HISTORY'S BAD DREAMS

By ROBERT HUGHES

When it was at the Tate Gallery in London a few months ago, R.B. Kitaj's retrospective show received a drubbing from English critics such as few artists ever have to endure in a lifetime. Indeed, the reviews were so bilious that this critic found himself wondering whether an artist he had admired for years might not have had a doppelganger-another R.B. Kitaj, pretentiously eclectic, too big for his boots and not much good with the brush, who had somehow snuck his God-awful daubs into the Tate ahead of the real one. But no; the show has now arrived at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is clearly by the real Kitaj.

The critics seem to have been provoked, as much as anything else, by the wall labels he rashly insisted on appending to his work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne is my favourite painter too ... Maybe that's why he draws so many of us to him." Us: oh, come on. William Lieberman, who curated this show for the Met (and has hung it beautifully), banished these ruminations from the wall. They are in the catalog.

Kitaj (pronounced Kit-eye) is 62 now, an American expatriate who has lived in London half his life. No artist with any ambition can reach that age without producing his or her share of failed pictures. Kitaj has, but he remains an artist of real, sometimes of remarkable interest: a restless omnivore whose way of painting, part personal confession, part syncopated history and part allusive homage to the old and Modernist masters, is quite unlike anybody else's today.

Some 30 years ago, settling down after a brilliant student debut at London's Royal College of Art, Kitaj was loosely put in with the English Pop movement; but his work had very little to do with Pop. Its real ancestry was Surrealist-the exegesis of dreams through collage and montage, the impaction of seemingly unrelated images. And its preferred terrain was recent. Let other Americans in Europe have their fantasies about Medicean Florence or the court of the Sun King; Kitaj had edgy, bad dreams of the comparatively recent past, a 20th century that began in 1914 and was populated by history-buffeted cosmopolitans, Jews on the run, unmoored intellectuals.

No American artist ever had a more extreme case of Casablancitis than Kitaj. His work harps on the theme of displacement, loss, nostalgia. You get it at full strength in The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin), 1972-73, with its diagonal mass of cafa habituas like creatures clinging insecurely to a reef-the whole structure, it seems, being undermined by a weird red figure among the red chairs in the foreground, indifferently wielding a pick.

Kitaj's growing ambition, now fully realized, was to re-create something that was supposed to have been expelled from modern art: history painting. It's as though his own sense of expatriation compelled him toward this gap, not as a witness to history but as a collector and combiner of its enigmatic fragments. Then his curiosity solidified into an obsession, as a Jew, with Jewish history, Jewish fate and intellectual character. His early models were more literary than visual-the "collage" of Eliot's The Waste Land, in particular.

Since Picasso's Guernica, few artists had attempted historical commentary. Robert Rauschenberg did in his silkscreen paintings of the early '60s, and so did James Rosenquist with big quasi-dioramas like The F-111, his reflection on the Vietnam War. Kitaj differs from both, for he wanted to paint his images all the way through, not transfer them out of mass media. It's odd that in the midst of all the talk about "appropriation" that went on through the '80s and into the '90s, Kitaj's name so seldom came up in New York: for this is a painter mad about quotation, about scouring the landfill of 20th century image-memory for fragments that could work as emblems and poetic signs.

The reason has to be that unlike younger appropriators, Kitaj is in no sense a conceptual artist. He didn't and still doesn't care about teaching us what theoretical limits can be assigned to art. But he does care passionately about the life and health of painting, as distinct from the mere evocation of image haze; and as a draftsman, colorist and all-around creator of plastic sensation, he has no rivals in the American generation behind his. After so much photo-based figure painting in which the actual scrutiny of the living body, in all its resistant complexity, played no part at all, Kitaj's figural art posed serious questions that American artists, in particular, were unwilling to face in the '70s and '80s.

Now that the very idea of avant-gardism was fraying into exhaustion and deconstructionist footnotes, why shouldn't an artist try to be, as Kitaj put it, "an illustrator of life"? Can an art that isn't based at least in some degree on "the human clay" satisfy us for long? And what could such an art be worth without a return to formal drawing, in all its physicality and gravity?

In 1975 Kitaj began to draw from life with pastel, a medium particularly associated, for him, with Degas. The results fill one gallery of the Met's show, and they are works of distinction: a drawing like Marynka Smoking, 1980, is an homage to Degas's bathers that hits a fine balance between the energy of the black bounding line-wiry, emphatic-and the crusty soft bloom of light on the model's back and buttocks. Kitaj is a greedy, sexy draftsman, even when he is not drawing women. And his prehensile take on the world through drawing gives his fantasies and allegories a strength that no mere montage of photographic quotation could supply.

Consider, for instance, his portrait of a friend, the English writer Michael Podro. Its title is The Jewish Rider. The man sits in the compartment of a railway carriage. Its upholstery, its projecting headrests and Podro's clothes are rendered in broad swipes of the brush and suggest an unease that is close to violence. The man is on the very edge of his seat, his arm cocked at a peculiar rhetorical angle, his hand on his thigh. We have seen this pose before. It is that of Rembrandt's Polish Rider: the mysterious young man setting out through the dark landscape on a bony horse. And indeed, the head of that horse materializes in the seat of the carriage. Through the train window, we see a landscape. It is not Rembrandt's dark pastoral background. It is bathed in smeary light, and its main feature is a chimney from which a plume of black smoke rises-a burned offering-toward a cross on the hill. Then one realizes that Podro, the "Jewish rider," like St. Anthony in a Bruegel, is dreaming monstrosity: riding in memory through the landscape of the Polish Holocaust.

Over the years, Kitaj's way of painting has passed from extreme and at times mannered precision (though with "rough" bits of drawing and focus) to a much looser and Expressionist manner. His most recent work is sketchier yet, and some of its tropes seem merely silly-like Western Bathers, 1993-94, a parody of Cazanne's theme but with the figures in cowboy costume around a campfire. Maybe a climactic late style lies on the other side of this interlude, maybe not. In neither case can his work be written off.

Jewishness has proved to be Kitaj's sustaining theme, the source of his most fecund anxieties as well as his episodic pretensions. And why not? Today we have a lot of trivial art about identity, but that should not blind us to the qualities of serious identity-art when it appears-as, in Kitaj, it does.