Art: The Last History Painter

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Expatriate R.B. Kitaj brings home the Bacon

One of the master images of 20th century art and literature was the City: the ville tentaculaire, condenser of populations and their unease, republic of anxiety, seedbed of desire. From Edvard Munch's top-hatted masks parading the streets of Oslo to Francis Bacon's pinstriped executives howling like caged baboons, the City secreted images of alienation. To the eye of modernist poetry it got more spectral as one came closer to it, as the capitals of Christendom did for T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, almost 60 years ago:

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

In painting today, the chief image maker of the City, apart from Bacon himself, is a 47-year-old American from Cleveland, Ohio, named R.B. Kitaj (pronounced Kit-eye). Kitaj has been living in London for more than 20 years, and has not shown regularly in the U.S. Consequently, he seems more of a name than a presence in American art. In England, his reputation is, if anything, exaggerated in the other direction. He is widely regarded as a reincarnation of America's cultural expatriates of the 1920s. When the catalogue essay for his present show of 50 drawings and a few paintings at New York City's Marlborough Gallery compares him with Idaho-born Ezra Pound in London-"the Yankee outsider who has the energy to float a circus, and the courage to initiate its polemics"-it reflects this startling English view.

Kitaj is not Pound. But he is one of the most inventive figurative artists at work today, and his ambition-to make the whole of modernist culture, literary, political and visual, available to painting as a subject-is a large brave one. "If some of us wish to practice art for art's sake alone, so be it," he wrote in 1976. "But good pictures, great pictures, will be made to which many modest lives can respond. When I'm told that good art has never been like that, I doubt it, and in any case it seems to me at least as advanced or radical to attempt a more social art as not to."