Jewish Art With (Francis) Bacon Drippings

R. B Kitaj’s “Eclipse of God.” Both Bacon and Kitaj after him saw themselves as social outcasts.

R. B Kitaj’s “Eclipse of God.” Both Bacon and Kitaj after him saw themselves as social outcasts.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

When the influence of Francis Bacon is talked about today, it’s usually in relation to the generation of painters immediately following his, the so-called Young British Artists who are now middle-aged: Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Cecily Brown. But what seems to be overlooked, particularly in the blockbuster Bacon centenary retrospective that just opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is his influence on his peers. It’s not the better-known ones, like Lucien Freud and David Hockney, who go without mention, but the specifically Jewish British artists whose art owes a huge debt to him.
Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and, most importantly, the deeply committed Jew R.B. Kitaj: all of these made up the School of London artists that dominated British art from the 1950s on.

All of them count Bacon as their patron saint. At a time when abstraction reigned supreme, they fought for the centrality of the human figure. They merged painterly techniques favored by the Abstract Expressionists — the horizontal color panes of Rothko, the scraped impasto of de Kooning — with a return to art’s traditional focus on telling human stories.

Bacon was, as he told his biographer David Sylvester, walking “a tightrope between what is called figurative painting and abstraction ... an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.” It must have worked. In the past 20 years each of the aforementioned School of London artists have received canonical treatment with solo shows at The Met, MoMA, The Tate in London and prominent museums elsewhere.

In fact, it was R.B. Kitaj who gave the school its name. In 1976, Kitaj wrote the introductory essay for the catalogue of a group exhibition he organized called “The Human Clay,” where he dubbed the group “the School of London.” He cited Bacon, Hockney, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff and himself as its chief practitioners. While Bacon and Freud were already well established, the show and Kitaj’s shrewd marketing of it helped secure the reputations of the others. Perhaps more importantly, it put an army of artists behind the lone figurative giant — Bacon — at a time when his grotesque, garish images of screaming popes and rabid dogs stood out as much for their visceral power as for their sheer uniqueness.

Of course, it was more than painting human figures alone that bound Bacon, who died in 1992, to Kitaj. Both artists saw themselves as social outcasts — Bacon as an openly gay man when homosexuality was a crime in England, and Kitaj as an American-born Jew living in London. Bacon was one of the first artists to publicly display homoerotic images in England, as he did with the muscular entangled forms that make up “Untitled (Two Figures in the Grass)” (1952), also on view at the new exhibit.

For his part, Kitaj used his Jewishness as a symbol for the quintessential role of the artist in society — a perpetual pariah. In the “First Diasporist Manifesto” (1989), a book he published with illustrations, he stated this parallel explicitly: “[M]y Diasporist painting ... owes its greatest debt to the terms and passions of my own life and growing sense of myself as a Diasporist Jew,” he wrote. David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA who advised Kitaj on his “Second Diasporist Manifesto” (2007) and recently organized an exhibition on Kitaj in Los Angeles, added that Kitaj saw his “Jewishness as a license for iconoclastic innovation.”

Though Bacon, born in 1909, was 13 years older than Kitaj and was closer both in time and space to the Second World War, both artists were urgently concerned with the fate of man in the postwar era. At the Met, there is hardly an image of Bacon’s that is not dripping in dark, if not black, hues. With his focus on teeth, skulls, bloodied carcasses and distorted or erased human faces, it is almost impossible to walk away not feeling a sense of dread.

One of Bacon’s prominent early works, “Painting” (1946), is modeled on the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, whose half sawed-off head speaks from a podium that is flanked by fleshy red rib cages. His words betray the slaughterhouse to come, Bacon seems to say. A common motif in Bacon’s work, the space-frame — a rectangular box that encases figures like the haunting “Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1953) — was also derived from the Nazi era. They were meant to mimic the bulletproof boxes used for war criminals at the Nuremburg trials.

The Holocaust had a heavy claim on Kitaj’s work too, though it did not appear until at least 20 years after Bacon’s. Kitaj moved to England in the late 1950s to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, on a G.I. Bill scholarship. At the time, he was married to a non-Jewish artist named Elsi Roessler, who committed suicide in 1963 (the same fate that met Bacon’s lover George Dyer). But soon after Roessler’s death, Kitaj met Sandra Fisher, a Jewish artist who critics and associates say had a profound influence on his turn towards Jewish history.

