R.B. Kitaj; Art Had Historical, Literary Themes

R.B. Kitaj, 74, an artist whose vivid figurative paintings used realistic shapes and images to convey historical and literary themes and who challenged the abstract art movement that dominated his era, died Oct. 21 at his home in Los Angeles.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County coroner's office said test results were needed to determine the cause of death.

Mr. Kitaj often made wild use of collage, fragmentary design and bright color, along with a thematic concern with modern Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust. His art highlighted historical and social commentary and obscure literary references. Toward the end of his career, he also addressed more personal themes, including his Judaism and the death of his second, much younger wife.

He could be confounding; art writer Ken Johnson once called Mr. Kitaj "bewilderingly complex, contradictory and disjunctive." Yet critic Robert Hughes, in an oft-quoted review from the mid-1970s, said Mr. Kitaj "draws better than almost anyone else alive."

Mr. Kitaj (pronounced kuh-TIE) was a self-taught intellectual whose literary tastes ranged broadly -- from Franz Kafka to Henry James to Ezra Pound to Walter Benjamin. His canvases often gave a nod to their work as well as to the filmmakers and other visual artists he claimed as inspirations.

Some critics found him pretentious and a name-dropper in his art. He defended himself: "Some books have pictures, and some pictures have books."

Mr. Kitaj was an American by birth but thrived for decades in England, where in 1963 he mounted his first solo show at the Marlborough New London Gallery. Along with such peers as David Hockney, a classmate at the Royal College of Art in London, he largely rejected passing fads, including pure abstraction and pop art, as too detached and devoid of passion.

Instead, Mr. Kitaj allied himself with the great artists of earlier generations -- particularly Cezanne and Picasso -- as well as such contemporaries as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Mr. Kitaj belatedly attracted wide attention in the United States, beginning with a traveling retrospective of his paintings and drawings that opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1981.

Yet he remained an elusive presence, which some writers attributed to his deeply troubled personal life. His first wife committed suicide, and his second, painter Sandra Fisher, died of a ruptured brain aneurysm in 1994.

He blamed the media for Fisher's demise, which followed the devastating attacks he received from critics during a much-promoted retrospective held at the Tate Gallery in London.

The show received accolades when it moved to New York and Los Angeles, where he eventually settled and spent his last years painting images of his second wife.