MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Doing something for Jews
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
(L) Synchromy with F.B. - General of hot desire (1968-69); (R) Besht Imaginary Portrait of The Baal Shem Tov (1987)
[R B Kitaj/Courtesy of Piano Nobile] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
R B Kitaj
Piano Nobile, London
AN outsider, who would forever define himself as such, R B Kitaj was born in 1932 in Cleveland, Ohio as Ronald Brooks. The following year his Hungarian father left his Jewish-American mother Jean, and she reared her child alone while working as a secretary and as a school teacher.
In 1941 she married Dr Walter Kitaj, a Viennese Jew and her son adopted his stepfather’s surname. The family moved to Troy, upstate New York in 1942 and by 1950 the young Kitaj escaped small-town life to become a sailor on cargo ships until 1954, during which time he read avidly.
Thus began what would remain an enduring and restless quest for adventure, learning and travel, all the while drawing and reading avidly.
More from this author
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
