ABSTRACT
R. B. Kitaj's library explicitly provides the imagery for his works, as in 1969 when he created In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library after the Life for the Most Part, a series of fifty screen prints taken from photos of his own worn and dog-eared texts. With the volumes of Adin Steinsaltz's Talmud translation stacked beside the easel in his studio, in his later years Kitaj came to conceive of his prefaces as his own acts of Jewish exegesis. Kitaj hopes to revive the tradition of painting what he calls 'the human clay'. The critical term for Kitaj is 'identity' and in his case that came to mean responding to the dilemmas of his 'tribe', the Jews. Ronald Brooks Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932 to Jeanne Brooks, an American-born daughter of Russian Jewish parents and a Hungarian-born father who left the family when Kitaj was two.
