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Female Narrator During a trip to Paris, R.B. Kitaj saw works in pastel by the French artist Edgar Degas. Captivated by the medium, he tried his hand at it. Getty Curator Julian Brooks.
Julian Brooks It's a very tender, loving portrait of two friends of his, essentially. On the left is the artist Frank Auerbach, with whom he was very close. And on the right is Sandra Fisher, the woman who was his studio assistant but soon became his lover and later, his wife. The renditions of their features are extremely life–like and faithful to their appearances.
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Clearly, they're posing as he's making his pastel and there's a sort of disconnection between them in some ways, I think just by the very nature that they're being drawn.
Female Narrator Perhaps they're self-conscious of being the subjects of a work rather than the artists making it.
Julian Brooks In many ways, this is a complex relationship. They're all artists. In some ways they're competitive, but then they're looking at each other, they're influenced. So there is this intimate bond between them which one gets to some extent from a work like this.
FEMALE NARRATOR:
Female Narrator Kitaj, however, would eventually leave the School of London behind. In 1994, he had his first retrospective exhibition in London.
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Julian Brooks Some of the London press was extremely scathing and said it was pretentious and name–dropping. And Kitaj was hugely upset by this and felt that they just didn't understand his work.
Female Narrator Around the same time, his wife, Sandra Fisher, was hospitalized with a sudden attack of inflammation in the brain and spinal cord. She died shortly afterwards.
Julian Brooks And Kitaj blamed her death on the London press. And he said he just felt nothing for London any more after that. And he moved to Los Angeles.
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