Ronald Brooks Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE) was born at Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland, Ohio, USA on 29 October 1932. His Hungarian father, Sigmund Benway, left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born and they were divorced in 1934. His mother worked in a steel mill and as a teacher. She remarried in 1941, to Dr Walter Kitaj, an Austrian research chemist, and the son took his surname. Ronald was educated at Troy High School and went to sea on a Norwegian freighter at the age of 17. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. Kitaj married his first wife, Elsi Roessler, in 1953. They would have a son and a daughter. After serving in the United States Army for two years, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958-59) under the G I Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959-61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. Through the 1960s he taught at Ealing Art College, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. In 1963 he staged his first solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London, entitled ‘Pictures with commentary, Pictures without commentary’. He selected an exhibition for the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, entitled ‘The Human Clay’ (an allusion to a line by the poet W H Auden), including works by 48 London artists, such as William Roberts, Richard Carline, Colin Self and Maggi Hambling, championing the cause of figurative art at a time, when Abstract was in the ascendant. In an essay in the catalogue, he coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe painters such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews, and himself. Kitaj had a significant influence on British Pop Art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewed most Abstraction and Modernism. Kitaj’s more complex compositions build on his line work using a montage practice, which he termed ‘agitational usage’. He often depicted disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumed a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives. This is best portrayed by his masterpiece The Autumn of Central Paris (1972-73), wherein philosopher Walter Benjamin is portrayed, as both the orchestrator and victim of historical madness. Kitaj staged a major exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965 and a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC in 1981. His first wife committed suicide in 1969. After living together for 12 years, he married Sandra Fisher in December 1983. Kitaj selected paintings for the exhibition ‘The Artist’s Eye’ at the National Gallery, London in 1980. In his later years, he developed a greater awareness of his Jewish identity and heritage, which found expression in his works. A second retrospective was staged at the Tate Gallery in 1994. Despite an almost universally negative response from art critics in London, the exhibition moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in Los Angeles in 1995. His second wife, Sandra Fisher died of a brain aneurysm in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery ended. He blamed the critics who savaged his exhibition for her death, and returned to the US in 1997 to live in Los Angeles, near his first son. The ‘Tate War’ and his wife’s death became a central themes for his later works in which he often depicted himself and his deceased wife as angels. Kitaj was one of several artists to produce a ‘post-it note’ in celebration of 3M’s 20th anniversary. Auctioned on the internet in 2000, the charcoal and pastel piece sold for $925, making it the most expensive post-it note in history. Kitaj was elected to the RA in 1991, the first American since Sargent. He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. He staged another exhibition at the National Gallery in 2001, entitled ‘Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters’. Kitaj had a mild heart attack in 1990. He died in Los Angeles in October 2007, eight days before his 75th birthday. Seven weeks later, the Los Angeles County coroner ruled the cause of death to be suicide.