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Artist or Maker: R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007)

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Exhibited: London, Marlborough Fine Art, R. B. Kitaj: Pastels and Drawings , October-November 1980, no. 30 (illustrated in colour, on the cover; illustrated, p. 39).
Washington D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, R. B. Kitaj , September-November 1981, no. 96. This exhibition later travelled to Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, December 1981-January 1982 and Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunstalle, February-March 1982.
London, Tate Gallery, The Hard-Won image: Traditional Method and Subject in Recent British Art , July-September 1984, no. 78.
London, Tate Gallery, R. B. Kitaj: A Retrospective , June-September 1994, no. 53 (illustrated in colour, p. 119). This exhibition later travelled to Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, October 1994-January 1995 and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, February-May 1995.
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, R. B. Kitaj, An American in Europe , January-March 1998, no. 67 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, April-June 1998; Vienna, Jewish Museum, June-August 1998 and Hannover, Sprengel Museum, September-November 1998.

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Executed in 1980, Marynka Smoking is one of R.B. Kitaj's most celebrated pastels, and has been widely published and exhibited over the last two and a half decades, featuring on the covers of several publications. This is a tribute to the extent to which Kitaj made the pastel medium his own. This exquisitely-worked, highly-finished pastel perfectly conveys the form of the woman, the various undulations of her back, of her spine. In the delicate play of light and dark, in the sensitive handling of the subtle shades that fill this work, we see Kitaj, a modern master of pastels.

Kitaj's focus on the spine is no coincidence in the work of one of the most visually erudite artists of the Post-War era. This is no simple picture of a model, but is instead the pretext for a deceptive wealth of associations and references. In selecting this pose and this range of colours, Kitaj was knowingly and deliberately referring to one of his greatest artistic heroes: Edgar Degas. Marynka Smoking has a clearly contemporary edge to it in the figure of the woman with a cigarette in her mouth; at the same time, the composition of the work and the focus on the back recalls Degas' Après le bain, femme s'essuyant in London's National Gallery, a museum that Kitaj knew incredibly well and whose pictures were almost friends of his. Indeed, it was a great moment for him when he was asked to make his own selection of works there for his exhibition of The Artist's Eye in 1980, the same year that Marynka Smoking was executed. This, then, appears to show Kitaj openly referring to his revered antecedent.

Kitaj's love of Degas was long-standing; his love of pastel, significantly, was not. When his partner Sandra Fisher, another artist and later Kitaj's wife, had turned to the medium, he had initially dismissed it as imprecise. However, he changed his mind during one of the many visits he made to Paris during the mid-1970s, when his friend David Hockney was living there. It was in 1975 that, during a visit to the Petit Palais, Kitaj saw an array of Degas' pastels; they were an epiphany for him, and he subsequently went and bought himself a set of pastels at Roché, where Degas himself had bought his own. This decision reveals Kitaj's keenness to keep history alive, tapping into synchronicity. For Kitaj's pictures are redolent with the past, with memories, with references, with the lingering traces of a thousand events and ideas and occurrences. It is through this heady mixture of past, present, memory, thought and visual impetus that Kitaj sought to condense human experience in his pictures.

This appears especially true in Marynka Smoking , which has an air of intense though languid eroticism. The picture functions as an invitation into an intimate realm of the artist, a personal place infused with personal associations. This is not merely an image of a model sitting and smoking, but instead becomes, by association, an insight into a world of sensuality. The nude, sitting apparently on a bed, becomes a figure in an unspoken narrative, perhaps smoking after a romantic encounter. Is Kitaj deliberately recalling the brothels that had so marked him as a young merchant seaman travelling from port to port? Are his own highly personal memories blending with Degas and with the present day, with the model sitting before him? Certainly, during this period, Kitaj had been creating pictures that treated the subject of sex, pornography and memory, and it appears to be at least in part in this context that we should view Marynka Smoking .

Hockney's influence in Marynka Smoking is perhaps evident in his luring Kitaj to Paris during the mid-1970s. It is, however, more evident in the simple fact that Marynka, who was one of Kitaj's regular models during this period, had been introduced to him by Hockney.