| From The
Jerusalem Post, article on R. B. Kitaj by Matt Nesvisky -- "In-Your-Face Outsider" ... the painter was fiercely unapologetic about being a lifelong reader and writer. "Reading Jewish books," he once wrote, "is to me what reading trees is for a landscape painter." And read he did, favoring such weighty Jewish writers as Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Marcel Proust, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gershom Scholem. Kitaj often wrote about these authors and thinkers and used ideas and images from their works in his paintings. He was also a compulsive letter writer, numbering among his correspondents such luminaries as Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Avigdor Arikha, Allen Ginsberg and, not least, Philip Roth, who modeled the protagonist of the 1995 novel "Sabbath's Theater" largely after Kitaj.... ... The critics got their revenge in 1994, when the Tate Gallery mounted a Kitaj retrospective. The reviewers savaged the show, both the paintings and the literary texts that Kitaj displayed along with them. One critic labeled Kitaj an outright fake artist. Another called him a Wandering Jew and barely concealed the wish that he would wander off somewhere else. Kitaj (and others) detected no small measure of xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the reviews. Then, even before the fierce critical reaction had cooled, Kitaj's beloved wife, the artist Sandra Fisher, whom he called his "Shekhina" (the mystical feminine manifestation of God), died suddenly at age 47 of a brain aneurysm. There was no doubt in Kitaj's mind that the critics were responsible for Sandra's death. |
From The
New York Sun, Oct. 24, 2007 -- obituary of R. B. Kitaj by David Cohen -- "Visual Artist R. B. Kitaj Is Dead at 74" Kitaj's own capacity to agitate was epitomized by the critical response to his retrospective at London's Tate Gallery in 1994, when one reviewer after the next lambasted him with such catcalls as "namedropper," "pseudo-intellectual," and "existentialist bull—." Kitaj was already devastated by this onslaught when personal tragedy caught up with him. While attending his mother on her deathbed in America he learned that his wife Sandra had died suddenly of an aneurism. Like Coleman Silk in his friend Philip Roth's novel "The Human Stain" (a character likely in part to have been modeled on Kitaj), he believed that — aiming at him — the critics had murdered his wife. |
"226 Philip Roth and Kitaj have been good friends since Roth’s time in London in the 1970s. Roth now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. Roth has moreover used Kitaj as a model for the not entirely sympathetic protagonist of Sabbath’s Theater, New York, 1994. See Livingstone (ed.): R.B. Kitaj: An American in Europe [1998], p. 25, note 16, for a description of Kitaj’s ‘role’ in Sabbath’s Theatre. In The Human Stain (New York, 2000, p. 13) he repeats word-for-word telephone conversations with Kitaj which took place after Sandra’s death: ‘They meant to kill me, and they got her instead.’"Google Books searches for more from Livingstone yield the following:
"Kitaj remarks: 'All characters in fiction and sometimes in my own art are complex hybrids from lots of sources in real life and imagination. Roth used sonie [presumably 'some'] of me in Mickey Sabbath, mainly my conversations about my time at sea.... Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels like a shell game.'"
-- Kitaj, by Marco Livingstone and R. B. Kitaj, Phaidon Press, 1999