Never short of an answer

People, that’s to say some critics, just don’t get it about R. B. Kitaj. They dislike the way he paints, running things past us in dead heats, so to speak, drawing things together with a Huck Finn-like disregard for propriety. He’s bookish, it seems, and full of himself, which annoys them, and he can be bitterly cantakerous. They particularly hate the way he answers back.

These days Kitaj lives in Los Angeles, where the critical climate is comparatively mellow. There he has family and seclusion and room in which to revisit his themes, the most urgent of which is a coming to terms in pictures with the death of Sandra Fisher, his second wife, who died immediately after his 1994 Tate retrospective, a show cavalierly received by several critics, two or three of whom ticked him off for being so presumptuous as to provide commentaries on his own work.