First Diasporist Manifesto, by RB Kitaj
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Tuesday February 05, 2008 12:24
by C Murray
This is an Obit.
Ronald Brooke Kitaj, Painter and Writer born in Cleveland 1932- died 2007.
RB Kitaj- Diasporist Artist and Magician.
He wrote in 1989 a book which was entitled 'The First Diasporist Manifesto', it was sold
along with catalogues that accompanied his Retrospective at the Tate Gallery. A further
book entitled :- The Second Diasporist Manifesto' was later published by Yale.
Kitaj tried to put into words his experience of being a post-holocaust Jew, he failed to
find the word magic to describe the experience of his abodelessness. He described
himself as an American, a yearning Jew and an Artist -School of London.
The Manifesto is beyond humble and unlike his painting he never quite finds the
words to describe his feeling of exile.
"Nationalism seems awful; it's track record stinks, but patriotism doesn't seem
half bad. ------------On the other hand, if people want their homelands, why not?
Partitioned homelands seem better to me than killing each other. My own homeland,
America , and my little one , England, offer such strong appearances of peace
and freedom that the really odd and peaceful practice of painting spins out my own
Diasporic days and years until I can't sense any other way to go.'
The Manifesto is one chapter long in the body of the book, followed by chapters
on :-
How I Came to make my Diasporist pictures.(Untimely Thoughts)
Diasporist Citations.
Guernica.
His New Freedom.
Commonality.
Golden Rule.
After 1945.
The Romantic Jew (ancestral Houses).
Diasporist tradition.
The Almond Tree.
Error.
He discusses Einstein, Gombrich, Roth and Primo Levi , amongst others.
Anyone can access Kitaj art by using the search engines, but it is far better to try and
attend an exhibition and examine the work of the artist.
"Diasporist Painting, which I just made up, is enacted under peculiar historical
and personal freedoms, stresses, dislocation, rupture and momentum'.
Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2RB Kitaj pretty much invented the notion of the school of the London, a fictional, although widely believed idea that he, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff were all somehow connected both as artists and friends.
Although false, this idea gave London painting a cachet that meant a lot to a certain generation of artists, who soldiered on with brushes and oils while Saatchi was getting ready to change the London art world into a subsidiary of the advertising world.
I thought it poignant and sad that Kitaj ended up feeling so bitter about London after his Tate retrospective in 1994 was savaged by the newspaper critics. "A little bit of fake Beckmann, a little bit of fake Picasso, but above all fake,'' wrote The Independent's hack, and others were worse. When Kitaj's wife died during the show he rather crazily blamed the journalists, and decided that he'd be better off in the USA.
Some say he was a great draughtsman, better than Degas, but I don't know if that's all an artist needs. My favourite piece of his is this one, called Communist and Socialist. I remember finding it in a book in NCAD library when I was doing my foundation there and being amazed by it.
Communist and Socialist
maybe the hack grew up...
Kitaj was born in the US and only found himself thinking about his exilic state at a certain
stage in his life.. a bit like the artist Plath, who had just begun to absorb and discuss
the Shoah in her art at the time of her death (the conversation was left unfinished).
I went in 1994 to the Tate to see the retrospective and spent most of the four days I had in
London looking at the Brushwork in one Kitaj Painting- The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg-
I can remember the size of the canvas and the brushwork quite clearly, and the books
it led to, cos thats what art does- it engages at different levels.
The introduction to the Manifesto is a quote by Eliot (George):
'A Modern book 'On Liberty' (J.S Mill) has maintained that from the freedom of
individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched.Why should we
not apply this argument to the idiosyncracy of a nation, and pause in our haste
to boot it down'.
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