Kitaj, R B

Kitaj, R(onald) B(rooks)

(born Oct. 29, 1932, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, U.S.—died Oct. 21, 2007) U.S.-born British painter. He studied in New York City, Vienna, Oxford, and London. In the 1960s he was a prominent member of the Pop art movement in Britain. His works mingled the impersonal finish characteristic of Pop canvases with the loose, painterly brushwork of Abstract Expressionism but differed from the work of his Pop contemporaries in their complex and allusive figurative imagery. Kitaj's semiabstract paintings feature brightly coloured and imaginatively interpreted human figures portrayed in puzzling and ambiguous relation to one another. He exhibited internationally and taught at various British art schools.