[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: April 14, 2008]
To the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street for a just-opened show of "little pictures" by the chameleon-like, recently deceased artist Ronald Kitaj.
Scroll down for brief notes on the Poet's House showcase.
Born in Ohio, but strongly associated with the so-called School of London, Kitaj - like Bacon and Freud - carried a banner for figurative painting in its unfashionable years and, at times, in the face of considerable critical hostility.
Kitaj's style over the years has been versatile to say the least. As far as I'm concerned, at least, one can rarely walk into a gallery and say "Look, that's a Kitaj over there." The enduring theme in his work has been the human figure; an additional theme, increasingly emphasized as the years passed, his Jewish identity.
This posthumous show is extensive - I think I counted roughly sixty works - but is drawn almost exclusively from the last two years of the painter's life. Almost every painting, moreover, is a head-and-shoulder portrait. A persistent approach is evident - attempting to capture both pictorial volume and the subject's character with swift black lines and staccato stabs of bright color.
The painter takes the opportunity to pay repeated tribute to his eminent contemporaries in this field, the London Jewish painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and their fascinating teacher David Bomberg. One of the few landscapes here, a view of Jerusalem "after Bomberg", is an apt homage to the latter's warm palette and shimmering shapes.
A portrait of Kossoff "after Auerbach" is explicit enough, but I found a 2007 self-portrait most reminiscent of Auerbach's drawings - a tangle of shattered black lines from which a head emerges almost against the odds.
At the beginning of the exhibition, there's a small selection of works from an earlier period - 1960s portraits, mainly of poets. Auden, Creeley, McLure; there's a sharp precision of rendering which it's interesting to compare with the later works, where the manner of conveyance seems as important as the face conveyed.
These later works employ a rough, heavily textured canvas, almost never painted over. Although they are oils, the feeling is of quick sketches on napkins. Some were surely painted from live models, as many others presumably from pictorial sources - Wittgenstein, the father's artist as a young man, a youthful Marcel Proust. Add Spinoza and Scholem and Maimonides, and there's clearly a fascination with famous Jewish faces. Freud, amusingly, is represented by his cigar only.
An exhibition, then, of doughty persistence and occasional flashes of humor - not least in the self-portraits. I wonder when we'll see a more various retrospective.
At the Marlborough through May 3.
Poet's House Annual Showcase
Just an acknowledgement, really, that the Poet's House organization - currently homeless while new Battery Park City premises are fitted out - has mounted its annual showcase of poetry publications. The aim is to display a copy of every book of poetry, and many books about poetry, published in the United States in the preceding year.
This is also a cunning way to build on their 50,000-plus volume collection, since they get to keep these publisher-donated volumes. And given the price of academic hardbacks, especially, the showcase represents many thousands of dollars-worth of books.
You need to move fast to catch the 2008 edition, as it's open only for one week in a back room of the Jefferson Market library on Sixth Avenue. I regard the annual opening reception as an exercise in looking at interesting new books without spilling wine on them.
Details here.
