As more time elapses since the regrettable fracas over Kitaj’s 1994 Tate exhibition and his tragic suicide in 2007, he comes more and more into his own as a great but still underrated artist. When I last wrote about him in this column, back in April, I had not yet seen the portion of his Berlin-originated retrospective which was shown at Pallant House in Chichester. Happily I managed to get there before it closed and was once again deeply impressed by the range and painterly intelligence of this extraordinary artist. Now another couple of shows pay justified tribute to his genius, this time as manifested through his printed work.
After his passionate espousal of figuration in the 1970s, Kitaj tended to disparage his earlier screenprints, even referring to them as ‘hack’ work and asking himself ‘what could I have been thinking when I cobbled such potboilers?’ The critical fraternity seems to have taken his word on this subject — odd really when you consider that what they so bitterly complained about in 1994 was being told what to think by this erudite and articulate artist.
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