Quick Facts
In full:
Ronald Brooks Kitaj
Born:
Oct. 29, 1932, Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Died:
Oct. 21, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif. (aged 74)
Movement / Style:
Pop art

R.B. Kitaj (born Oct. 29, 1932, Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died Oct. 21, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.) was an American-born painter noted for his eclectic and original contributions to Pop art.

Kitaj studied art at the Cooper Union in New York City and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After working as a merchant seaman and serving in the U.S. Army (1955–57), he settled in England and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts and at the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj was associated with the beginnings of the Pop art movement in Great Britain in the early 1960s. 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. His work was highly intellectual in its wealth of pictorial references to historical, artistic, and literary topics. Kitaj continued to exhibit widely throughout the 1960s and ’70s while teaching painting at various British fine arts schools.

A retrospective of Kitaj’s work—complete with his explanatory notes on the various paintings—at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1994 drew harsh criticism, though it was praised when exhibited in New York and Los Angeles. Kitaj’s wife died shortly after the Tate retrospective, and in 1997 he moved to the United States, where he continued to work.

"The Birth of Venus," tempera on canvas by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485; in the Uffizi, Florence.
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London School of Economics and Political Science

university, London, United Kingdom
Also known as: LSE

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London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), institution of higher learning in the City of Westminster, London, England. It is one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to the social sciences. A pioneer institution in the study of sociology and international relations, it offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degree programs. It administers several centres for research in economics, human rights, diplomacy, finance, and health and social services, as well as regional centres on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Total full-time enrollment is more than 10,000; about half of its students are postgraduates.

The London School of Economics was cofounded in 1895 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the former a trustee of the will of Henry Hunt Hutchinson, who wanted the residue of his estate to be spent on socially constructive purposes. George Bernard Shaw was also important in the founding of the school, which became a college of the University of London in 1900. Although Hutchinson, the Webbs, Shaw, and other cofounders were dedicated Fabians, the Webbs established the principle that the school would offer knowledge and interpretation without dogma. Thus, the influential conservative Friedrich von Hayek was among its faculty members who have won Nobel Prizes in economics. Foreign students have long constituted a large proportion of LSE’s student body; in the 2010s, more than two-thirds of its students came from overseas. Among former LSE students are several past or present heads of state, including presidents and prime ministers.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Jeff Wallenfeldt.