Search instructions
View alphabetical lists of all artists currently featured on the site.
Select the initial of the artist's name that you are looking for. Scroll down the list until you find the name, and select it for more information about the artist and his or her work.
Search Tip
Artists are organised by their most commonly-used names. This is usually but not always their surname e.g. Leonardo da Vinci is under L, Van Gogh is under V and Raphael is under R.
- © R.B. Kitaj
-
Enlarge
If Not, Not
Ronald Brooks Kitaj
- © R.B. Kitaj
Ronald Brooks Kitaj
If Not, Not1975 - 1976On Display | GALLERY OF MODERN ART
This is probably Kitaj's best-known and most complex work. The artist stated that the painting related to T S Eliot's poem 'The Waste Land'; the poet is depicted at the bottom left, wearing a hearing aid. The building in the top left corner is the gatehouse to Auschwitz. Below it lies a scene of cultural disintegration and moral collapse. The stagnant water, the dead and blackened trees, and the books scattered about the landscape, speak of death and destruction. A Matisse bust (coincidentally a variant of the one owned by the gallery) lies broken in the centre foreground. The small figure of the man in bed, holding a baby, is a self-portrait.
Details
- Accession no. GMA 1585
- Medium Oil and black chalk on canvas
- Size 152.40 x 152.40 cm
- Credit Purchased 1976
Ronald Brooks Kitaj (American / British, 1932 - 2007)
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Kitaj settled in Britain in 1957. He had previously studied at art schools in New York and Vienna and, after serving with the army in Germany, came to England on a G.I. Scholarship to study in Oxford and at the Royal College of Art, London. At a time when abstract art was prevalent, Kitaj worked figuratively, developing a personal artistic language derived from pictorial and literary sources. He became associated with the loose grouping of artists called the 'School of London', who were concerned with the human form. Kitaj moved to Los Angeles in 1997.
Glossary Open
Abstract art
Art in which there is no attempt to represent anything existing in the world, particularly used of the 20th century onwards. ‘Abstraction’ refers to the process of making images that may in part derive from the visible world but which are reduced to basic formal elements.
Figurative art
A general term for art that refers to the real, visible world, used more specifically for the representation of the human figure.
School of London
A group of London-based figurative painters of the second half of the 20th century including Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.