Walter Lippman, 1966, Oil on canvas, 188 X 218,
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, studied at the Cooper Union Institute in New York, joined the merchant marine and then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna in 1951. He attended the Ruskin School, Oxford in 1958-9, and then, perhaps his most formative period, studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1961.
The years of traditional art training come through in his work. He was a painter with superb drafting skills, a refined colour sensibility, a highly skilled handling of paint, pastel and charcoal. Equally, he was an intellegent picture maker with a richness of narrative possibility that could draw the viewer in for long run.
R.B Kitaj died in Los Angeles in 2007.
Marco Livingstone, Kitaj, 2nd (revised and expanded) edition, London 1992 (first published as R.B. Kitaj, Oxford 1985)
Richard Morphet (ed.), R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery 1994