一位備受人爭議的美國畫家,兩場品鑑其作品的英國畫展

A DECADE before he killed himself in 2007 at the age of 74, R.B. Kitaj, an American painter, left Britain, where he had lived since the 1950s, and moved, with his young son, to Los Angeles. A retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994 had drawn caustic personal reviews. When his 47-year-old wife, Sandra Fisher, also a painter, died just a fortnight after the exhibition closed, Kitaj blamed the critics and turned against his adoptive nation.

從1950年代開始，美國畫家羅納德·布魯克斯·基塔伊就一直生活在英國。然而1994年泰特美術館的一場回顧展引來了針對個人的尖刻評論。畫展結束後僅僅兩個星期，他47歲的妻子、同爲畫家的桑德菈·費希爾便撒手人寰。基塔伊遷怒於那些評論家，並同他旅居的這個國家反目成仇。1997年，他帶着年輕的兒子離開英國，前往洛杉磯。10年後，74歲的基塔伊自殺身亡。

Now two shows, drawn from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, offer a reassessment of this passionate and difficult artist. The Jewish Museum in London’s Camden Town has chosen a small selection of works in which Kitaj confronted most explicitly the questions of his Jewish identity. “Unpacking My Library”, which he began in 1990, shows a white-haired figure contorted, bent almost double, from the effort of concealing a book in his jacket. The figure has the moustache and spectacles of one of Kitaj’s intellectual heroes, Walter Benjamin, a Jewish essayist, but this is undoubtedly Kitaj. A self-confessed bibliophile, the artist wrote in 1990, “my books feed into the pictures I make with an untutored passion.”

對這位充滿激情卻又性格乖張的畫家，當前舉辦的兩場畫展做出了重新評價。展出的作品均來自柏林的猶太博物館。展館之一是倫敦卡姆登鎮的猶太博物館，它挑選的是一組爲數不多的作品：在這些畫中，作者正視自己猶太身份的方式最爲直白。《開箱整理我的藏書》是1990年開始創作的。畫中，一個滿頭白髮的人由於竭力想把書藏到外套中，幾乎將身子彎成了一張弓。他的鬍鬚和眼睛很像作者的知識偶像之一、猶太作家瓦爾特·本雅明，但卻無疑是作者本人。基塔伊承認自己愛書成狂，他在1990年寫道：“我的畫會以質樸的激情，從我的書中吸取養分。”

Here in microcosm is what makes Kitaj one of the most significant painters in post-war Europe and also what maddens so many of his detractors. The painting is full of movement and precisely articulated emotion. It is partly comic—the hero trying to slip away from helping his wife arrange the house—but it is also an assertion of identity, both as an intellectual of the Jewish diaspora, and as a writer. Kitaj’s paintings are always figurative, but like books, they need to be read or unpacked, which his critics find pretentious.

此畫正是基塔伊畫風的縮影。這一畫風讓他享譽戰後的歐洲畫壇，也讓衆多詆譭他的人爲之抓狂。《開箱》一畫動感十足，其間飽蘸的情感拿捏得十分準確。作品有幾分滑稽（比如不願幫妻子收拾房間、試圖溜之大吉的主人公），但也是對身份的堅持：既有流離海外的猶太知識分子這一身份，也有秉筆耕耘的作家這一身份。基塔伊的繪畫都是表象藝術，不過同書籍一樣，它們需要觀者的解讀；這在批評者眼中卻甚是造作。

Kitaj’s obsessive concern with his Jewishness started in the early 1970s, after he read Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust. For 14 years on and off he worked on “Desk Murder”, finishing the painting in 1984. Invoking Arendt’s phrase, “desk murderer”, it shows the spooky outlines of a 1940s office set against a blood-red background, which morphs into the shape of a mobile gas van. “The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding)” from 1980 vividly conjures in pastel a Holocaust survivor, a surrogate for Kitaj himself, hunched underground and visibly tense with fear.

