Stop 1437

Female Narrator In 1983, R.B. Kitaj married the artist Sandra Fisher at a Sephardic synagogue in North London. Six years later, he commemorated the event in paint. He's the one wearing the blue yarmulke, dancing with his wife.

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Getty Curator Julian Brooks.

Julian Brooks It feels like [an] assemblage of his memories of that day – this natural and wonderful chaos of a wedding day. Kitaj was an artist who was very influenced by pop art and by collage and in this painting, it seems at first like a random collection of color and figures and a sort of jumble and an assortment, as if he's literally trying, to put everyone and everything, the whole event, the whole ceremony, in there.

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Female Narrator Three of the artists in this exhibition attended the wedding: that's Lucian Freud, lounging at far left with his back to us ... Frank Auerbach at center, with a gray face outlined in dark blue ... and Leon Kossoff, peering in from the far right. Kitaj also included another School of London artist, his best man: David Hockney, the man with a shock of yellow hair.

Julian Brooks It's amazing, as a sort of record of this very tight knit group of artists who were close and constantly looked at each other's work and were referring to each other's work. It was a sort of ongoing sort of competition between them in some ways.

Female Narrator Kitaj even asked for their help on how to resolve this work.

[cheerful, celebratory music evoking movement]

Julian Brooks It's a painting that he worked on for four years and he just kept going back to it, kept fiddling with it, trying to finish it and just make it complete in his mind. And in the end he said quote, 'he never finished it, but he finished with it.'

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