Literary Collage

"For me, books are what trees are for the landscape painter," says Ronald B. Kitaj, 32, an American expatriate who nearly rules Britannia's new wave of painters. His studio is a library in London, where he keeps pamphlets and books open for perusal while he paints. He appends long bibliographies to his show catalogues, and has even convinced British revenue agents that his book purchases are tax-deductible business expenses.

Erasmus' Doodles. All of this makes Kitaj (pronounced Ki-teye) pop's most literary painter. After soup cans and Cinemascopic cartoons, critics found his collages of madcap memorabilia, portraiture and complex puns refreshing. In 1963, London's Times even went so far as to declare that his first one-man show had put "the whole new wave of figurative painting in this country in perspective." This left up in the air the question of how much of Kitaj's charm lies in his witty verbal byplay, how much in his agile draftsmanship and startling colorism. Last week Kitaj was back in the U.S. for the first time in nine years, presiding over his first New York show, 72 works covering eight years, at Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. If buyers did not understand all his allusions, they certainly liked his work. By the end of the week, private collectors and museums had bought or put reserves on most everything.

More than most pop, Kitaj throws the book at the viewer. He believes Francis Bacon the greatest British painter since Gainsborough, and endorses his statement that "Art is a game by which man distracts himself." And Kitaj provides enough puns and anagrams for a month of Sundays. His paintings are a kind of litterbug's playground, scattered with the paperwork of mass communications. There are doodles drawn from Erasmus' notebooks, titles that refer to obscure Marxist-Leninist deviationists. In one corner of his An Early Europe is pasted the source photograph of neoclassical nudes that inspired the painting's composition. He will borrow an economist's catch phrase, The Production of Waste, to title a 1963 oil showing a trio of allegorical figures chopped up like news photos of poverty, stupidity and avarice. "My pictures are a compendium of disparate imagery," he says, "mixing sweet subjects with sour ones."

Cleveland-born Kitaj is largely self-taught. He began shipping out on cargo vessels at age 17, read voraciously during long voyages, and his art reflects his random, eclectic learning. As consummate technique, Kitaj's paintings bear the skill of a man who stayed ashore long enough to spend five years variously at Manhattan's Cooper Union, Vienna's Academy of Fine Art, Oxford University's Ruskin School of Drawing and London's Royal College of Art. He can coalesce flat forms with rounded ones, switch from silhouette to transparency with deft sleights of brush.

Curious Syndrome. Kitaj's visual skill spares him from making just word games. He is coming to realize that source dropping can become as precious--and boring--as name dropping. As he could learn from another expatriate, the late T. S. Eliot, it is the poetry, not the footnotes, that made The Wasteland great. Kitaj himself admits that most of his catalogue explications are, he cheerfully confesses, "Red herrings." Though he greatly admires the work of DeKooning, Kline and Pollock, he objects to total abstraction. "I'm likely to be moved by what is peripheral to the picture itself," says Kitaj. "You can't make a mark on a canvas that's not redolent of something you know outside the painting."

In The Ohio Gang, he shows how well he can perform without the aid of verbal asides. There his figures act out a silent drama: a two-faced lowlife extends his hands to a sensuous nude as if she were a manicurist, while a wet nurse in open brassiere wraps a ribbon through the girl's hair. Harsh, disjointed architecture unsettles the scene. It is no longer important that Kitaj has combined figures from German and French anatomical discourses with an English pram. For him, this painting conjures up his native state and the curious syndrome in American literature--you can't go home again. His real subjects are violence, alienation, social misery and loneliness.

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