by Jack­ie Anzaroot

The Jew­ish Muse­um has opened a new exhib­it titled R. B. Kitaj: Per­son­al Library fea­tur­ing the work of R. B. Kitaj, famed Jew­ish Amer­i­can artist and poet (1932 – 2007). The exhib­it, which opened April 5th and will be on view until August 11th, fea­tures 33 screen­prints that are exact repro­duc­tions of select book cov­ers from Kitaj’s own per­son­al library. The col­lec­tion, titled In Our Time, dates from 1969 and, styl­is­ti­cal­ly, draws upon the influ­ences of the Pop and Ready­made artis­tic movements. 

Kitaj, a lover of books with eclec­tic tastes, was him­self a poet and author as well as an artist. In 1989 he pub­lished the First Dias­porist Man­i­festo, a short book that com­bines prose, poet­ry and art to describe how the Jew­ish dias­po­ra has affect­ed his out­look on art and him­self as an artist. Kitaj lat­er fol­lowed up the first man­i­festo with the Sec­ond Dias­porist Man­i­festo in 2007, the same year that he com­mit­ted sui­cide at the age of 74. Kitaj’s bril­liant meld­ing of styles — Pop and Ready­made — in his fea­tured art col­lec­tion was a trend that fol­lowed the artist through­out most of his career and is evi­dent­ly mir­rored in the hybridiza­tion of rhetoric styles in his lit­er­ary work. The artist’s ten­den­cy to styl­is­ti­cal­ly hybridize both his artis­tic and lit­er­ary work is also a reflec­tion of his iden­ti­ty as self-described ​“dias­porist” Jew. 

The gallery at The Jew­ish Muse­um is an intrigu­ing exhi­bi­tion and is cer­tain­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al of all the cul­tur­al boun­ty that can come out of being a dias­porist. The col­lec­tion serves not only as a trib­ute to his beloved library, but also as a repro­duc­tion of Kitaj’s per­son­al memen­tos from his var­i­ous jour­neys — both cul­tur­al and phys­i­cal — into dif­fer­ent places, schools of thought and philoso­phies. The screen­prints of book cov­ers come from a wide of array of gen­res and Kitaj’s love of poet­ry can be seen in his inclu­sion of one book of Vachel Lindsay’s poet­ry and in his a repro­duc­tion of a cov­er of one of the vol­umes of tran­si­tion, a lit­er­ary jour­nal that once fea­tured greats such as William Car­los Williams and James Joyce. Some odd­i­ties have also been includ­ed, such as a cov­er of an annu­al bud­get report for the city of Bur­bank, year 1968 — 1969, a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence bul­letin from 1944, and a med­ical and pub­lic health tech­ni­cal man­u­al. The artist’s inter­est in Holo­caust stud­ies can also be seen in one cov­er that bears the title, ​“The Jew­ish Ques­tion” and belonged to a col­lec­tion of anti-semit­ic arti­cles pub­lished by Hen­ry Ford’s news­pa­per, The Dear­born Inde­pen­dent, dur­ing pre­war Amer­i­ca, and in anoth­er titled We Have Not Forgotten.

As a whole this col­lec­tion is not overt­ly Jew­ish. But there’s a lev­el sub­text that sug­gests a cel­e­bra­tion of the artist as both a Jew and cul­tur­al observ­er. There’s the sug­ges­tion that it was, in fact, Kitaj’s feel­ings of Jew­ish dias­po­ra, of not-belong­ing to any par­tic­u­lar nation and not being attached to any one school or cul­ture, that allowed him to pick his way through dif­fer­ent move­ments, adopt dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions and assim­i­late them into his own unique Jew­ish identity.