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Consider, for instance, his portrait of a friend, the English writer Michael Podro. Its title is The Jewish Rider. The man sits in the compartment of a railway carriage. Its upholstery, its projecting headrests and Podro's clothes are rendered in broad swipes of the brush and suggest an unease that is close to violence. The man is on the very edge of his seat, his arm cocked at a peculiar rhetorical angle, his hand on his thigh. We have seen this pose before. It is that of Rembrandt's Polish Rider: the mysterious young man setting out through the dark landscape on a bony horse. And indeed, the head of that horse materializes in the seat of the carriage. Through the train window, we see a landscape. It is not Rembrandt's dark pastoral background. It is bathed in smeary light, and its main feature is a chimney from which a plume of black smoke rises-a burned offering-toward a cross on the hill. Then one realizes that Podro, the "Jewish rider," like St. Anthony in a Bruegel, is dreaming monstrosity: riding in memory through the landscape of the Polish Holocaust.
Over the years, Kitaj's way of painting has passed from extreme and at times mannered precision (though with "rough" bits of drawing and focus) to a much looser and Expressionist manner. His most recent work is sketchier yet, and some of its tropes seem merely silly-like Western Bathers, 1993-94, a parody of Cazanne's theme but with the figures in cowboy costume around a campfire. Maybe a climactic late style lies on the other side of this interlude, maybe not. In neither case can his work be written off.
Jewishness has proved to be Kitaj's sustaining theme, the source of his most fecund anxieties as well as his episodic pretensions. And why not? Today we have a lot of trivial art about identity, but that should not blind us to the qualities of serious identity-art when it appears-as, in Kitaj, it does.