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

Ronald Brooks was born Oct. 29, 1932, in Chagrin Falls, a Cleveland suburb. He later took the surname of his stepfather, a Viennese Jewish refugee.

His mother was also Jewish, but it was not until the 1960s that his religion became increasingly central to his life. He said the change came with reading Hannah Arendt's New Yorker dispatches of the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis' foremost planners of Jewish extermination.

Mr. Kitaj's exposure to fine art began with children's classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and after finishing high school in Troy, N.Y., he studied art at the Cooper Union in New York and the Akademie der Bildenden K¿nste in Vienna. He financed his studies by working as a seaman on cargo ships and tankers.

Drafted into the Army in 1955, he was stationed in France and became an illustrator for military publications. Mostly, he drew pictures of Soviet tanks and installations.

After his service, he settled in England and used the G.I. Bill to further his art training at Oxford University, where he began to devour books on iconography. He also spent two years studying at the Royal College of Art in London and emerged as one of the promising young artists of the day.

His work was hard to categorize, although his youth often got him lumped into the pop art category. He remained defiantly eclectic and worked in several mediums, including silkscreen and fiberglass.

Starting in the mid-1970s, he began concentrating on pastels in the tradition of Degas. And even later on, his paintings because more autobiographical, with allusions to Judaism, the antiquarian book stores he frequented and other aspects of his personal life. Above all, he remained to observers an ever-evolving spirit of the art world.

He received many honors, among them election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Times of London reported that he was the first American to become a Royal Academician since John Singer Sargent at the end of the 19th century.

His first wife, Elsi Roessler, died in 1969.

Survivors include two children from his first marriage, including screenwriter Lem Dobbs; a son from his second marriage; and three grandsons.