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Kitaj's growing ambition, now fully realized, was to re-create something that was supposed to have been expelled from modern art: history painting. It's as though his own sense of expatriation compelled him toward this gap, not as a witness to history but as a collector and combiner of its enigmatic fragments. Then his curiosity solidified into an obsession, as a Jew, with Jewish history, Jewish fate and intellectual character. His early models were more literary than visual-the "collage" of Eliot's The Waste Land, in particular.
Since Picasso's Guernica, few artists had attempted historical commentary. Robert Rauschenberg did in his silkscreen paintings of the early '60s, and so did James Rosenquist with big quasi-dioramas like The F-111, his reflection on the Vietnam War. Kitaj differs from both, for he wanted to paint his images all the way through, not transfer them out of mass media. It's odd that in the midst of all the talk about "appropriation" that went on through the '80s and into the '90s, Kitaj's name so seldom came up in New York: for this is a painter mad about quotation, about scouring the landfill of 20th century image-memory for fragments that could work as emblems and poetic signs.
The reason has to be that unlike younger appropriators, Kitaj is in no sense a conceptual artist. He didn't and still doesn't care about teaching us what theoretical limits can be assigned to art. But he does care passionately about the life and health of painting, as distinct from the mere evocation of image haze; and as a draftsman, colorist and all-around creator of plastic sensation, he has no rivals in the American generation behind his. After so much photo-based figure painting in which the actual scrutiny of the living body, in all its resistant complexity, played no part at all, Kitaj's figural art posed serious questions that American artists, in particular, were unwilling to face in the '70s and '80s.
Now that the very idea of avant-gardism was fraying into exhaustion and deconstructionist footnotes, why shouldn't an artist try to be, as Kitaj put it, "an illustrator of life"? Can an art that isn't based at least in some degree on "the human clay" satisfy us for long? And what could such an art be worth without a return to formal drawing, in all its physicality and gravity?
In 1975 Kitaj began to draw from life with pastel, a medium particularly associated, for him, with Degas. The results fill one gallery of the Met's show, and they are works of distinction: a drawing like Marynka Smoking, 1980, is an homage to Degas's bathers that hits a fine balance between the energy of the black bounding line-wiry, emphatic-and the crusty soft bloom of light on the model's back and buttocks. Kitaj is a greedy, sexy draftsman, even when he is not drawing women. And his prehensile take on the world through drawing gives his fantasies and allegories a strength that no mere montage of photographic quotation could supply.