Kitaj, R(onald) B. (1932- ), American painter, living in England, whose figurative paintings and pastel drawings explore the anxieties and contradictions of the human condition. Kitaj’s work defies categorization in terms of a particular school or movement. He had little taste for American abstract expressionism and was repelled by attempts to associate his work with that of the British pop artists, in spite of his interest in, and use of, images from popular culture (magazines and films, in particular). Kitaj cites the work of late 19th-century French artists Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne as some of the most important influences on his style.

Many of Kitaj’s pastels feature sinuous lines that cut through and define the softly blurred shapes beneath them, as in Bather (Psychotic Boy) (1980, collection H. R. Astrup, Oslo, Norway). Large, flat patches of unexpected colors give his compositions an abstract structure. At the same time, a sense of strangeness and anxiety permeates his work through jarring juxtapositions of near and far objects, sexual tension between figures, and the combination of radically different drawing styles within one composition. Kitaj’s keen interest in literature, his long-standing friendships with poets and writers, as well as passionate investigations of his Jewish heritage play an important role in his work. For many of his later paintings Kitaj invented characters who are both universal archetypes and disguised self-portraits. An example is Joe Singer, a sort of Jewish Everyman, who appears in The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding) (1980, collection Nelson Blitz, Jr., New York City).

Ronald Brooks Kitaj was born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and spent much of his boyhood in Troy, New York. From 1950 to 1951 he studied art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He went to Vienna, Austria, in 1951 and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) until 1953. During the years 1950 to 1953 he also worked intermittently as a merchant seaman, traveling to the Caribbean and South America. From 1955 to 1957 he served in the United States Army. After additional travels in Europe and North Africa, Kitaj settled in England, studying from 1957 to 1959 at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England, and from 1960 to 1962 at the Royal College of Art in London.