R.B. Kitaj, R.A. (1932-2007)

Kitaj: In the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters opened at the National Gallery, London, in November 2001. The exhibition included a series of new paintings with the title Los Angeles followed by a respective number, which were inspired by Cézanne’s last three major Bather paintings. All the works in the series depict Kitaj and his beloved wife and muse Sandra Fisher, who had tragically died of an aneurism in 1994. Kitaj blamed Sandra’s sudden death on the devastating critical response to his Tate retrospective of the same year, saying ‘they aimed at me, but they got Sandra instead’. Soon after Sandra’s death, Kitaj moved to Los Angeles, where they had first met.

All the paintings in the series, of which Los Angeles No. 1 is the first, depict Kitaj reuniting with Sandra in the afterlife in a variety of erotic embraces; portrayed as angels not only to represent their reunion but also as a pun on the translation of 'Los Angeles' to 'The Angels'. These immensely personal paintings also mark an important stylistic departure for Kitaj. Compositionally, the series is much looser and more spontaneous than his earlier work, with large expanses of primed canvas left white. Andrew Lambirth notes that ‘Of the Los Angeles paintings Kitaj says, ‘I’ve never left so much white’, and then quotes Emily Dickinson’s phrase for death – ‘the white exploit’. But there is no sense that these pictures are concerned exclusively or even primarily with death. Doomy they are not. They are self-evidently a celebration – of sexual tension, longing, fulfilment, love, even loss. There is something redemptive here, a strange new calmness and optimism’ (see A. Lambirth, Kitaj, London, 2004, p. 71).