R.B. Kitaj, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960
Oil and collage on canvas,
153 × 152 cm
© R.B. Kitaj Estate
2/9
In his first solo exhibition, held in London in 1963, R.B. Kitaj presented “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg” as a historical painting. The canvas doesn’t show the murder itself – as the title suggests – but the moment in which the dead body is thrown into the water. The corpse seems to float in the center of the painting.
In the upper half, the figures of Germania and Count Helmuth von Moltke allude to the historical context of the murder: A social climate that was nationalistic, with a military influence, which started with the founding of the German Empire. The monuments at the left and lower part of the painting are symbolic of the historical appreciation for the life and work of Rosa Luxemburg.
In the right corner of the painting, Kitaj placed a note in which he explains the sources of the images he used and quotes a publication on Rosa Luxemburg. This is the report taken from Paul Fröhlich’s first biography on Rosa Luxemburg:
“… Rosa Luxemburg was led from the Hotel Eden by Lieutenant Vogel. Before the door a trooper named Runge was waiting with orders from Lieutenant Runge and Captain Horst von Pflugk-Hartung to strike her to the ground with the butt of his carbine. He smashed her skull with two blows and she was then lifted half-dead into a waiting car, and accompanied by Lieutenant Vogel and a number of other officers. One of them struck her on the head with the butt of his revolver, and Lieutenant Vogel killed her with a shot in the head at point-blank range. The car stopped at the Liechtenstein Bridge over the Landwehr Canal, and her corpse was then flung from the bridge into the water, from which it was not recovered until the following May.”
(from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Paul Frölich’s “Rosa Luxemburg” …
Left Book Club Edition, Victor Gollancz, 1940)
Around this period, Kitaj was not only interested in Luxemburg but also in other outsiders and revolutionaries in general.
"My Rosa Luxemburg painting was not as radical as she was, but radical enough for a student in an art college. Although Rosa was of course, a Communist, I never was. All my life I've been an American Democrat of the Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Clinton varieties. It's just that Jewish cultural life with all its disasters, brilliance, learning, evasions and daring has conducted me and my art like an excited zombie or Golem stumbling into real trouble, like my Jews so often do.
My first show and its catalogue was a kind of first shot across the bows of painterly convention, as befits as young radical artist. Rosa, Popper, Wind, Warburg, Isaac Babel, Gertrud Bing, Walter Kaufman, Karl Marx, Kafka, and other Jewish ghosts haunted my show and are named in my catalogue in a youthful feeding frenzy. Most of the critics treated me like a painter version of T. S. Eliot and even Ezra Pound. No one mentioned the J-word. Not even me. I was on the verge of it though, but like almost all Jewish artists, I wanted to appeal to a universal standard."
from: R.B. Kitaj, Confessions of an old Jewish Painter, unpublished autobiography, R.B. Kitaj Estate
"'Rosa' was a student work begun at the Royal College of Art. It looks
naive and graceless to me now. It arose out of mediation upon my
grandmothers. It is about an historic murder, but it is really about
murdering Jews, which is what brought my grandmothers to America.
Grandma Rose is given as her veiled wraith, upper left, but it is
grandmother Helene … who really prefigures Rosa L. in my life. Helenes
two sisters, like Kafka's three sisters and four of Freud's five
sisters were murdered in the same camps by the Germans/Austrians. My
grandmother was not political - but Helene and Rosa L. looked alike,
dressed alike. Helene wore those long black skirts and boots in America
until she died, and came from the same cultivated milieu whose
brilliance and disaster are now legend. Helene was born in Vienna the
same year as Picasso, the year Disraeli died, when Dreyfus was an
obscure captain on the French General Staff. I didn't paint Rosa because
I was attracted to her revolution. That God never failed me because I
never worshipped in his church, but this painting has always seemed
failed to me, although I do ponder its terms now and again as if those
terms have some breath left in them... I would never quite be free of
what is called the lachrymose view of Jewish history."
from: Kitaj Interviewed by Richard Morphet, in: Richard Morphet (Hrsg.), R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, Tate Gallery 1994
R.B. Kitaj on his painting "The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg" (Excerpts from the exhibition's audio guide, narrator: Peter Rigney)