漢娜·阿倫特有一部作品講述的是審判阿道夫·艾希曼（組織猶太人大屠殺的兇手之一）。基塔伊在1970年代初拜讀這部作品之後，便開始十分重視自己的猶太身份，甚至沉迷其中。繪畫《辦公桌旁的謀殺》就援引了阿倫特的“辦公桌旁的兇手”這一措辭。這幅作品，他斷斷續續地畫了14年，才於1984年完成。畫中，一套1940年代的辦公物件呈現出陰森恐怖的輪廓，而血紅的背景則幻化成一輛流動毒氣車的形狀。創作於1980年的《喬·辛格在藏身處側耳傾聽》用彩粉生動地描繪出一位大屠殺倖存者的形象：他躬身藏在地下，驚懼之色一目瞭然，而這一形象指代的恰恰是基塔伊本人。

In “The Wedding” (pictured), completed in 1993, Kitaj himself, wearing the yarmulka, dances with his wife at their wedding surrounded by his best man, David Hockney, and their Jewish friends—Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff—whom he had dubbed the School of London. “If Not, Not”, his masterpiece from the mid-1970s, is mesmerising, lusciously painted and formally resolved. The dreamlike blue lake is inspired by Giorgione’s “The Tempest” overborne by the looming gates of Auschwitz, in a landscape littered with symbolic objects and people. Kitaj acknowledged his debt here to Eliot, another American émigré, and to the idea of the “waste land” of T.S. Eliot’s great poem “as an antechamber to hell”.

圖中的這幅《婚禮》完成於1993年。這是基塔伊自己的婚禮，畫中的他頭戴猶太便帽，與妻子翩翩起舞，周圍是他的伴郎大衛·霍克尼，以及他們的猶太朋友盧西安·弗洛伊德、弗蘭克·奧爾巴赫和里昂·科索夫（也即基塔伊口中的“倫敦畫派”）。《如果不是，那便不是》是他1970年代中期的大作。這幅作品畫風豔麗，形式完美，令人心醉神迷。畫中，一泓碧藍色的湖水如夢似幻，其靈感正是來自喬爾喬涅的《暴風雨》；湖水上方森然籠罩着奧斯維辛集中營的大門，而四周原野則零散堆砌着富有象徵意味的物品和人物。基塔伊藉此向同爲美國僑民的托馬斯·艾略特致謝，並感謝其偉大詩篇中的“荒原”這一意境：在他看來，“荒原”正“如通往地獄的前廳”。

The second Kitaj show, at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, picks up another thread in the artist’s imagination: his allegiance to a line of modernist thinking that included Jewish intellectuals as well as those occasional anti-Semites, Eliot and Ezra Pound. Among the important canvasses that reflect Kitaj’s broader philosophical and political thinking are “The Ohio Gang” (1964), with its ferocious Maenad, a follower of Dionysus, sweeping in from the side, the compelling “Juan de la Cruz” (1967), with its conflicted African-American soldier, and the huge contemporary history painting, “Pacific Coast Highway” (1973), with its multilayered references. None of these is easy, but they share essential qualities: exhilarating draughtsmanship, boldly expressive colour and conceptual ambition.

另一場畫展是在奇切斯特市的帕蘭特屋畫廊。它所挑選的是作者意象的另一主線，那就是他對一種現代主義思潮的忠誠（這一思潮中既有猶太知識分子，也有偶爾反猶的艾略特和埃茲拉·龐德）。基塔伊的不少油畫都能反映他在哲學和政治方面更爲廣泛的思考，而以下幾幅都是其中的重要作品：在1964年的《俄亥俄幫》中，酒神迪奧尼索司的信徒美娜德從一側氣勢洶洶地掠來；1967年的《“聖十字”胡安》是一幅引人入勝的作品，畫中的美國黑人士兵滿臉都是矛盾的神情；而1973年的巨幅現代歷史畫《太平洋海岸公路》則有多層次的旁徵博引。所有這些作品都不簡單，卻都有一些共同的基本特徵：賞心悅目的繪畫技巧，大膽而極具表現力的色彩運用，以及宏大的藝術構思。

A final room contains some of the explosive works that Kitaj painted after 1994, including the marvellously vituperative “The Killer-Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even”, painted the year he left Britain. Nearly two decades after the Tate show, these exhibitions prove just how good Kitaj was at marshalling complex ideas into a coherent and forceful image.

最後一個展廳陳列的是1994年之後、基塔伊在盛怒之下所繪的一些作品。其中《刺殺奪命評論家，爲亡妻雪恨》就是他在離開英國的那一年所畫；作品充滿了刻毒的詛咒，卻又令人歎服。在泰特回顧展結束將近20年後，這些畫展恰好表明，基塔伊是多麼擅長將複雜的思想融入一幅條理清晰、震撼有力的圖像。