: F Critical Kitaj: Essays on th... Under Postcolonial Eye... vos aja (alm Sais) ie UNDER POSTCOLONIAL EYES Figuring the “jew” in Contemporary British Writing EFRAIM SICHER & LINDA WEINHOUSE22:18 @ 59x ma & books.google.com.br aot a ipad = kitaj first diasporist manit. Under Postcolonial Eyes: F... Critical Kitaj: Essays on th.. Under Postcolonial Eye.. vos aia (aimix « 5 === as) i 2012 by the Vial Sassoon Inerstiona Center forthe Study of “Manufscured and isibued fo he Vidal Sassoon International Center fr Library of Congress Caaloging-in-fublication Dats Siehet isi, Under postcolonial eyes: figuring the “ow” in contemporary British writing Efraim Sher and Linda Weinhs pcm, —( Studies in antisemitism Tnclodes bibliographical references and index ISBN 975-08032-4503-7 (loth ak paper) 1. English Mteraire— History and criicam, 2. Jews in iteratre. 5. Potcolonalism — Great Britain, Sudaim and literature Great Brin, 5. Postmodernism (Lear). Great Briain, 1. Weinhouse, Lindl, Tie PRISLASSSS 20iPad = 228 ma @ books.google.com.br kita frst dlasporist manit... | Under Postcolonial Eyes: F... | Critical Kita: Essays on th vos a a Contents Acknowledgments ia _— Inerodution 2. UnderPostoloial Eyes: Bawmgariner's Bombay 3. Hybriiy's Children: Andre Lery, Zale Smith and Salman Rosie 4. The Color of Shylock: Cary! Philips $5. Down Cultural Memory Lane: Ai Lcbienstein, and Gavroe 6, The Postmodern Jew 2, Radically Jewish G @ 59% ep ee TE Under Postcolonial Eye..