R B Kitaj: London to Los Angeles

R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles was the first retrospective of the artist’s work in a decade. It provided a chronological overview of Kitaj's career, exploring the relationship between his art and the places he lived. Although he travelled widely, spending seasons and sometimes whole years in California, Catalonia, Paris and New York, Kitaj made London his home from 1959 – the year he entered the Royal College of Art – until 1997. For the last decade of his life, from 1997 to 2007, he lived in Los Angeles.

The exhibition included little-known early work of the fifties, the groundbreaking ‘collagist’ work of the sixties that established his reputation, and the life drawings and glowing paintings of the seventies, continuing through to Kitaj's rediscovery of painting in the eighties and his final period in Los Angeles. An accompanying publication includes original essays by Andrew Dempsey, Marco Livingstone and Colin Wiggins, in addition to extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, now held by the Tate Archive and published here for the first time.

Coinciding with the exhibition a selection of Kitaj's screen prints In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part are available to view via our online viewing room here. 

Piano Nobile represent the R.B. Kitaj Estate.