“It was something that she brought out in him,” said Tracy Bartley, Kitaj’s studio assistant in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1997 until his death a decade later. Bartley said it was after meeting Sandra, whom he married in 1983, that Kitaj became “obsessed with this idea of Jewish art ... and why there was no great Jewish artist.” It was Kitaj’s aim, Bartley said, to become one.

Kitaj’s first major Jewish-related work was “If Not, Not” (1976), which revamped Giorgione’s “Tempesta” for modern times. The gates of Auschwitz, most tellingly, hover ominously in the background. But his works ventured well beyond Jewish history and into the realm of ideas. He was a careful student of Martin Buber, whose philosophical tract “I and Thou” lent the title to a Kitaj painting of a boy studying with an aging man. Buber’s “Eclipse of God” gave the theme and title to another late work, too.
In that painting, on view at The Jewish Museum, Kitaj inverts a Renaissance painting by Paolo Uccello that showed Christians breaking into a Jewish home whose owners allegedly bribed churchgoers for a Eucharist wafer and wine. In its time, viewers understood the Jews in the painting to be villains who intended to burn the bread and drink the transubstantiated wine. In Kitaj’s modern version, the roles are reversed, with the Christian figures rendered as an angry mob, and a Jewish man, his wife, and two children standing frightened behind the door. Kitaj also paints a figure whose back is turned to the viewer, with the name “God” written on his neck, that shows the artist’s use of an idea taken from Buber’s text: that God does not show his face in times of crisis.

Religious thought connects Kitaj to Bacon as much as it divides them, though. Bacon’s postwar view was essentially Beckettian: an existentialist who thought religion was a hoax, life had no inherent meaning and everyone must therefore invent one for himself. As Bacon liked to quip to critics that said his bleakness bordered on suicidal despair: “I’m an optimist about nothing.”

That was not the case for Kitaj. Though he was secular, his theological beliefs took on the air of kabbalistic mysticism, and he held firm to the Buber-inspired idea that God was the ultimate Unknowable. Where Bacon saw the Second World War as proof of God’s nonexistence, Kitaj saw it as proof of only his absence. As the kabbalists taught, God’s infinitude demanded that he retreat from this world in order to make room for human life.

Many critics point out the shared fascination with the Western canon — both its art and literature — as key parallels. As The New Republic critic Jed Perl, who knew Kitaj personally and reviews the Bacon retrospective in the current issue, said: “[Kitaj] was a man who loved the past and the richness of human experience and achievement.” His paintings often referenced quotes by Pound, Eliot, Goethe and Gombrich, while his imagery borrowed from masters of both the Impressionist and Renaissance periods.

But it may also be the case that their embrace of the Western canon stemmed from wholly different places. To be sure, both were drawn to representational painting in large part because they loathed abstract art and its inability to evoke tangible human life. But Bacon’s aim in re-rendering a Velaszquez pope or the head of William Blake was ultimately to subvert their original meanings. The church sowed hate, Bacon suggests in his Innocent X painting; the Sublime existed only in human reality, if it even existed at all, could be the message in Bacon’s death mask painting of Blake’s head.
Kitaj wanted, on the one hand, to reclaim the West’s former glory. Its achievements should not be blamed for its crimes, its luminaries not for its lunacy. The art historian James Aulich argues in “Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj” (2000) that the acute sense of loss felt by secular Jewish intellectuals in the wake of the Holocaust may have intensified their search for the West’s better past. “For many, their biographies speak for an intimate knowledge of the collapse of tradition to which they consciously or unconsciously, persistently and obsessively, refer,” he wrote.

If this psychological reading of Kitaj is projected back onto Bacon, it could be argued that, with his deep ancestral ties to Christian Europe, he wanted nothing more than to escape it. He did so not by running away from its traditions, but by attacking, subverting and calling out its lies. Kitaj, the perennial Jewish outsider on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to be let in. With Bacon now having his retrospective at The Met, and Kitaj having his there back in 1995, it seems safe to say that both are now honored members, for better or worse.

“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” is on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212) 535-7710. Through Aug. 16.

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