In his paintings, R. B. Kitaj reminds me of no one so much as Saul Bellow. In addition to grand ambition and wholehearted expressivity, which often result in a certain lack of subtlety, both men caricature isms and ideas while habitually rendering human characters as comic-strip figures. To this mélange of habits, Kitaj adds another tic, that of embodying Jewish anxiety and self-obsession to the point of unintentional parody. Of course, his two-dimensional approach to ideas inflects his attitude toward Judaism: what some critics hail as allusiveness will seem to others to be mere name-dropping. But I cannot imagine Kitaj agreeing that one will find considerably more intellectual complexity in, say, a Dutch still life than in a painting of Freud or in a work such as his The Jews Are They Human? (2000), which unimaginatively offers a framed book cover from an old anti-Semitic work of the same title—whin- ing to the converted.
Kitaj’s choices gall because he is a terrifically skilled artist. His drawings, many of which were on view in “How to Reach 67 in Jewish Art,” his recent show at Marlborough Gallery—October 31 to December 2—are among the finest and most genuinely provocative works by any living practitioner of art. In fact, such a wide gap separates Kitaj’s best drawings from his worst paintings that one is tempted to believe two different artists create them. Consider such erotic pastels as Marynka On Her Stomach (1979) and UCLA Back (After Buñuel)(1997–2000). The former