Lot 186
  • 186

R. B. Kitaj

Estimate
50,000 - 70,000 GBP
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Description

  • R. B. Kitaj
  • Dreyfus (after Méliès)
  • signed, titled and dated 1996-2000 on the overlap
  • oil on canvas
  • 91 by 91.2cm.; 35 3/4 by 35 3/4 in.

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2000

Exhibited

Madrid, Marlborough Gallery; and New York, Marlborough Gallery, R.B. Kitaj: How to reach 67 in Jewish Art:100 pictures, 2000, n.p., no. 14, illustrated in colour; and inside front cover, illustrated in colour
Monaco, Marlborough Monaco, Group Show, 2008
Berlin, Jüdisches Museum; London, The Jewish Museum; Chichester, Pallant House; and Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Obsessions : R.B. Kitaj 1932-2007, 2012-13, p. 213, illustrated in colour 

Literature

Marco Livingstone, Kitaj, 2010, p. 225, no. 752, illustrated in colour

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some faint rubbing to the left edge, towards the upper left corner and towards the lower left corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Catalogue Note

Executed between 1996 and 2000, Dreyfus (after Méliès) is paradigmatic of R.B. Kitaj’s celebrated late, tormented style. The present work takes for its subject the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that began in 1894 until its resolution in 1906, which came to divide the French public. The scandal centres on the espionage conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish and Alsatian descent, who purportedly relayed French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. Found guilty in court, Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guinea until 1899 when he returned to France to face trial once again. The case left France divided. Only in 1906, after years of lobbying, was Dreyfus acquitted and pardoned. This story of injustice, persecution and anti-Semitism resonated with Kitaj on a profoundly personal level, as he believed that these were sentiments levelled at him after his 1994 Tate Retrospective.

In 1994, a landmark retrospective of Kitaj’s work had been planned for the Tate Gallery, London. Fascinated by outsider practices such as Jewish intellectualism, and with a deep-rooted interest in the literature of Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and T.S Eliot amongst others, it was suggested that Kitaj should demonstrate some of this erudition with extended captions accompanying each work in the exhibition. What was meant to be a celebration of the artist’s lifelong achievements, however, rapidly denigrated into critical scandal and what the artist felt was a witch-hunt. Many critics were outraged by what they perceived as Kitaj’s pretences to intellectualism and queued up to destroy Kitaj’s claims in the national press, which grew in ferocity each day. Dividing opinion in much the same way the Dreyfus affair did, on the other side of this so called ‘Tate War’ were Kitaj and his fellow London painters Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Leon Kossoff who rallied in support for their fellow artist. Tragically, two weeks after the show opened Kitaj’s beloved wife and muse, Sandra Fisher, passed away – an event Kitaj wholly blamed on the shock of the utter public humiliation that the exhibition caused. The outcome of this tragedy was Kitaj’s self-inflicted exile to Los Angeles, where he cultivated his obsessive, anguished dislike for British critics.

Describing how the critical reception made him feel, Kitaj expands: “a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde, Whistler and Dreyfus were attacked and savaged by hatred for the outsider, the foreigner, the Jew. All three fought back against enemies who savaged them in unjust warfare. And they fought back against the odds, against a cowardly press and it’s dogs of war… These little wars were like antechambers to a miserable century in which far more real wars would murder many millions of outsiders, foreigners and Jews. More often than not, Jews were all three objects of hate at once, as I was in the fateful summer of 1994 when my Tate War opened to friends and enemies by the River Thames” (R. B. Kitaj quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Berlin, Jüdisches Museum (and travelling), Obsessions : R.B. Kitaj 1932-2007, 2012-13, p. 213).

Dreyfus (after Méliès) is the perfect culmination of these fears, depicting as it does the scene of Dreyfus imprisoned on Devil’s Island in George Méliès’ 1899 sequential film of the scandal. However, in Kitaj’s rendition he has cast himself as the despondent and accused Dreyfus who recieves a letter from his wife. By aligning himself with Dreyfus, Kitaj reflects just how unjustly persecuted he was made to feel at this time. In this work, as in many of his later pieces, Kitaj renders himself with a long white beard in terse, scumbled brushstrokes and with lines of sorrow and longing etched on his face. Owing to their extraordinary facture, painterly mastery and heartfelt subject-matter, these later paintings, of which Dreyfus (after Méliès) is a thrilling example, have rightly maintained Kitaj’s status as a stalwart of British art.