In his paintings, R. B. Kitaj reminds me of no one so much as Saul Bellow. In addition to grand ambition and wholehearted expressivity, which often result in a certain lack of subtlety, both men caricature isms and ideas while habitually rendering human characters as comic-strip figures. To this mélange of habits, Kitaj adds another tic, that of embodying Jewish anxiety and self-obsession to the point of unintentional parody. Of course, his two-dimensional approach to ideas inflects his attitude toward Judaism: what some critics hail as allusiveness will seem to others to be mere name-dropping. But I cannot imagine Kitaj agreeing that one will find considerably more intellectual complexity in, say, a Dutch still life than in a painting of Freud or in a work such as his The Jews Are They Human? (2000), which unimaginatively offers a framed book cover from an old anti-Semitic work of the same title—whin- ing to the converted.

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