Ron Kitaj – The Flood of Laymen (Mahler Becomes Politics, Beisbol screenprints suite, 1964-67)

As an art student in the 60s my interest in Kitaj’s prints developed alongside my enthusiasm for those of Eduardo Paolozzi. There are many fascinating similarities, visually, conceptually and technically. The catalyst for his uptake of the screenprint medium was Paolozzi’s introduction of Kitaj to Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio in 1962. As detailed in my coverage of Paolozzi’s work in http://paolozzi.blogspot.co.uk/ Prater facilitated and enhanced printmakers’ creativity not just through his supremely good technical ability but also because he built artistic rapport and empathy with them.

That year Paolozzi and Kitaj made a collaborative mixed media collage called Work in Progressive. Within two years Prater was producing stylistically similar screenprints for Kitaj, rich with multiple visual and literary references. 15 of these constitute the Mahler series.

Where Paolozzi formed a personal and creative empathy with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kitaj did so with Gustav Mahler. Paolozzi’s empathy with the philosopher involved quite a lot of mutual angst, and so with Kitaj/Mahler:

He had felt a kinship with Mahler since he studied in 1950s Vienna, seeing hatred in the eyes of his landlady, his tutors, the shopkeepers. ‘The streets I walked on I could have been hauled off just a few years before,’ he said. Kitaj equated anti-Semitism with anti-modernism. ‘Jewish brilliance’, he said, ‘made the modern world.’ Jews like Mahler and Kitaj were agents of change, architects of human unease. (Norman Lebrecht, author and authority on Mahler).

Mahler Becomes Politics, Beisbol was created over the period 1964-67 and published in 1967 by Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. The fifteen prints and Title Page were presented in a yellow case mostly in an edition of 70, although there were 75 of some. Additionally a book of poems by Jonathan Williams was included with the first 30 of the edition. Typical size was 840 x 570 mm.

The print below is The Flood of Laymen. I especially like its 3D ‘architectural’ structure and the sharp contrast between the creation in the image of extensive space with the ‘flatness’ of the Phony Fish illustrations and text:

Paolozzi’s ‘As Is When’

In February 1964, (the month in which The Beatles were recording Can’t Buy Me Love), Paolozzi made a work-note:  collage called the artificial sun; series of collage based upon Wittgenstein precepts.  The resulting images, published the following year, comprise the As Is When suite of screenprints – a ground breaking masterwork.

At this time, Paolozzi was 40 and best known for his sculpture and involvement with the proto-Pop Independent Group in London the mid-Fifties.  He had formed an interest in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early-Fifties and this developed significantly and with great personal empathy when he read Norman Malcolm’s Memoir, published in 1958.  Paolozzi found himself closely identifying himself and his art both with Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his, (problematic) life journey.  Initially, this resulted in sculptures such as Wittgenstein at Casino: the photograph below shows Paolozzi in 1964 in New York where this piece was on exhibition at MOMA:

Artificial Sun is the first of the 12 prints (plus Poster) and is dated 13^th May 1964.  It is one of the nine prints in the Suite based on Wittgenstein’s thinking; (the other three depict events/aspects of Wittgenstein’s life).  The incorporated statement: The world is all that is the case is a proposition from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only work published, (in 1921), before Wittgenstein’s death in 1951.  In this reflection of his early philosophical thinking, Wittgenstein contended that a verbal proposition is a picture of reality.  So now consider the reality of Artificial Sun:

Much more at http://paolozzi.blogspot.co.uk/ also covering Universal Electronic Vacuum and Moonstrips Empire News series