Before visiting Tate Collections stores to see two Kitaj paintings I read Marco Livingstone’s article Iconology as a Theme in the Early Works of R B Kitaj. Of particular interest was what the article revealed about Kitaj’s connection with Aby Warburg. This is because it connected to my research into Griselda Pollock, ‘Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum’ and Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. 

 

Kitaj was linked to Warburg by his Jewish ‘heritage’ and studied at the Warburg Institute while a student at the Royal College. Kitaj recalls his view ‘Warburg was like a surrealist: he tried to bring odd things together like Breton did: “Magic and logic flowering on the same tree” somehow the two strains come together.’ (M Livingstone 1980). Kitaj also cites Aby Warburg’s ‘analysis of symbolic form’ as a major influence in the 1963 catalogue of his first solo exhibition ‘Pictures without Commentary’ (M Livingstone 1980).

 

Tate describes Kitaj’s early works as ‘autobiographical collage’. Influenced by Surrealist ideas as well as Aby Warburg, M Livingstone (1980) describes how in his early works Kitaj  used iconography as a starting point ‘around which a personal view of the world is constructed’. He was concerned with exploring the inherited meanings of borrowed imagery as raw material for his pictures. For example, in the ‘Murder of Rosa Luxemburg’ the woman who lies at the centre of the picture is Rosa, but the image also connects to Kitaj’s two Jewish grandmothers, specifically Grandmother Helene whose likeness Kitaj saw in Rosa’s. 

Influenced by Surrealist methods Kitaj early works are collage based, either literally pasting things to the surface of works or in the composition, the way he scatters images across the surface, ‘deliberate scattering of ‘attention across the surface….is an inducement for the mind to wander’ M Livingstone (1980).

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The totally unexpected discovery of Kitaj’s connection to Aby Warburg and Warburgian thinking made me realise the breadth of Aby Warburg’s influence not only the visual arts but also on Literature (Ezra Pound and TS Elliot). Finding this unexpected connection is very exciting, it also helped explain more clearly Griselda Pollock’s theory of the power or even necessity of challenging traditional/received ideas, by those outside the system (women, Jews|) presenting new and unexpected conjunctions of images. I am not quite sure where this will lead but it has the potential to be a very rich line of enquiry.

Livingstone, M (1980) Iconology as a Theme in the Early Works of R B Kitaj The Burlington Magazine URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/880055 [Accessed 16 December 2019]

 

Observations of the works in Tate stores

Erasmus Variations 1958 

Tate Collection reference T12540                                                         Based on and almost exact copy of Erasmus’s own doddles as reproduced in Plate V Huizinga’s Erasmus of Rotterdam. The images are presented as collaged composition, though all painted on one canvas surface. However, the ‘collaged’ nature of the images is emphasised by each having its own colour palette. The images are connected by strong use of outline almost at odds with the way they are painted with loose and gestural brush strokes, reminiscent of abstract expressionism and specifically De Kooning’s Women series (painted between 1950 and 1953) and with which Kitaj was familiar. Kitaj saw Erasmus’s doodles as a kind of ‘automatic drawing, made without the intervention of reason’ and later favoured by the Surrealists. The painting is autobiographical content, each face though not a portrait is meant to represent a woman Kitaj had known. ‘I assigned each disguised visage in this picture to a Woman I had known in fleeting encounters’(quoted Livingstone, 2010, p232)

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The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg 1960

Tate Collection reference T03082                                                         Images assembled as a collage, images of conflicting scales, one item (description of her death in words top right) is actually pasted to the canvas. The composition is united by grey/brown, monochrome colour palette. Much more to understand in the symbolism of the images, knowing Kitaj talked about this painting as arising out of a meditation on his two grandmothers, about a historic murder but really about murdering Jews.