R.B. Kitaj, 74; paintings conveyed historical, literary themes

WASHINGTON - R.B. Kitaj, 74, an artist whose vivid figurative paintings used realistic shapes and images to convey historical and literary themes and who challenged the abstract art movement that dominated his era, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles.

Mr. Kitaj often made wild use of collage, fragmentary design, and bright colors, along with a thematic concern with modern Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust. His art highlighted historical and social commentary and obscure literary references. Toward the end of his career, he addressed more personal themes, including his Judaism and the death of his second, much younger wife.

He could be confounding; art writer Ken Johnson once called Mr. Kitaj "bewilderingly complex, contradictory, and disjunctive." Yet critic Robert Hughes, in an oft-quoted review from the mid-1970s, said Mr. Kitaj "draws better than almost anyone else alive."

Mr. Kitaj (pronounced kuh-TIE) was a self-taught intellectual whose literary tastes ranged from Franz Kafka to Henry James to Ezra Pound to Walter Benjamin. His canvases often gave a nod to their work, as well as to the filmmakers and other visual artists he claimed as inspirations.

Some critics found him pretentious and a name-dropper in his art. He defended himself: "Some books have pictures, and some pictures have books."

An American, Mr. Kitaj thrived for decades in England, where in 1963 he mounted his first solo show at the Marlborough New London Gallery. Along with such peers as David Hockney, a classmate at the Royal College of Art in London, he largely rejected passing fads, including pure abstraction and pop art, as too detached and devoid of passion.

Instead, Mr. Kitaj allied himself with the great artists of earlier generations, particularly Cezanne and Picasso, as well as such contemporaries as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Mr. Kitaj belatedly attracted wide attention in the United States, beginning with a traveling retrospective of his work in 1981.

Yet he remained an elusive presence, which some writers attributed to his deeply troubled personal life. His first wife committed suicide, and his second, painter Sandra Fisher, died of a ruptured brain aneurysm in 1994.

He blamed the news media for Fisher's demise, which followed the devastating attacks he received from critics during a much-promoted retrospective held at the Tate Gallery in London.

The show received accolades when it moved to New York and Los Angeles, where he settled and spent his last years painting images of his second wife.

Ronald Brooks was born in Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland. He took the surname of his stepfather, a Viennese Jewish refugee.

His mother was also Jewish, but it was not until the 1960s that his religion became increasingly central to his life. He said the change came with reading Hannah Arendt's New Yorker dispatches on the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis' foremost planners of Jewish extermination.

Mr. Kitaj studied art at the Cooper Union in New York and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. He financed his studies by working as a seaman on cargo ships and tankers.

Drafted into the US Army in 1955, he was stationed in France and became an illustrator for military publications.

After his service, he settled in England and used the GI Bill to further his art training at Oxford University, where he began to devour books on iconography. He also spent two years studying at the Royal College of Art in London and emerged as one of the promising young artists of the day.

His work was hard to categorize, although his youth often got him lumped into the pop art category. He remained defiantly eclectic and worked in several media, including silkscreen.

Starting in the mid-1970s, he began concentrating on pastels in the tradition of Degas. And even later on, his paintings because more autobiographical, with allusions to Judaism, the antiquarian book stores he frequented, and other aspects of his personal life. Above all, he remained an ever-evolving spirit of the art world.

He received many honors, including election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Times of London reported that he was the first American to become a Royal Academician since John Singer Sargent at the end of the 19th century.