K Enters the Castle at Last

Abbot Hall is thrilled to have been bequeathed a wonderfully surreal, quintessential painting by the late RB Kitaj in 2008.

The subject is based on The Castle, by Kafka, the story of the Land Surveyor, K, and his thwarted attempts to enter the fortress of the title. Kitaj, who described K as his ‘favourite Jew’ and Kafka as the ‘best Jewish artist’, achieves what the author failed to do by sneaking the aged K into the Castle, where he encounters, lower left, ‘a critic who hates both K and me and has tried to kill my signature lizard by chopping off her tail and tale’, as well as an image of ‘Rabbi Jesus’ on the door, who ‘foresees lots more trouble for the Jews’.

The searing colour scheme is based on what Kitaj claimed was a ‘secret (Kabbalistic?) colour recipe’, and stands in stark contrast to the subtle, muted tones of his painting, Poet, also in the Abbot Hall collection.