Big Biba & Ruby Keeler

 Cathy Lomax is swept up by the 1970s visions of Hollywood glamour at 'The Biba Story' and 'Do a Ruby Keeler' at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

 

Biba, the name rolls across the tongue, evoking images of sumptuous fabrics, peacock feathers and impossibly glamorous women. I feel sad that I didn’t get to visit Big Biba, a temple of style and cool situated in an art deco building that had previously been department store Derry and Toms on Kensington High Street in the 1970s. So, I was excited to see the exhibition devoted to Biba at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

Biba, a clothing brand designed by Barbara Hulanicki, may only have been extant between 1964 and 1975, but its influence and most importantly the clothes were, and continue to be evocative, familiar to a new generation from images in books about the time when London was swinging. The Biba look, as epitomised by house model Ingrid Boulting, was long thin arms, flat chest, low waist and straight hips. For Hulanicki 'Ingrid was the perfect shape. The idea was that one was trying to get that shape on to people who weren't that shape'. (It is notable that Biba clothes are very tiny, maybe post-war women who had grown up under food rationing were predominantly a different shape from our current more healthily round average shape?) Archetypal Biba clothes have regulation puffed shoulders and are made from tactile velvets and jerseys with sprinkles of sequins. Prints are also plentiful and feature stylised art deco shapes, while colours are brown and mauve and rust and plum and forest green, or what Hulanicki called, ‘Auntie colours’, after her inspirational Aunt Sophie. 

 

The exhibition opens with an enlarged image of the career woman feature in the Daily Mirror, for which Hulinicki supplied a little gingham dress (inspired by one Brigitte Bardot wore and recreated for the exhibition), which resulted in thousands of orders and initiated Hulanicki’s mail order business. This leads to a corridor of lamps – naked women holding up circular glass shades – deco is the leit motif of the Biba style (or maybe more accurately what might now be termed the less time-period restricted Hollywood Regency). 

Leopard print acrylic fun fur coat, 1973, on loan from Lilli Anderson

This opens into the darkened first room which is peopled by Biba clad mannequins wearing a myriad of outfits in the house colours. A particularly striking group features a nipped waist trouser suit and oversize coat in animal print against a large image of a glamourous 1970s Twiggy sitting all alone in the Big Biba restaurant. The caption tells us that Biba produced some of the best and least expensive fake-fur fashions for men, women and accessories to furnish the home.

And this is important because the Big Biba shop was a department store which alongside the iconic fashion, sold furnishings, wallpapers, makeup and even food – all in the distinctive Bia style. The Biba makeup line which sold the Biba look of smoky eyes, long enhanced lashes, dark lips and primary coloured nails was so popular that it outlasted the rest of the empire and was sold across the world. 

Looks available by mail order from Biba catalogue, 1968

 

The Biba style reflects the revival of 1940s fashion in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yves Saint Laurent presented a 40s-inspired collection in 1971, but it was Biba who created the best high street examples (although Biba, magpie-like, borrowed from all the decades of the first half of the 20th century). And this is important, Biba was not haute couture; it was accessible and within the price range of young women who were exercising their liberation from the corseted constraints of 1950s fashion. This means that although the clothes were way beyond the fast throw-away fashion seen today they were not necessarily built to last. This is apparent in the clothes on display which do not hang from the dress forms like cossetted high fashion – these clothes have been worn, loved and re-worn. This is apparent in the list of names that the items on display have been borrowed from which rather than big institutions and collections are dominated by individual women, who I like to think, have loved and cherished their favourite items of Biba. Despite this everywoman quality Biba and Hulanicki did not shirk on design, and this is reflected in the stylish catalogues produced from 1968-69 which were photographed by names such as Helmet Newton.

Black waistcoat suit unlined, in heavy linen texture rayon cream linen collar and cuffs. Cream buttons; flared skirt, April 1968, on loan from Annie Hawker

 

Alongside the Biba show don’t miss the gloriously titled Do a Ruby Keeler, a small exhibit devoted to Shirley Russell’s designs for the 1971 Ken Russell film The Boyfriend. Packed with archival items it reinforces the link between the early 1970s and the high style of classical Hollywood. Russell was especially influenced by the the films of Busby Berkley and was a pioneer in her use of vintage clothing, which she also sold through her shop The Last Picture Frock in Notting Hill.

 

This exciting period in British fashion could be seen as being compromised by its overwhelming nostalgia for a past glamorous period. Nostalgia is an interesting term which is currently attached to a denial of contemporary mores, often in a reactionary way. But Biba’s nostalgia was a way of denying the consumerist and conservative 1950s by looking back to the fantasy emanated by a disappeared Hollywood glamour. It is fascinating that it is now Biba that inspires a nostalgia for its own particular egalitarian glamour as well as, I would suggest, a less commercially cynical period of young fashion.

 

The Biba Story, 1964-1975 and Do a Ruby Keeler

Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1

Until 8 September 2024

Amanda Ziemele, the Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale

Embracing the performative possibilities of oil and canvas, Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale provides Toby Üpson with a romantic escape from all that is overwrought and excessive. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

The early mornings in Venice are bright. Lullabies of white noise. From April 17 to 19 — the preview days of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia , titled Foreigners Everywhere — the sun rose between 06:21 and 06:25. At 06:30, or thereabouts, I sat, perched on the balcony of my rented room, eating muesli from a chipped bowl, watching the sun’s rays calmly tip-tap over the copper clad roof of Campanile di San Marco. A dreamy experience, a sense of which I would like to recall with you now: 

Imagine, we are meandering through Venice’s narrow streets. It is bright and white and there is not another soul about — an anomaly for this busy city. We shimmy down a walkway-come-catacomb emerging into a sun filled square. It's a magnificent reprieve, like the taste of fresh air. With nobody about, here a sense of liveliness is provided by loose sheets of cotton delicately hung from homely windows, by loose leaves and/or petals drifting from a sole magnolia tree, by loose fly-posters, worn and weathered and weary from life, juddering off the available walls. There is a bench at the centre of this scene. Held by the mystique of this quiet place we waltz towards this. Reclining, we glance left, we glance right, up and down spotting a battered hardback lying on the ground, its title indiscernible. Thumbing spine, cover and back we open the book at random. No narrative arrives, its old pages just rivulets of smoke grey. Following the flow of these never-lines, we get lost in hospitable thinking, in the transcendence found in pure form. That is, here, basking in the spring’s morning sun, we dream with and through the abstract and anomalous, with and through the beauty which composes this encounter. It is all Romantic sublime, like a literary text, a moment that leads us beyond turgid social life. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome’, lines of Shakespearean dialogue, reshaped by Edwin A Abbott in his 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, set the tone and title for Amanda Ziemele’s Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Representing Latvia, her large, three-dimensional paintings subtly sit about the Pavilion — much like those loose sheets, loose leaves and loose fly-posters enlivening my dreamt-up square above — creating a welcoming zone within the bluster of the Biennale and its opening week. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Ziemele’s paintings are fun, fleshy gestures floating in space. With their skeletal stretchers exposed for all to see, they not only defy any known geometry, be this spatial or shapely, but wave a disregarding hand towards notions that treat painting as a flat pictorial means. Here paintings twist and contort, they wink, blink, rise and fall or simply dance about the Pavilion. Honest and overtly self-conscious, the abstract simplicity of these forms reminds me of the blockade lines and loops which constitute the text-based work of Lawrence Weiner. That is, much like his unashamed text on walls Ziemele’s artworks are what they are: sculptural paintings, suggestive and protean. Indeed, as Ziemele’s folds of formless colour — cheeky blue, bright orange, green, terracotta, pearl, and Ikea teal — dot the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the Pavilion, gleaming in the Venetian light, they speak softly through the impasto of their brushstroke veins, lulling us to pause, to think and explore all the possible reaches found through their multi-dimensionality. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

This oil and canvas allusiveness is poetic. With each painting working out from itself, they do not dictate a thought, rather each invites us to take flight from the noise of our imminent context — for me, the Biennale and its overly mediated foregrounding of ‘hot’ politics. To make another comparison, as I look upon the wall-mounted painting Double Crisp (2024), two Pringles-like petal curves of taupe pearl positioned aside one of the Pavilion’s gridded windows, I am reminded of the ineffable magic found in Emily Dickinson’s transcendentalist poem Two Butterflies went out at Noon — an ambiguous 12 lines, formally self-conscious, dashed through with disinterested joy — a dreamy construction, one critical of a social climate yet with a waltzing lightness that creates an affinity across readers. This is a tone I appreciate. It is one that avoids the political pageantry that undermines much of what I encountered at the Biennale, and here, as the Pavilion’s title suggests, it is a tone which welcomes the wondrous stranger, providing a generous space to rest and think and meet and shelter together. To riff, there are foreigners everywhere and Ziemele’s Pavilion is a place to host us all, no aestheticized labels attached.

 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Not knowing about Ziemele’s practice before being welcomed into the Pavilion, I did some Googling. Most of Ziemele’s works emerge from a place of site-specificity, or in dialogue with specific situations. In previous projects, such as Sun Has Teeth — an exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, 2023 — her large canvas blobs drifted amongst the whitewashed woodwork of the museum’s attic exhibition space. Like mesmerising butterflies or clouds of pastel colour, the works in that exhibition rested weightlessly in the air of the museum, not only inviting viewers to look differently about the place but reanimating the quotidian structure of the museum’s ceiling. 

 

Departing from the flat forms seen in her previous exhibitions, Ziemele’s Pavilion feels artistically ambitious. Collaborating with the architect Niklāvs Paegle to establish a spatial choreography that echos the physicality of the Pavilion, most notably seen in the visual relationship between the Pavillion’s large gable window and the supports for each canvas, here Ziemele uses both oil and canvas gesturally to create an animate zone, or a ‘living organism’ to quote the press release. This exhibitionary choreography does not feel like a meek transformative imposition. Rather each of Ziemele’s loose forms accentuates the agency already structurally woven into the architecture of the Pavilion allowing the very frames of this otherwise bare cube to resound, becoming an active part of the exhibition’s being. To get all meta for a moment, by working with and from the formal space of the Pavilion, the totality of Ziemele’s presentation can be seen as a fractal projection her individual paintings; with its structural body newly animated, the space twists and contorts, tip-tapping with colour, dancing differently under the Venetian sun. 

Detail view: Amanda Ziemele, Morning Sunshine (Pottering Along), 2024, oil on canvas. Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Situated at the heart of the Arsenale’s long march of National Pavilions, Ziemele’s brushstroke architectures offer us a reprieve from the excessive curation and gluttony of the busy Biennale. Like an anthology of poems, read on a bright spring morning, complete in itself or imparting pleasure through its parts, the Pavilion does not demand overwrought readings, it welcomes momentary sojourns, be these contextually critical or just affinitive, in the most hospitable manner.

 

The Venice Biennale is open until Sunday 24 November 2024

 

Westminster Coastal

Jennifer Caroline Campbell talks to Luke Burton about his 'seriously playful' show Westminster Coastal at Bosse & Baum Gallery in Peckham, London.

 

Jennifer Caroline Campbell: Exploring your installation has a slight feeling of trespassing. It makes me think of some kind of normcore / gammon version of Kafka, and maybe Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Like opening a door in a corridor, that you aren’t really allowed to open, on the way the toilet perhaps, unexpectedly finding it unlocked, and daring yourself to have a nosey. Did you feel like a trespasser (/sneak/imposter) when you were living in Westminster? Did you feel inside of, or outside of, the political machine?

