Dan Glaister in London
AS a form of revenge, it is both expansive and expensive. Sandra Three, by RB Kitaj, occupies an entire wall of the Royal Academy’s normally sedate Summer Show and carries a price tag of 1-million.
The piece is the third instalment in Kitaj’s aim to exact revenge on the critics he says helped to bring about the death of his wife, Sandra Fisher, in 1994.
Fisher, also an artist, died of a brain haemorrhage during an exhibition by Kitaj at the Tate Gallery. The show had been savaged by critics, who attacked its scale and its vanity. One headline read “Great pretender”, while others said the show was “Constipated” and “Fake, fake”.
Kitaj launched his revenge at last year’s Summer Show with a piece entitled The Critic Kills. Last winter he followed it up with Sandra Two, a magazine produced in Paris. The centrepiece of Sandra Three is a painting entitled The Killer-Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even.
Kitaj was invited by the academy to arrange the room in which his work hangs. The other artists represented include Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff, Peter Blake and Allen Jones. “I have invited a few of the over-the-hill gang to join me because I believe in a geriatric avant-garde,” he writes.
Kitaj, who is returning to the United States, attacked the response: “It was not art criticism but art hatred of a personal kind, real resentment by sick hacks full of hate and self-hate.”