一位备受人争议的美国画家,两场品鉴其作品的英国画展

A DECADE before he killed himself in 2007 at the age of 74, R.B. Kitaj, an American painter, left Britain, where he had lived since the 1950s, and moved, with his young son, to Los Angeles. A retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994 had drawn caustic personal reviews. When his 47-year-old wife, Sandra Fisher, also a painter, died just a fortnight after the exhibition closed, Kitaj blamed the critics and turned against his adoptive nation.

从1950年代开始，美国画家罗纳德·布鲁克斯·基塔伊就一直生活在英国。然而1994年泰特美术馆的一场回顾展引来了针对个人的尖刻评论。画展结束后仅仅两个星期，他47岁的妻子、同为画家的桑德菈·费希尔便撒手人寰。基塔伊迁怒于那些评论家，并同他旅居的这个国家反目成仇。1997年，他带着年轻的儿子离开英国，前往洛杉矶。10年后，74岁的基塔伊自杀身亡。

Now two shows, drawn from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, offer a reassessment of this passionate and difficult artist. The Jewish Museum in London’s Camden Town has chosen a small selection of works in which Kitaj confronted most explicitly the questions of his Jewish identity. “Unpacking My Library”, which he began in 1990, shows a white-haired figure contorted, bent almost double, from the effort of concealing a book in his jacket. The figure has the moustache and spectacles of one of Kitaj’s intellectual heroes, Walter Benjamin, a Jewish essayist, but this is undoubtedly Kitaj. A self-confessed bibliophile, the artist wrote in 1990, “my books feed into the pictures I make with an untutored passion.”

对这位充满激情却又性格乖张的画家，当前举办的两场画展做出了重新评价。展出的作品均来自柏林的犹太博物馆。展馆之一是伦敦卡姆登镇的犹太博物馆，它挑选的是一组为数不多的作品：在这些画中，作者正视自己犹太身份的方式最为直白。《开箱整理我的藏书》是1990年开始创作的。画中，一个满头白发的人由于竭力想把书藏到外套中，几乎将身子弯成了一张弓。他的胡须和眼睛很像作者的知识偶像之一、犹太作家瓦尔特·本雅明，但却无疑是作者本人。基塔伊承认自己爱书成狂，他在1990年写道：“我的画会以质朴的激情，从我的书中吸取养分。”

Here in microcosm is what makes Kitaj one of the most significant painters in post-war Europe and also what maddens so many of his detractors. The painting is full of movement and precisely articulated emotion. It is partly comic—the hero trying to slip away from helping his wife arrange the house—but it is also an assertion of identity, both as an intellectual of the Jewish diaspora, and as a writer. Kitaj’s paintings are always figurative, but like books, they need to be read or unpacked, which his critics find pretentious.

此画正是基塔伊画风的缩影。这一画风让他享誉战后的欧洲画坛，也让众多诋毁他的人为之抓狂。《开箱》一画动感十足，其间饱蘸的情感拿捏得十分准确。作品有几分滑稽（比如不愿帮妻子收拾房间、试图溜之大吉的主人公），但也是对身份的坚持：既有流离海外的犹太知识分子这一身份，也有秉笔耕耘的作家这一身份。基塔伊的绘画都是表象艺术，不过同书籍一样，它们需要观者的解读；这在批评者眼中却甚是造作。

Kitaj’s obsessive concern with his Jewishness started in the early 1970s, after he read Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust. For 14 years on and off he worked on “Desk Murder”, finishing the painting in 1984. Invoking Arendt’s phrase, “desk murderer”, it shows the spooky outlines of a 1940s office set against a blood-red background, which morphs into the shape of a mobile gas van. “The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding)” from 1980 vividly conjures in pastel a Holocaust survivor, a surrogate for Kitaj himself, hunched underground and visibly tense with fear.

