Hamish Hamilton: R B Kitaj

R B Kitaj

Born in 1932 in the American state of Ohio, to a Hungarian father and Russian-Jewish mother, Ronald B. Kitaj worked as a merchant seaman for a short time before travelling to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and then at the Royal College of Art in London. He settled in England in the 1960s and taught at Ealing Art College, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. He lived more than half his life in England, establishing the School of London with other painters such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow and Michael Andrews. The extraordinary eclecticism of his art has made him one of the most distinguished artists of modern times. His work is celebrated in Kitaj, Pictures and Conversations with Julian Rios, a long conversation between Kitaj and the Spanish novelist Julian Rios which was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1994. Kitaj died in October 2007.