KIKE ART
3/14/95
East Village
DD,
This afternoon I went to see the R.B. Kitaj exhibition at the Met. He’s a painter you’re probably familiar with because he lived so many years in London.
I went to see the show because my friend Romy Ashby told me to. She liked the charcoal drawing of two black cats fucking (My Cat and Her Husband, 1977). The show, which opened last year in London, was panned by all the critics there on weirdly specious grounds. Kitaj has followed Arnold Schoenberg in proclaiming “I have long since resolved to be a Jew… I regard that as more important than my art.” And his work’s been called a lot of things that Jews are called: “abstruse, pretentious”; “shallow, fake and narcissistic”; “hermetic, dry and bookish”; “difficult, obscure, slick and grade f.” Too much in dialogue with writing and ideas to be a painter, he’s been called “a quirky bibliophile… altogether too poetic and allusive… a little too literary for his own good.”
It’s hard to figure out just why Kitaj’s been criticized this way. His paintings are a little bit Francis Bacon, a little bit Degas, a little bit Pop Art, but mostly they are studies. Thought accelerates to a pitch where it becomes pure feeling. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists or the Pop artists who he’s been unfavorably compared to, his paintings never are one single statement or one transcendental thing. It’s like he’s conscious he’s the Last Remaining Humanist, using painting as a field for juggling ideals that don’t quite hold. Unlike painters of the ’50s whose works celebrate disjunction, Kitaj’s paintings recognize disjunction while in a certain sense lamenting it. Melodies floating across a cafe patio that evoke another world. Walter Benjamin smoking hashish in Marseilles to enjoy the subtle pleasures of his own company. An intellectual rigor that allows the possibility of nostalgia.
In Paris in the ’50s, upwardly mobile ghetto Jews like Sylvère Lotringer suffered a terrible dinner party dilemma: whether to announce the fact that they were Jews to offset possible racial slurs and jokes and be accused of arrogantly ‘flaunting it;’ or say nothing and be accused of deviously “hiding it.” Kitaj the slippery Kike is never just one thing and so people think he’s tricking them.
It amused me that Kitaj has wrapped himself around the idea of creating “exegesis” for his art, writing texts to parallel each painting. “Exegesis”: the crazy person’s search for proof that they’re not crazy. “Exegesis” is the word I used in trying to explain myself to you. Did I tell you, Dick, I’m thinking of calling all these letters The Cowboy and the Kike? Anyhow, I felt I had to see the show.
The exhibition was presented by the Met with a huge amount of explication that served to distance Kitaj further from his viewers and his peers. Curatorial excitement mixed with apprehension: how to make this “difficult” work accessible? By introducing us to the artist as an admirable freak.
Entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters the first in a series of large-scale placards explaining Kitaj’s strange career. A sentimental pen-and-ink portrait of the not-yet-dead artist is displayed beside a text describing biographic landmarks. Kitaj grew up in Troy, New York and ran away at age 16 to be a merchant seaman. He enlisted in the Army, then attended art school in Oxford on the GI Bill. After school he moved to London, painted, showed. After the unexpected death of his first wife in 1969, Kitaj stopped painting for several years. This fact is disclosed in a tone of awed surprise. (Why has every single life that deviates from the corporate norm—from high school to an east coast BA, followed by a California art school MFA, followed by a cheerful steady flow of art-production—become so oddly singular?)
The placards in the second room continue amplifying Kitaj’s oddness. He is “a voracious reader of literature and philosophy” “a bibliophile.” The facts of Kitaj’s life are sketched so bare that he becomes exotic, mythic. The text is telling us that while it may be impossible to love the artist or his work we must admire him. Although his work is “difficult,” it has a substance and a presence; it can’t be entirely dismissed; it holds its own. And so at 62, in his first major retrospective, Kitaj becomes revered/reviled. All the rightness of his work is undermined by singularity. He’s a talking dog domesticated into myth.
(Am I being too sensitive? Perhaps, but I’m a kike. And isn’t it well-documented that those kikes who don’t devote themselves to power-mongering and money-grubbing are hopelessly highstrung?)
The placards go on to apologize/explain Kitaj’s prose. After years of fucked-up readings of his work, he was forced to write his own. The placard suggests you spend some money to access Kitaj’s texts (buy the catalogue, rent the audiocassette) but in reality you don’t have to. Because in the middle of the second room there’re multiple copies of the catalog displayed on two long library tables complete with shaded reading lamps and chairs. How perfect—a tiny architectural slice of the New York Public Library or Amsterdam’s grand American Hotel. (You too can be a kike!) This display was so archaic that the catalogs weren’t even chained, and I contemplated stealing one, though finally I didn’t. Because although Kitaj’s friends include some of the greatest poets in the world, I didn’t like his texts that much. His texts spoke to someone not quite real, the “perplexed but sympathetic viewer.” You either like the paintings or you don’t. Kitaj’s writing pandered so it was disappointing.
But Kitaj’s paintings never pander and they aren’t disappointing.
My first favorite, painted in 1964, was called The Nice Old Man and The Pretty Girl (With Huskies). What a terrific painting to own! What a lot it says about your life circa 1964 if you were somebody significant in the art world! It’s a painting that’s seduced by the frenetic energy and glamour of this time while mocking it.
The colors of this painting—mustard yellow, Chinese red and forest green—were high fashion in their time. The nice old man sits facing us in 3/4 profile from the depths of a mauve Le Corbusier-inspired chair. The Nice Old Man’s head has been replaced with a side of ham that makes him look like Santa Claus. Over it, he wears a gas mask. The chair is expediently correct, Roche-Bobois, but not remarkable or beautiful. Perhaps chosen by an uninspired decorator. The Nice Old Man’s body extends across almost the entire frame, ending in one of those Nordic furtrimmed boots that go in, though mostly out, of style. And this boot is pointed squarely at the knee (Claire’s Knee by Eric Rohmer?) of the Pretty Girl, who is completely headless. Her coat is Chanel red and almost matches the Nice Old Man’s seedy Santa outfit. Except it’s better cut—tight at the top, then flaring. Her dress is mustard orange.
And then there’re those huskies, visitors from a David Salle work that’s travelled back in time, panting, grinning, moving, even though each is trapped inside a white rectangle, towards a snow-bank rising from the bottom right corner of the frame. Between them there’s a red square displaying some of their possessions: a model of a monolith for him, a Gucci scarf for her. What a modish pair. And what could be more modish than Kitaj’s acerbic portrait of them? Except that the acerbic-ness seems to go too far, beyond the effervescent skepticism of the period towards a moral irony that lays it bare.
And, perfectly, appropriately to that first adrenaline rush of art & commerce that characterized the art world in 1964, the painting’s circle of meaning is completed by its ownership. Nice Old Man was loaned to the exhibit by its owners Susan and Alan Patricoff, prominent members of the mid-’60s New York City/East Hampton art and social scene. Alan Patricoff, a venture capitalist, art collector and early owner of New York magazine is a great supporter of Kitaj’s. According to the writer Erje Ayden, he and Susan Patricoff gave the most amazing parties in East Hampton, where writers, art-world luminaries and miss-outs mixed with famous socialites.