1980.
Gentlemen never explain. ~ Jowett
Yet why not say what happened? ~ Robert Lowell
Some images from the book
Kitaj by Marco Livingstone, and excerpts on the topic of making art personal from
Kitaj's preface to his paintings:
Hemingway told Fitzgerald we're all bitched from the start and that we have to use that hurt: ... I think the modern term is identity, and its art can be the examined life, which is not very heretical after all. There are even a few strong voices around, such as that of I.B. Singer, who say that good art springs from one's tribe. He once wrote: 'Only dilettantes try to be universal; a real artist knows that he's connected with a certain people...'
My idea of art is to make picture-studies, to act upon what can be learnt about the world (according to one's sensations) in these 'studies'. My idea of art is that even though you stay in your own room alot, you still find out about the world; you find, like Picasso said, disguises of things learnt which become new and discrete (paintings) in a changeful history of subjectivity. My idea of art is that it conceals and reveals one's life and that what it confesses, is as Kafka called, 'a rumour of things'...
My pictures and their evidences are not everyone's cup of tea; I know that. But our sainted Emerson spoke for me as I could never do when he said in his Divinity School Address: 'That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself.'
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