Published: 22 May 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In Cecil Court WC2 (1983-4), named after a street famous for its second-hand bookshops, and an old haunt of the American-born artist, Kitaj himself reclines on a sofa while a motley group of colourful figures pop up on the canvas. The composition, explained Kitaj - not one to shy away from discussing the influences in his work - was inspired by the old Yiddish theatre troupes of shtetl Europe.
Another, The Wedding (1989-93), depicts the artist's own betrothal to his wife in Britain's oldest Synagogue, Bevis Marks. And the figures kitted out in kippahs are none other than those heavyweights of twentieth-century British painting, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, all of whom - bar Hockney's glaring absence - are heavily represented in this mighty exhibit.
Tate curator Elena Crippa and assistant curator Laura Castagnini trace the artistic lineage of these masters and others, to artists like Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), and Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), who described painting as "the sensation of a page torn from the book of life".
Indeed, Spencer's Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece (1935), with the model's sagging, veiny breasts, would certainly not look amiss next to the dozen or so Lucian Freud portraits, a few rooms later.
Also given prominence are several works by David Bomberg (1890-1957), the Whitechapel Boy born to Polish-Jewish immigrants, whose art was shamefully neglected during his lifetime, but who has emerged posthumously as one of the great British painters of the last century.
Jewishness à la Kitaj was never Auerbach, Kossoff or Bomberg's style. Instead, an emotional intensity to their work renders it not simply Jewish, but universal.
In works like Evening in the City of London (1944), the sunset floods the rooftops with soft, warm colours St Paul's Cathedral can be spied in the distance, that iconic Wren building of which prime minister Winston Churchill declared: "At all costs, [it] must be saved."
However, Bomberg was never designated an official war artist. "Like so many of his race his work looks artificial and done for effect, which is the last thing we want our war records to be,” Sir Kenneth Clark, Chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee and director of the National Gallery, wrote of Bomberg to a colleague.
Still, his legacy may be discerned in the vision of art he imparted to a younger generation. Artists like Dennis Creffield, Dorothy Mead, and indeed Auerbach and Kossoff, flocked to Bomberg's art classes at the Borough Polytechnic, [now Southbank University], where the East Londoner, unable to find work at any of the leading London art schools, taught after the war.
The audacious Bomberg dismissed traditional observational methods as "hand and eye disease". For him, painting was no mere visual record, but emotive, a search to seek "the spirit in the mass". As Kossoff has stated in quasi-Bomberg terms: "The only true guide in this search is the special relationship the artist has with the person or landscape from which he is working".
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In an exhibition showcasing artists ranging from Francis Bacon (1909-92) to Paula Rego (b 1935), it is the dialogue between two Bomberg students, Auerbach and Kossoff, that stands out.
In a room of their earlier work, the heavy impasto of both artists, inches thick in places, simply shocks. Kossoff's Early Morning, Willesden Junction (1962), captures the intensity and dark drama of a grimy London train station; while Auerbach's Head of EOW 1 (1960) is an impasto revelation, almost sculpture like, with its layers upon layers of paint.
The artists have been friends since Kossoff's first year at St Martin's, back in the 1940s. Both found inspiration in a London ravaged by the Luftwaffe - Kossoff's family home was destroyed- and in the post-war years the two would seek out bombsites to sketch, often together. “There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London", Auerbach remarked of post-war life in the capital.
Another room in the exhibition displays their work side by side, the townscapes and everyday scenes of a beloved North London canvas. Kossoff's Children Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971) is pure ecstasy of movement, noise and prosaic joy: local bathers diving, splashing, lounging, a baby in the water with its mother. Auerbach's Looking towards Mornington Crescent Station - Night (1972-3), and Chimney in Mornington Crescent - Winter Morning (1991) are painted nearly 20 years apart, yet in that time none of his brushstrokes' rapid urgency is lost.
"This part of London is my world. I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I’ve become attached to them and as fond of them as people are to their pets", the Berlin-born painter, and Kindertransport child, once observed of his north London muse.
Jewishness à la Kitaj was never Auerbach, Kossoff or Bomberg's style. Instead, an emotional intensity to their work, whether in capturing street scenes or people's faces, renders their work not simply Jewish, but universal. All Too Human, as a matter of fact.
CREDITS
Main image: The Wedding, by RB Kitaj (Courtesy, the estate of RB Kitaj)
Second image: Children's Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon 1971, by Leon Kossoff (Courtesy Tate)
All Too Human is at Tate Britain until August 27
