Exhibitions: Why can’t the critical fraternity make up its mind?

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. So the screenprints have been lying dormant and neglected, waiting to be rediscovered, and now it appears their time has come, with two exhibitions in London and a sale catalogue devoted to them by the enterprising Mike Goldmark, whose gallery in Rutland delivers to your door. Meanwhile in New York there’s a display of 33 of Kitaj’s 1969 ‘In Our Time’ screenprints at The Jewish Museum (until 11 August).

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The British Museum show in Room 90 incorporates part of Kitaj’s substantial and generous bequest to the museum (293 items in total, including 18 drawings), juxtaposing it with other recent acquisitions. The argument that he would be thrilled to hang among the Old Masters he admired (there are works by Gauguin and Goya, as well as Picasso, Sidney Nolan, Auerbach and Baselitz here) is somewhat compromised by hanging Kitaj’s ‘Yaller Bird’ next to a Michael Craig-Martin drawing.