Looking at Kitaj at Pallant House I was reminded of T S
Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ -
the idea, roughly speaking, that somewhere in our cultural history feeling and intellect became uncoupled.
For a poet like Donne, an emotional experience could take the form of an
intellectual adventure: the search for religious truth, for example, occupies
mind and heart symbiotically, and we feel that in the pulse of the
verse rhythms. But now emotion goes one
way – prompted by the stimulus of the quick hit – and intellect is left to find
its own dessicated form elsewhere. Kitaj’s paintings represent a new synthesis
of brain and emotion. Take ‘The Killer-Critic Assasinated by his Widower, Even’
(1997) – the work prompted by the recent death from an aneurism of Kitaj’s wife
Sandra, which Kitaj blamed on the negative critical reactions to his Tate
Retrospective of 1994. Clashing colour, gestural scrawl and grotesque imagery
communicate a tactile, trembling fury. Yet it’s a fury felt through a dense web
of association: the title alludes to Duchamp, the central image to Manet’s
'Assassination of Maximilian' (while the victim’s hands surely point to Goya’s 3rd
May – Kitaj had a long and intense immersion in Spanish culture). Modernist
collage points us in further directions, to revenge tragedy, to Erasmus and
Gogol and their subjects of fools and madmen. The heart’s passion quickens the
mind’s dance. It’s a language we are more used to in literature, in particular
in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, at once the scrapbook of a hyper-educated memory
and the verbal reflex of mental disintegration. Densely allusive art requires
time to unpack in the mind, but like Eliot, Kitaj can deploy his art to convey
sudden sensuous beauty. ‘Degas’ (1980), shown in a room devoted to Kitaj’s
figurative pastels, is a moving and beautiful work showing the hand and eye of
an Old Master. Some excerpts of John Ashbery’s essay on the artist are
reproduced in Paris Review:Tuesday 16 July 2013
R B Kitaj, Pallant House
Looking at Kitaj at Pallant House I was reminded of T S
Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ -
the idea, roughly speaking, that somewhere in our cultural history feeling and intellect became uncoupled.
For a poet like Donne, an emotional experience could take the form of an
intellectual adventure: the search for religious truth, for example, occupies
mind and heart symbiotically, and we feel that in the pulse of the
verse rhythms. But now emotion goes one
way – prompted by the stimulus of the quick hit – and intellect is left to find
its own dessicated form elsewhere. Kitaj’s paintings represent a new synthesis
of brain and emotion. Take ‘The Killer-Critic Assasinated by his Widower, Even’
(1997) – the work prompted by the recent death from an aneurism of Kitaj’s wife
Sandra, which Kitaj blamed on the negative critical reactions to his Tate
Retrospective of 1994. Clashing colour, gestural scrawl and grotesque imagery
communicate a tactile, trembling fury. Yet it’s a fury felt through a dense web
of association: the title alludes to Duchamp, the central image to Manet’s
'Assassination of Maximilian' (while the victim’s hands surely point to Goya’s 3rd
May – Kitaj had a long and intense immersion in Spanish culture). Modernist
collage points us in further directions, to revenge tragedy, to Erasmus and
Gogol and their subjects of fools and madmen. The heart’s passion quickens the
mind’s dance. It’s a language we are more used to in literature, in particular
in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, at once the scrapbook of a hyper-educated memory
and the verbal reflex of mental disintegration. Densely allusive art requires
time to unpack in the mind, but like Eliot, Kitaj can deploy his art to convey
sudden sensuous beauty. ‘Degas’ (1980), shown in a room devoted to Kitaj’s
figurative pastels, is a moving and beautiful work showing the hand and eye of
an Old Master. Some excerpts of John Ashbery’s essay on the artist are
reproduced in Paris Review: