Kitaj's List

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 6–7 Kitaj’s List R. B. KITAJ I WANT TO PLAY A GAME I have never seen played before. To make a list of the dozen or so ‘‘best’’ Jewish painters would invite much trouble, but to list my own favorites lies well within the democratic freedoms and perspectivism we usually enjoy, so that’s what I’ll try to do here because, well, the game sort of excites me, as the Jewish Question has for many years. I find it exciting to probe, and recover if I can, those rare souls who made art very unlike other art, what Harold Bloom, in his Western canon, valued above all else—strangeness. Right at the outset I will invite trouble by saying that there are no ‘‘great’’ Jewish or women painters for me, largely for the same post-Emancipation reasons, as there are Christian males of ultimate genius. Jews and women were not freed from their closed societies to be schooled as painters until the late nineteenth century , the Second Commandment against idolatry notwithstanding in the case of Jews. So, it is only with Pissarro (1830–1903) that the first really good painter of Jewish descent emerges. Cézanne called himself a pupil of Pissarro. There is, sadly, no Jewish Cézanne or Degas or Matisse or Picasso (or Giotto, or Titian, or Rembrandt, or Goya). You will just have to trust me. The Jews have produced many ‘‘great’’ modern (and ancient) figures like Marx, Freud, Einstein, Proust, Kafka, and Schönberg, but no painters of that class. It is my contention that the best Jewish painters are what are called minor masters and that they only appear in what may be called the modern period. Before Pissarro, there were the very ordinary Hellenist painters of Dura-Europas and a very few inconsiderable, pedestrian others like Mengs, Zoffany, and Oppenheim, all said to be Jews. There was Jewish artisanship in between, but not painting. I will not treat here the fascinating Jewish Question of Jewish art. Good Jewish painters have hardly ever treated the Jewish Question, because they have insisted almost exclusively upon just being good, universal painters. Here is my list of favorites. Let’s say I would like to choose a painting by each of these guys to hang on my walls: The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. KITAJ’S LIST, KITAJ 7 Camille Pissarro Marc Chagall (only his Vitebsk and early Paris pictures) Amedeo Modigliani (died very young, age 36) Chaim Soutine (the one who came closest to greatness) David Bomberg Mark Rothko (though I’m not an expert judge!) Philip Guston (for his guts) Balthus (his mother was the daughter of a Polish cantor) Lucian Freud Leon Kossoff Frank Auerbach Kitaj !!! (one of my own top dozen) Of these dozen, I favor Soutine and Balthus—both of whom lie with the cross on their graves. Balthus denied he was a Jew. The folly of my own daring and arrogant presence on the list is based on a threefold reason: (1) I believe that I can draw as well as or better than any Jew in history, my only rivals being a few of my contemporaries. (2) I seem to be the only well-known painter to put the Jewish Question at the heart of my work. The Jewish Question is, for me, what trees are for a landscape painter. It mesmerizes me. (3) I seem to be the most controversial easelpainter alive. In any case, as Gibbon noted, in old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for parents and artists who presume the immortality of their name and works. Major talent is rare, and so is agreement on which artists are major talents . Clem Greenberg, as everyone knows, would have substituted many of his own favorites for mine. But I get more pleasure from the specter of Greenberg himself than, say, ‘‘his’’ Morris Louis. Newman, Lichtenstein, and Arikha (especially his still lifes) deserve places on my list for various...