$5,715
Estimate: $2,500 - $4,000
What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part II
Auction: February 28, 2024 at 12 PM ET
Oil on canvas
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)
Executed in 1964.
Marlborough Galleries, New York, New York.
Marlborough Galleries, London, United Kingdom.
Christie’s, New York, sale of February 16, 1984, lot 221.
Acquired directly from the above sale.
The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Kestner-Gessellschaft, Hannover, January 23- February 22, 1970.
Marlborough Fine Art, London, April-May 1970.
Wieland Schmied, R.B. Kitaj Katalog, an exhibition catalogue, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, 1970, no. 143-146.
The following five lots are early portraits by the Cleveland-born artist Robert Brooks Kitaj, who spent much of his life in Britain, where he coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe a group of London-based artists he brought together in the pursuit of figurative painting. The group included Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff, and David Hockney, with whom the artist was particularly close. Kitaj’s work defies easy categorization, and he became a somewhat polarizing figure in the art world – both revered, as well as strongly criticized as a pseudo-intellectual and egoist. Indeed, Kitaj always maintained a somewhat outsider status whose challenging works pay homage to literary references and allusions, cultural and historic events, and sometimes include explanatory texts.
To wit, the subject of lot 196 is the famous 1st-3rd century alchemist, while lot 199 is a nod to Marxist theory. As art historian and author Marco Livingstone has noted: “Contemptuous of the dumbing down of culture, Kitaj presupposed the existence of an intelligent and intellectually curious audience willing to meet him halfway in his divagations through painting into areas of human experience habitually assumed to be outside the realm of painting. Fragmentation was dear to Kitaj’s heart: indeed the title of a small painting of 1964 (…) His Cult of the Fragment, (lot 197) could serve as an epitaph for his lifelong quest for understanding through accumulations of motifs, references and stylistic quotations.”
The Kitaj lots on offer here were each exhibited at Marlborough Galleries. In 1963, just one year prior to their execution, Kitaj held his inaugural solo exhibition there, which he entitled ‘Pictures with commentary. Pictures without commentary.’ The unadorned, straightforward portraits presented here, devoid of color and modest in scale, reveal Kitaj’s skill as a draughtsman in oil paint, of which the famed art critic Robert Hughes once said “Kitaj can draw better than any man alive.”