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R.B. Kitaj

Ronald Brooks Kitaj (1932-2007) was an American artist who spent much of his career in Britain. He studied in Vienna and New York and moved to England for further study in 1958, where he attended the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in Oxford before studying at the RCA in London from 1959-1961. His work incorporated references to political history, art, literature and his own Jewish identity; and his figurative paintings were influential in British Pop Art alongside the work of his friends from the RCA who included David Hockney, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier and Patrick Caulfield. In 1976, Kitaj coined the phrase 'School of London' to describe the work of painters such as Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and himself. He had major retrospective exhibitions at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington in 1981, and at the Tate Gallery in 1994.


Drawings & works on paper   

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