KITAJ, RONALD B.

Cleveland, 1932



Pintor norteamericano. Estudia en la Cooper Union de Nueva York en 1950, tras haber sido marino mercante en América del Sur y el Caribe. Después de la II Guerra Mundial se traslada a Inglaterra donde continúa su formación en la Ruskin School of Drawing and Fines Arts de Oxford y en el Royal College of Art (1958-1961). Compañero de Hockney y Jones en el Royal College se influyeron mutuamente. Él se define como un continuador del expresionismo abstracto, aunque influye decisivamente en los artistas pop ingleses. La cultura popular no le interesa y sí la pintura de artistas como Hopper, Lucien Freud y Bacon, siendo evidente las influencias del expresionismo alemán, de Picasso y de Matisse. Sus estancias temporales en la Costa Brava española son decisivas en el arte de Eduardo Arroyo y Carlos Alcolea. Es esencialmente un artista muy intelectual cuya pintura es difícilmente descifrable por la ambigüedad y la diversidad de fuentes en las que se inspira. Sus pinturas se caracterizan por sus colores planos en tonos ácidos e intensos, con un grafismo roto y áspero.

Ronald Brooks Kitaj (October 29, 1932 - October 21, 2007[1]) was an American-born artist who spent much of his life in England.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, his Hungarian father left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born; he took his surname from his mother's second husband, Dr. Walter Kitaj. His mother and step-father were non-practising Jews.
He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter aged 17. He studied at Cooper Union in New York City and the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. After a serving in the United States Army for two years, in France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958-59) and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959-61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield.[2]
He subsequently settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the Ealing Art College, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art. He staged his first solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1963. He selected an exhibition for the Arts Council in 1976, entitled "The Human Clay".
Kitaj became a significant contributor to British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most abstraction and modernism. Allusions to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work. He also produced a number of screen-prints. His later works have been more personal.