The artist who put a kippah on Hockney

He mentored David Hockney, put a kippah on him and painted his famous best man under the chuppah when he married at Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1983. And now R B Kitaj, the Jewish painter who fell out of love with London despite his wedding picture becoming one of the most beloved works held in the Tate, is back on display in the capital with From Fragments, a collection of rarely-seen early works, including collages fans can pick up for as little as £12,500.

They may be small fragments on card or board, but fragments that combine to tell a story are the very essence of Kitaj’s work, even when put together in huge canvasses like those also newly on display in London’s Piano Nobile gallery. The modestly-priced collages, some incorporating bits of paintings the artist made earlier and tore up to re-use, seem an astonishing bargain for originals by an artist whose paintings command more than £500,000, despite London art critics doing their best to destroy his reputation in the run-up to the Millennium.

Hockney called their savaging of his friend at the time of his 1994 Tate retrospective “vicious” and “appalling”. One wonders what provoked such critical disparagement.

Kitaj received a Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale the very next year and was lauded by one of the world’s greatest art critics, Robert Hughes, as being able to draw “better than almost anyone else alive”.

Hockney praised Kitaj’s draughtsmanship many times himself, citing his work as a huge influence on his own output. Lucian Freud, who, along with fellow School of London artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, was depicted at Kitaj’s wedding, painted his friend’s portrait and also sat for him at the very time he was being reviled by the British art world.

But the damage done to the psyche of an artist hyper-sensitive to criticism was done; in 1997 American ex-pat Kitaj returned to his native land, believing the premature death of Sandra Fisher, the woman he first met in LA but married at Bevis Marks, was partly due to the toll the London critics’ hostility to his work had taken on her health.

“When my wife died, London died for me and I returned home to California to live among sons and grandsons… a very good move,” the painter who became increasingly obsessed with Judaism, writing a “diasporist” manifesto and the memoir he subtitled Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, declared to a friend. Of his beloved Sandra, he wrote: “She came into my life in 1970 as a passionate Jewishness began to form crazily in me. She seemed like a shining California miracle of new-old Jewish womanhood invented in the diaspora.”

Ronald Brooks Kitaj, known only by his surname to his nearest and dearest, including Sandra, got that exotic monicker from his stepfather. Born in 1932 and educated in New York, Vienna and England, the merchant seaman turned artist settled in London in the 196’s, forming a close friendship with Hockney when they were both at the Royal College of Art.  Also in his circle were Francis Bacon and other great Anglo-Jewish artists of the time.

Yet despite being elected to the Royal Academy and having his work collected by British museums, Kitaj felt like an outsider battling barely-suppressed antisemitism during his London years. He felt those who criticised his habit of writing commentary on his own work were actually attacking the Talmudic tradition from which his practice sprung.

Back home and 6,000 miles away from those critics, Kitaj embraced his Judaism in spades for the last decade of his life. It took centre stage for the artist in the last decade of his life as he embraced Shabbat rituals, attended Seders with his children and machutanim and took the deep dive into Kabbalah which saw him re-casting his late wife as the Shekhinah, or female presence of God.

“Deifying Sandra was chutzpah of the highest order for someone with no notion of God that would be familiar to Jewish believers,” says Kitaj’s close friend, the American academic Professor David Myers.  “But he identified deeply with the modern Jewish condition and embraced it as his own.”

Indeed, although the artist did not grow up religious and barely thought about being Jewish until feeling compelled to marry Sandra under a chuppah, Luke Farey, director of research at Piano Nobile and co-curator of the new exhibition, says: “Kitaj reinterpreted his early work through the lens of his later concerns with Jewry, diaspora, his Jewish identity and heritage.”

Of his picture The Wedding, begun in 1989, six years after the ceremony, Kitaj wrote: “Sandra and I were married in the beautiful old Sephardic Synagogue founded in London by Rembrandt’s friend, Menasseh ben Israel. Under the chuppah, aside from my children and the Rabbi in top hat, Freud is on the left, Auerbach in the middle, then Sandra and me, and Hockney (best man) is to the right of us. Kossoff appears at the far right, transcribed from a drawing by John Lessore. I worked on the painting for years and never learned how to finish it even though painter friends, including most of those in the picture, gave me good advice about it which I took up and changed things all the time. In the end, instead of finishing it, I finished with it and gave it away to a deserving old friend.”

R B Kitaj: From Fragments is at Piano Nobile in West London until 27 November. piano-nobile.com