 

Luke Burton: I have lived in the borough of Westminster for three years, just a stone's throw away from the Home Office building on Marsham St depicted in one of my large paintings, in an Edwin Lutyens estate owned by the council, though many if not the majority of the flats in the estate are privately owned now. So the 'political machine' - the historical conditions for my housing, the current architecture of the Civil Service and Whitehall, along with their workers, are all very much in my everyday experience of living there. That said, I very much feel like an observer rather than an actor in this context, apart from when I am part of a protest or rally perhaps. I think your question about trespassing is interesting because it speaks to the feeling that so many people in London have of not feeling as though they have the means, and therefore the right, to live in the city. There are myriad political and economic reasons for this of course but this idea that you can be a trespasser in your own home, that you can have both the feeling of intimacy and comfort while at the same time an overriding knowledge of your own contingency and precarity is very real. 

            And going back to the exhibition and installation, I wanted to suggest a space that felt both theatrical and hyper-formalised – decorative even – but also on first pass, a space that could have the whiff of authenticity. So, people might take a minute to figure out the dynamics of the space, somewhere between a crime scene, a civic office, an archaeological dig, and a gallery space. I wasn't that interested in sustaining any one of these illusions but rather having an awkward synthesis of these different kinds of spaces, with them becoming dialled up or down as you processed the various elements of the exhibition. 

 

JCC: That's such a great point about the trespasser-feeling connecting to the normalised precarious modes of living in this city. It makes me think about a book that I just read called Replace Me by Amber Husain. I'm now thinking about the disposable mass-produced elements in the show, especially the junk food packets and the way you have adorned them, or perhaps crystallised them, with your vitreous enamels. The whole installation, but perhaps particularly this choice, to add precious surfaces onto cheap discarded packaging, is seriously playful. As in, it feels like you are inviting us into your pretend-game, and this pretend-game is full of winks and a kind of childish mischief, yet at the same time it is deadly serious. 

            I think many artists now are struggling to find ways that their practice can respond to the weight of global, political, and ethical concerns. It is a fine line to walk, and easy to get wrong, yet it feels urgent to connect with these contexts though the language of our practices. I am inspired by the way you have managed this in Westminster Coastal. The work is an engaging and a rich development of your ongoing practice, and it is quite blunt in some ways, yet it avoids the pitfalls of becoming too didactic or illustrative. How did 'process-led' and 'idea-led' approaches play out for you in the run-up to this exhibition?

LB: That is a very generous analysis of the work. I'm glad you used the term 'seriously playful' which conjures up an ongoing attitude I take with work (as so many artists do I would contest).  In my mind it is also associated with the German Romantic Schiller's idea of 'Spiel' – a very serious kind of play which describes the complex conditions of making art. And you only have to look at very young children's faces to see that play is an incredibly serious activity! Something about delight and total, sincere immersion in an activity. 

            I often see the vitreous enamels like counters in a game, the rules of which I paradoxically invent but somehow don't know. They present so many 'problems' of presentation too because their scale elicits so many possibilities. I have used them in boxes, on shelves, on the wall, within architectural niches and in clusters or singularly. I'm either resigned to their modularity and variability being a condition of showing them or resigned to my own indecisiveness! I was just having a conversation today with the critic Sacha Craddock where we both felt the way they sit within the scenography of the installation allows them to exist without too much discomfort alongside the paintings. In recent exhibitions I have been amused by the awkwardness of these two media being shown together. It's hard to describe but they often feel like odd bedfellows...the enamels being related to miniature paintings or jewels and therefore somehow too close and not contrasting enough. But by having the enamels on a horizontal plane and embedding them within the 'architecture' of the Twiglet plinths or office furniture or indeed encrusted on to three-dimensional objects, their inherently sculptural qualities are privileged, and they suddenly sit in contradistinction with the paintings in a productive way. I mean, they are still quite bonkers, but something feels resolved in their display which allows you to rest with the different elements of the exhibition. 

            I really relate to the struggle of responding (or not) with so many incredibly complex global, ethical and political concerns. I think this show is as much a response to particular questions around these issues such as state violence both home and abroad as it is to the wider (im)possibility of responding at all. I have thought a lot about a spectrum of directness and indirectness that the work plays with in relation to the complex political landscape. Civil servants were a kind of sweet spot of both being fundamental to the machine of government whilst simultaneously being anonymised and culturally opaque - a kind of faceless bureaucracy. This contradiction really interested me and so they became a kind of keystone in terms of this tightrope of directness without wishing to be didactic. A lot of the other material and conceptual choices followed on once I had found the civil servants. 

            In terms of process-led or ideas-led dynamic of the practice. I find it impossible to distinguish between the two. Sometimes ideas seem to crystallize out of 'nowhere' but they always feel like they are a solution to a problem I never knew I had. There is often a psychoanalytic dimension to these moments on reflection. And sometimes material contingencies in the studio show me the way with a kind of clarity that borders on contempt! But most of the time it really feels utterly synthesised and just a kind of ugly-beautiful cat-and-mouse game. 

 

JCC: The toughness and weight of the enamels seem more present in this installation than in previous incarnations that I have seen. I can imagine them clinking down onto the glass, pressing down on the flimsy food wrappers and ripping them, cracking the twiglets. You have really activated their materiality. But equally, they are also still handmade pictures. 

            I read some of the enamels as shards of picture, as if they grew like crystals from within the painting’s depicted space and ended up being shed into our ‘real’ space. Perhaps they were generated within the oversized chandelier droplets that feature in some of the paintings. These multifaceted droplets feel like monstrous opulent glitches that have grown out of a slow-motion absurd snowball effect, perhaps originating in a slight misalignment in the mechanism of Westminster. Maybe they embody the interpersonal violence of the day to day of politics somehow? Could you tell me how you found this particular motif? 

 

LB: I agree the enamels have much more weight to them than previously. This is partly a technical thing of having layers of added copper cut-out sections on top of the first layer of enamel, which are then enamelled themselves. There are also a lot of embedded copper wires which is my crude version of cloisonné, an ancient technique of separating space for different sections through cellular structures using wire. So there's a bit more going on with the surface of these works than before. And then there is the material thinness of the crisp and chocolate wrapper foil which produces this contrast. 

            You are right there are echoes of the enamels in the large chandelier droplets. Their lozenge forms for one thing. Also, their material, both being made from glass. But they are also oddly contrasting as one is an imperfect representation of a perfect symmetrical crystal and the enamels are extremely asymmetrical, wonky but hopefully formally just-so. I have always wanted to have this interplay between the enamels in the paintings but have struggled to figure out how much to dial up their reflections...I like that you see the chandelier droplets as monstrous because I have been thinking a lot about Mannerist and Baroque art and the many examples of heavily distorted and amplified forms. The monstrous and the decorative being entwined with the idea of the 'misshapen pearl' of the Baroque - this twinning of violence and decoration being a red thread through the show. The droplets, in the process of painting, also turned into grenades or dropping bombs but that was so horrendously on the nose it had to happen in the unconscious rather than by design. It's too blunt for me though I didn't change it once I saw it. 

            I came to these forms partly because I have always wanted to paint chandeliers and chandelier droplets because of the repeated lozenge forms. And paint them lovingly and loosely. I have a great painter friend Allan Rand who once said the pleasure of painting a grid loosely was enough of an excuse for a painting. I think all artists have these fairly simple drives based on something physical, like a hunch that there will be enjoyment in the process and that's enough. But I had the idea way back in 2016 on a residency in Baku, Azerbaijan, where there were loads of chandelier shops to provide interior decorations for all the newly built mansions popping up. Neo-classicism was as much the rage as hyper-capitalist glass towers, but I made a series of failed attempts at the time and abandoned the idea until now. I was thinking a lot about the very august spaces of Whitehall and how in reality much of government space is modern, very corporate and functional. So this contrast of opulent classicism and aesthetic conservatism running next to the expediency and pragmatism of the office interested me. 

