Edgy Footnotes to an Era

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Hirshhorn Museum, a powerful retrospective of R.B. Kitaj

With his retrospective of 102 paintings and drawings at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the American Artist R.B. Kitaj, expatriate in England, has come home in force. For the past 15 years, Kitaj has been one of the most visible figures in European painting. His images, edgy and literary, full of sexual belligerence and failed political hopes, powerfully convey what the poet John Ashbery (in one of the catalogue essays for the show) calls "an era's bad breath." If Kitaj is not, in fact, the Auden of modern painting, he is quite often discussed as though he were, especially by English critics. Of late, he has also emerged (along with David Hockney and Avigdor Arikha) as one of the few real masters of the art of straight figure drawing in Europe or, for that matter, in the world.

The Kitaj show (which will go to his native Cleveland in December, and to Dusseldorf in February 1982) begins, as it were, on Weimar modernism, on the strains, dislocations and terrible urgencies of a time that Kitaj, 48, is too young to have experienced directly--Europe in the '20s and '30s. Gangsters and politicians, clowns and whores, drifting intellectuals and their pale cafe groupies, the doomed, the uprooted, the crushed, the demented--such is the cast of characters. They are imagined and mixed by a mind saturated not only in literature but in fantasies about reading, straying and witnessing.

Kitaj's works from the '60s, like The Ohio Gang, set forth dramatic melanges, Bertolt Brecht plus Constructivism plus Al Capone--irresistibly nasty stuff, Neue Sachlichkeit run through a fragmented lens.

The words "history painter" suggest an august mummification of fact--Wolfe nobly expiring at Quebec, Washington becoming his own statue in the boat on the Delaware. If Kitaj can be called a painter of modern history, he is not of that sort.

Rather, he has a close instinct for the disconnected emblems of a moment--the faces glimpsed in smeared newsprint, the sense of not having the whole story that comes from living at no remove from traumatic events.

Some critics have found Kitaj's wide allusions both obscure and pretentious.

So they can be, but not very often. A peculiar case in point is After Rodin, one of the recent pastel drawings of a nude woman sprawled on her back, rosy, firm and decapitated. To what does this repugnant, though not very gory, piece of sadism owe its title? On the face of it, to Rodin's fondness for making fragmentary figures, headless torsos, isolated arms or legs. But then one is reminded that this, in Rodin's own day, was ceaselessly guyed by satirists as literal mutilation; so much so that during the Turkish atrocities in Armenia, one French cartoonist drew some observers in front of a hut festooned with severed limbs, exclaiming, "What fine models for Rodin!" Presumably this lopsided equation of the fictive violence of art with the real violence of history is meant to hover, in quotes, above Kitaj's nude; but it seems very contrived.

The images that work best are the ones where Kitaj spins a web of congruent allusion without ever getting too literal, where the art-history and real-history footnotes balance and bear one another out. A remarkable one is If Not, Not, 1975-76, his meditation on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. One could hardly call it an illustration of the poem, although Eliot seems to make an appearance as the clerkish figure with spectacles and hearing aid in the lower left corner, an irritable St. Anthony tempted by a naked girl to whom he has clearly not been introduced.

The Waste Land's familiar cast of characters--Phlebas the Phoenician, Mr. Eugenides, the Fisher King and the rest--do not appear. Instead, there is an Eliotian tone of dissociation, alienation and decay; and it is grafted onto an ambitious composition not unlike the burning phantasmagorias of Bruegel, filled with emblems of evil. Eliot (if it is he) functions, in the picture, like the figure of "Mad Meg" in Bruegel's Dulle Griet, striding through the landscape and inventing it as she goes.

The building on the distant hill, with its gaping mouth, recalls the hell mouths in Bruegel (it is actually copied from the guardhouse gate at Auschwitz). The figures, lying dead or crawling about in unidentifiable uniforms, reek of anonymity.

Against that, there is the dry and exact pleasure with which Kitaj's paint covers the surface; its luminosity, even its neatness. He is no expressionist--in fact, no one could be further from the mediocre, revivalist splurging that passes for neoexpressionism in Germany and New York these days. Kitaj is very aware of himself, but that awareness (or wariness) presses him toward a detached kind of discourse, a way of painting grounded in tradition. "There are some people who don't like museums because they think of them as tombs, or something negative," he remarked in an interview recently. "I've always loved them. They are to me lighthouses of utopianism and social well-being." Why utopianism? Because the museum does nothing if it does not strive toward some ideal of visual literacy. Its mission begins from the unquestioned belief that learning to see is as important as learning to read, and that seeing is not the property of one class.

This literacy--a sense of the thickness of art's layer over an insufficiently interpreted world, a knowledge of what alternative images it contains--is part of Kitaj's essential subject matter. It explains his passion for homage, his contempt for theories of progress in art and his dislike of spontaneity. It would be hard to find anyone intelligent today who believes art still moves from lower states to higher, but ten years ago, Kitaj was much scorned in some circles for not believing it and saying he did not. "In the terms of my own life and its present needs, the Mona Lisa is more profound, more 'real,' more timely, less dated .. . than almost any picture I can think of since Cezanne put his brushes down in 1906." That is Kitaj practicing with the crust (if not the mantle) of his curmudgeonly hero, Degas.

Such utterances are less interesting than the oeuvre they garnish. Kitaj's recent drawings, particularly his pastels, are of marvelous density. The firm boundary line, probing and circumscribing, pays its respects to Degas, as does the broken, emphatic texture of the pastel, sometimes built up to a thick coat of peacock-hued dust. There is nothing theoretical about these drawings, no "as if--such as one might expect from an artist turning, at midcareer, away from modernist fragmentation. Solid, chunky, driven, greedy: these adjectives apply to Kitaj's appropriation of the world--particularly the bodies of women--with line. Sometimes his egotism goes out of control or his taste fails him, or both, as in an absurdly paranoid self-portrait that looks like Jack Nicholson fried on acid. But when confronted with the posed model, in The Waitress or his various nude studies, Kitaj draws better than almost anyone else alive, taking on all the expressive and factual responsibilities of depiction and carrying most of them through.

For that, one can gladly put up with the obscurities of his political work. It is Kitaj's drawing that convinces one of the integrity of his search. Perhaps it is not given to any single painter to do what he is trying to do--to construct a narrative, ironic and didactic art that can stand clear of stories, jokes and propaganda. But one must respect the man for trying.

--By Robert Hughes

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