American-born R. B. Kitaj spent the most influential years of his painting career in England, where he settled in 1958. He was a member of a group of artists at the Royal College of Art in London that promoted pop art. Kitaj was controversial for his outspokenness in favor of figurative art. Among his most important exhibitions was a Tate Gallery retrospective in 1994. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1991, the first American to earn this honor in almost a century. In 1995, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
R. B. Kitaj considered himself a figurative artist at a time when abstract art was the dominant trend. His paintings, with their brightly colored and sometimes overlapping figures, produce a collage…
Home to a Jewish community from at least the thirteenth century, Pesaro later became the refuge of Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the sixteenth century. In 1642, a few years after the town’s Jews were…
This detail appears on the right side of a pithos (storage jar) from Kuntillet Ajrud. The seated figure plays a lyre held away from the body. There seem to be four strings, oriented vertically…