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Re: Death of R B Kitaj

From:     blp
Category: Art
Date:     26 October 2007
Time:     11:51 AM

Review:

He looks like a sad casualty of painting's crisis. I remember thinking he was just so good at
drawing, then gradually realising that that wasn't making for work that was either very interesting
or very affecting. As paintings they  were pretty much just coloured in drawings, often with rather
unprepossessing colour schemes. It didn't seem that they needed to be paintings and it didn't seem
that much like his half hallucinatory, always deadly tasteful meanderings through the intellectual
and political history of the twentieth century particularly needed to exist at all. Still, one way
or another, it was all sort of there. You can understand how he would have found it hard to
understand that people didn't rate him. Poor Ron. A good illustrator really. He should have had a
decent career doing unusually intelligent book jackets and illustrations for the Guardian and the LRB. 


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