From Angel to the Shekhina: The Influence of Kabbalah on the Late Work of R. B. Kitaj

Abstract

After a lifelong career as a central figure in the London art scene, the American-Jewish artist R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) left England in 1997 for Los Angeles to be “in exile,” as he named it, following a series of tragic events that he believed had caused the sudden death of his beloved wife and muse, artist Sandra Fisher (1947–1994). In Los Angeles, he continued the mission he had assigned himself long before: to create a meaningful, new Jewish art. For Kitaj, Jewish art was a “Diasporist” art—that is, a modernist, universal art whose core lies in the experience of the artist living and working in multiple societies simultaneously, and a response to being Heimatlos (“homeless”). He formulated his thoughts in two manifestos (1988/1989 and 2007), which were followed in 2017 by his posthumously published autobiography, Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Around 2003, Kitaj’s perception of Sandra Fisher attained a more mystical level: in addition to angelic qualities, he began to assign divine qualities to her as the personification of the Shekhina, the feminine aspect of God, to whom he could cleave as a mystic through his art while painting his Los Angeles series. In his final years, his personal devotion focused entirely on his reunion with Sandra. In this, mystical ideas about the Shekhina offered Kitaj a vehicle for his thought and art as well as a means of transition from earthly existence to death.