R. B. Kitaj

Art Brokerage: Ronald Brooks Kitaj American Artist: b. 1932-2007. Ronald Brooks Kitaj (29 October 1932 - 21 October 2007) was an American artist who spent much of his life in England, and studied at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford (1958-59). For a while Kitaj - known as Ron to his friends but always RB to the world at large - was linked with the pop artists at the RCA. His brilliantly assembled images and colours in the work of this period, which was ome of his best, give the impression of random collages assembled from glossy magazines, and indeed he did actually work on a collage construction with one of the first artists to utilise mass culture in his work, Eduardo Paolozzi. Kitaj settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the Ealing Art College, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. He staged his first solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1963, entitled "Pictures with commentary, Pictures without commentary". In his later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish heritage, which found expression in his works, with reference to the Holocaust and influences from Jewish writers such as Kafka and Walter Benjamin, and he came to consider himself to be a "wandering Jew". In 1989, Kitaj published "First Diasporist Manifesto", a short book in which he analysed his own alienation, and how this contributed to his art. His book contained the remark: "The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once." And he added: "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist." His second wife, Sandra Fisher died of a brain aneurysm in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery had ended. He blamed the British press for her death, stating that they were aiming for me, but they got her instead. David Hockney concurred and said that he too believed the London art critics had killed Sandra Fisher. Kitaj returned to the US in 1997 and settled in Los Angeles, near his first son. The "Tate War" and Sandra's death became a central themes for his later works: he often depicted himself and his deceased wife as angels. Kitaj was one of several artists to make a post-it note in celebration of 3M's 20th anniversary. When auctioned on the internet in 2000, the charcoal and pastel piece sold for $925, making it the most expensive post-it note in history, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.