 

JC: Final question: what is your relationship to monster munch?

 

LB: Haha, best question ever. I love Pickled Onion. And Beef flavour. But also they are wild little things. Monster hands and feet. The monster with its mouth open wide on the front of the packet depicts a kind of species-on-species cannibalism. Or are the snacks supposed to be human hands? I think I was quite restrained with my use of them in the show as they could derail things by virtue of being too silly. But I kept them in because I liked their connection to our previous themes of the monstrous - aesthetic histories and political figures and the monsters we all make of others for political convenience. But also, they are stupid damn things - comic and visual shorthand. Another kind of visual style to play with. 

Luke Burton, Westminster Coastal

8 February – 2 March 2024

Bosse & Baum, London

Listen to Luke Burton in conversation with Jennifer Caroline Campbell and Cathy Lomax in Episode 5 of the Garageland Salon podcast

Synchromy with R.B.Kitaj

Kitaj’s paintings and drawings may be strange and provocative, but they are always engaged, as Michael Ajerman finds at a new show in London. 

After almost a decade a new R.B. Kitaj exhibition rises to the surface in London. Covering over 50 years of art-making, this show at Piano Nobile is split over the gallery’s two individual large-scale spaces, divided by a brisk walk across the street. This helps organise things tremendously well. Here we have Kitaj before 1980, and after.

 

The show begins with Kitaj’s diptych of Francis Bacon peering at you through the diamond shaped glazing of the gallery’s door. Synchromy with F.B.- General of Hot Desire is Kitaj’s homage to his hero of bodily depictions and British (Irish) painting. Many of Kitaj’s Royal College classmates, and countless others for decades, would be inspired by Bacon. It is a painting that celebrates all of the many strengths of Kitaj’s 1960s pictures. The strange gallivanting modernist architecture used in these paintings enables him to bring a monumental feeling of space and possibility. A playset, and arena, he fills with his people, places, and ideas, realised with flat stumbled brushwork and saturated colour.

R.B. Kitaj, Synchromy with F.B. - General of hot desire 

On the left we are given Bacon looking more like WC Fields in an odd outfit that screams new money and the bad fashion choices that come with it. To the side we are given a female nude fractured into pieces, possibly Henrietta Moraes, Bacon’s friend and muse who inspired his body paintings of the time. She seems like a sphinx with a stiff rendered face, adorned with a single Michelangelo-esque female breast dipped in florescent colour, while her inner thighs and genitalia, with pubic hair, seems to reference both Courbet’s best and photographic erotica. The figures have been transplanted into an Orient Express train carriage as a bright European countryside flies by. All the while white hands, that strangely seem anything but threatening, grab for her throat.

 

The right-hand panel feels more like the real Bacon, a bit more intense in profile, his hidden muscular strength suggested by plump forearms exposed by a rolled-up shirt sleeve. Kitaj gives him green and yellow, comic book, x-ray vision, his superpower allows him to look through men, women, animals, and hubris. It is a solid vision of an artist who is busy seeing, thinking and dissecting everything, all at once.

 

Downstairs explores the many approaches to drawing that became Kitaj’s passion in the 1970s. He was no longer painstakingly making charcoal drawings onto canvas that would later be obliterated in colour for completed paintings. Drawing was now to stand on its own, working with a combination of charcoal and pastel on his porridge paper. Think of a rough yellow watercolour paper and imagine it crossed with elephant hide.

