When it was at the Tate Gallery in London a few months ago, R.B. Kitaj's retrospective show received a drubbing from English critics such as few artists ever have to endure in a lifetime. Indeed, the reviews were so bilious that this critic found himself wondering whether an artist he had admired for years might not have had a doppelganger-another R.B. Kitaj, pretentiously eclectic, too big for his boots and not much good with the brush, who had somehow snuck his God-awful daubs into the Tate ahead of the real one. But no; the show has now arrived at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is clearly by the real Kitaj.
The critics seem to have been provoked, as much as anything else, by the wall labels he rashly insisted on appending to his work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne is my favourite painter too ... Maybe that's why he draws so many of us to him." Us: oh, come on. William Lieberman, who curated this show for the Met (and has hung it beautifully), banished these ruminations from the wall. They are in the catalog.
Kitaj (pronounced Kit-eye) is 62 now, an American expatriate who has lived in London half his life. No artist with any ambition can reach that age without producing his or her share of failed pictures. Kitaj has, but he remains an artist of real, sometimes of remarkable interest: a restless omnivore whose way of painting, part personal confession, part syncopated history and part allusive homage to the old and Modernist masters, is quite unlike anybody else's today.
Some 30 years ago, settling down after a brilliant student debut at London's Royal College of Art, Kitaj was loosely put in with the English Pop movement; but his work had very little to do with Pop. Its real ancestry was Surrealist-the exegesis of dreams through collage and montage, the impaction of seemingly unrelated images. And its preferred terrain was recent. Let other Americans in Europe have their fantasies about Medicean Florence or the court of the Sun King; Kitaj had edgy, bad dreams of the comparatively recent past, a 20th century that began in 1914 and was populated by history-buffeted cosmopolitans, Jews on the run, unmoored intellectuals.
No American artist ever had a more extreme case of Casablancitis than Kitaj. His work harps on the theme of displacement, loss, nostalgia. You get it at full strength in The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin), 1972-73, with its diagonal mass of cafa habituas like creatures clinging insecurely to a reef-the whole structure, it seems, being undermined by a weird red figure among the red chairs in the foreground, indifferently wielding a pick.