Abbot Hall's intimate but judiciously selected exhibition is the first significant UK retrospective of Kitaj's work since the artist killed himself in 2007. It's also the first proper reappraisal since the infamous debacle of the 1994 Tate retrospective that caused Kitaj to abandon Britain while accusing his critics of hastening his wife's death.
- Portraits and Reflections
- Abbot Hall,
- Until 8 October
- Gallery website
Kitaj's problem (or his greatest virtue) was that he was always an outsider: an American in London, a figurative painter from a generation of abstract expressionists, a man with a deep reverence for the old masters amid the ephemera of Pop. Hardly any of his paintings fail to acknowledge the greats: The Rise of Fascism is a disturbing frieze in which an encroaching bomber casts a shadow over a Gauguin lagoon; Cecil Court, London WC2 twists the inhabitants of Kitaj's favourite alley of booksellers into Mannerist poses within a Tintoretto-style receding perspective.
Many of the late self-portraits, shown here in public for the first time, adopt Kitaj's preferred square format: "Square paintings, I don't know why, maybe there's a reason among the secrets of Kabbala," he commented. Among them is a small piece of loose, liver-spotted Pointillism from which the artist's features emerge as if from the bark of a tree. Kitaj, who completed the work just days before his death, was proud of the painting and referred to it as his "Jewish Scream", though the expression he is wearing seems more of a wry smile. It becomes especially poignant given that the Los Angeles coroner recorded a verdict of suicide, though it was always Kitaj's fate to be a round peg in a square frame.