汉娜·阿伦特有一部作品讲述的是审判阿道夫·艾希曼（组织犹太人大屠杀的凶手之一）。基塔伊在1970年代初拜读这部作品之后，便开始十分重视自己的犹太身份，甚至沉迷其中。绘画《办公桌旁的谋杀》就援引了阿伦特的“办公桌旁的凶手”这一措辞。这幅作品，他断断续续地画了14年，才于1984年完成。画中，一套1940年代的办公物件呈现出阴森恐怖的轮廓，而血红的背景则幻化成一辆流动毒气车的形状。创作于1980年的《乔·辛格在藏身处侧耳倾听》用彩粉生动地描绘出一位大屠杀幸存者的形象：他躬身藏在地下，惊惧之色一目了然，而这一形象指代的恰恰是基塔伊本人。

In “The Wedding” (pictured), completed in 1993, Kitaj himself, wearing the yarmulka, dances with his wife at their wedding surrounded by his best man, David Hockney, and their Jewish friends—Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff—whom he had dubbed the School of London. “If Not, Not”, his masterpiece from the mid-1970s, is mesmerising, lusciously painted and formally resolved. The dreamlike blue lake is inspired by Giorgione’s “The Tempest” overborne by the looming gates of Auschwitz, in a landscape littered with symbolic objects and people. Kitaj acknowledged his debt here to Eliot, another American émigré, and to the idea of the “waste land” of T.S. Eliot’s great poem “as an antechamber to hell”.

图中的这幅《婚礼》完成于1993年。这是基塔伊自己的婚礼，画中的他头戴犹太便帽，与妻子翩翩起舞，周围是他的伴郎大卫·霍克尼，以及他们的犹太朋友卢西安·弗洛伊德、弗兰克·奥尔巴赫和里昂·科索夫（也即基塔伊口中的“伦敦画派”）。《如果不是，那便不是》是他1970年代中期的大作。这幅作品画风艳丽，形式完美，令人心醉神迷。画中，一泓碧蓝色的湖水如梦似幻，其灵感正是来自乔尔乔涅的《暴风雨》；湖水上方森然笼罩着奥斯维辛集中营的大门，而四周原野则零散堆砌着富有象征意味的物品和人物。基塔伊借此向同为美国侨民的托马斯·艾略特致谢，并感谢其伟大诗篇中的“荒原”这一意境：在他看来，“荒原”正“如通往地狱的前厅”。

The second Kitaj show, at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, picks up another thread in the artist’s imagination: his allegiance to a line of modernist thinking that included Jewish intellectuals as well as those occasional anti-Semites, Eliot and Ezra Pound. Among the important canvasses that reflect Kitaj’s broader philosophical and political thinking are “The Ohio Gang” (1964), with its ferocious Maenad, a follower of Dionysus, sweeping in from the side, the compelling “Juan de la Cruz” (1967), with its conflicted African-American soldier, and the huge contemporary history painting, “Pacific Coast Highway” (1973), with its multilayered references. None of these is easy, but they share essential qualities: exhilarating draughtsmanship, boldly expressive colour and conceptual ambition.

另一场画展是在奇切斯特市的帕兰特屋画廊。它所挑选的是作者意象的另一主线，那就是他对一种现代主义思潮的忠诚（这一思潮中既有犹太知识分子，也有偶尔反犹的艾略特和埃兹拉·庞德）。基塔伊的不少油画都能反映他在哲学和政治方面更为广泛的思考，而以下几幅都是其中的重要作品：在1964年的《俄亥俄帮》中，酒神迪奥尼索司的信徒美娜德从一侧气势汹汹地掠来；1967年的《“圣十字”胡安》是一幅引人入胜的作品，画中的美国黑人士兵满脸都是矛盾的神情；而1973年的巨幅现代历史画《太平洋海岸公路》则有多层次的旁征博引。所有这些作品都不简单，却都有一些共同的基本特征：赏心悦目的绘画技巧，大胆而极具表现力的色彩运用，以及宏大的艺术构思。

A final room contains some of the explosive works that Kitaj painted after 1994, including the marvellously vituperative “The Killer-Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even”, painted the year he left Britain. Nearly two decades after the Tate show, these exhibitions prove just how good Kitaj was at marshalling complex ideas into a coherent and forceful image.

最后一个展厅陈列的是1994年之后、基塔伊在盛怒之下所绘的一些作品。其中《刺杀夺命评论家，为亡妻雪恨》就是他在离开英国的那一年所画；作品充满了刻毒的诅咒，却又令人叹服。在泰特回顾展结束将近20年后，这些画展恰好表明，基塔伊是多么擅长将复杂的思想融入一幅条理清晰、震撼有力的图像。