R. B. Kitaj, Marynka on Her Stomach

Comparing the Fauve nude in Synchromy to Marynka on Her Stomach is an important matter.  The diptych nude seems derived from photography creating a chilled separation. In contrast there is a quietness and a deep responsibility felt when looking at Marynka posing on a day bed. She appears confident to show her body, in full, from behind, nothing is made up here. Everything from the cushion embroidery up the inner thighs is rendered slowly. However, from the waist up the figure seems less defined, possibly to give the sensation of the figure moving through space on an awkward diagonal. There is nothing of art school life-rooms here, instead it is more about the working and trust of artist and model – decisions made between them in private.

 

Dominie (Dartmouth), seen in the flesh after so many years only in reproduction, does not disappoint. Kitaj’s three quarters profile of his daughter in her teen years captures an essence of her – his determination to catch the emotions and energies in her head is palpable. The upturned arm holds echoes of the mechanics of Balthus’ tonal Italian figure drawings, while the level of focus on the head and hair is touching, skilful, and the artist’s own.  

R. B. Kitaj, Dominie (Dartmouth)

In the second space coming in at around seven feet by twelve inches is the painting, The Gentile Conductor.This is the sister piece to the absent The Jewish Rider, a large painting starring writer Michael Padro as a worn passenger traveling through a beautiful countryside to visit the Death Camps after the war. With The Gentile Conductor we are given the spin off series. This painting, tall as a professional basketball player, looks sinister, yet because of its extreme slenderness, goofy. The conductor’s hat is too small for his head and fits clumsily, while his arms gesture to the side, giving the impression of being preoccupied in another train carriage. In the movie in one’s mind, the painting’s dual points of view allow us to imagine the scar faced creep in the distance, while the red velvet carriage walkway leads directly to our own feet. Kitaj puts us there, making us wonder if we have our ticket and documents deep in our pockets for inspection, or if we need to hide in the toilets to avoid the conductor for a stop or two.

R.B. Kitaj, The Gentile Conductor, 1984-85

From the 1970s on one of Kitaj’s many obsessions was ‘his Jews’. In the following decade he declared in writing that his individual Jewish diaspora art was not a movement, but rather his own club, with a membership of one. If that Groucho Marx joke is now ringing in your head, you get a gold ribbon. Furthermore, he was adamant in wanting to see a Palestinian diaspora art flourish, just as he supported the blossoming of Black American and queer art.

 

History has once again returned to the deep and tangled question of the Middle East with the events that have come to a head this October in Israel and Palestine. The impossible-not-to-watch television tirelessly presents interviewees avoiding questions in order to promote their own agenda. It is endless, and I along with many others, fear what is to come. Kitaj’s late painting, Arabs and Jews (After Ensor) (not in the show), has been on the back of my eyelids, I wish it would leave and it won’t. Of this painting Kitaj wrote: ‘This is my third painting called Arabs and Jews, a fight I expect will never end. This picture is based on Ensor’s painting The Fight. You may choose which is Arab and which is Jew.’ 

R. B. Kitaj, Arabs and Jews (After Ensor) [not in show]

 

We bring ourselves, our history, our light and dark, to life and to viewing art. We decide who is who in this painting. Are both figures on the brink of blind rage?  Who is the culprit, who is being attacked, who is in self-defence? This is a painting that is needed now more than ever – not for our own propaganda but for us to contemplate why we think the way we do. Kitaj had an unwavering belief in the two-state solution in the Middle East, something to be achieved by talking on both sides, with debate, understanding, and some well needed humour as a cushion. Let’s hope he was dead wrong about it being a fight that will never end.

 

Was Kitaj the most controversial easel painter? I don’t know and personally, I don’t care. We need his artwork more than ever – the hits and the misses. This exhibition holds true gems deep from the ocean. The show is on until early next year. The Central Line is the quickest way. 

Michael Ajerman

October 2023

R.B Kitaj: London to Los Angeles 

25 October 2023 – 26 January 2024 

Piano Nobile Gallery, London