Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This exhibition surveys thirty-five years’ work by an American painter who for almost the whole of this period has lived in England and who is Jewish. Though simple to state these facts of Kitaj’s origins and habitat denote a com- plex interaction of identities the dynamic of which has formed his art. Despite the length of his life in England which is his home Kitaj remains strikingly American in important ways. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to base- ball and from Hollywood to Morton Feldman his work repeatedly highlights the indigenous American culture in which he was formed and remains steeped. The bracing directness and pragmatism which he applies to any sub- ject must also be transatlantic in origin. Nevertheless Kitaj’s art has for over thirty years come to constitute one of the most distinctive bodies of work within the English scene where it has been correspondingly influential. Fur- thermore in the period’s debate about the needs of art and the possibilities it offers his opinion has been exceptional in its clarity. vividness and challenge. Either of these achievements in image and in word – would be remarkable by itself but the two together (and they cannot sensibly be separated) have had a decisive impact both on English art and on a wider culture. (MP)