Before becoming a student at
the Royal College of Art, Kitaj had travelled widely (he was a merchant seaman, he then served in the US army) and his wide cultural horizons made him an influential man among his contemporaries
(he studied with Hockney and Allen Jones!!). 
He
held his own in his preference for figurative drawing as opposed to the more popular abstract work.
He visited Paris in
1975 and came back inspired by Degas and eager to take up pastel drawing, which he continued to use for much of his later work. Late 19th-century French art and his obsessive preoccupation with his Jewish identity (he said) were a major influence in his work. He is quoted as saying; ‘’I took it into my cosmopolitan head that I should attempt to do Cézanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz.'’ Unlike the majority of Pop artists, Kitaj has had little interest in the culture of the mass media and has declared that he is not in fact ‘a Pop artist’ at all.
HE was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932 and as a child attended art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. After high school, he studied art at Cooper Union in New York and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Following two years in Europe serving for the United States Army Kitaj became a student at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University before transferring in 1959 to the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj remained in Europe, spending 40 of those years in London, until 1997 when he moved to Los Angeles.
Kitaj's work is included in numerous public collections throughout the western world and beyond.
Kitaj was one of the great figurative artists of the post-World War II period. An expatriate American living in London for many years, he returned to make his home and work in Southern California a number of years ago, after the tragically early death of his wife, the artist Sandra Fisher.
At that time, his important retrospective show at the Tate Gallery (this was 1994) had been widely, even cruelly, panned by critics, primarily on account of the lengthy explanatory texts he apparently felt necessary to include next to the paintings on the walls, in case they should be misunderstood. He bitterly and publicly denounced his critics for having contributed to Sandra’s sudden death of an aneurism, and later produced a painting called “The Critic Kills,” signed “By Ron and Sandra.”
My own opinion of his work is that he is a most excellent draughts person and figurative painter, particularly in his use of line. My favourite of his works is a drawing called Mary Anne………..
this shows what I mean about his ability to draw expressively. There are other works of his that I really do not like, but then if his objective was to do ‘’ Cézanne and Degas and Kafka over again, after Auschwitz.'’, especially from the jewish perspective, It’s not surprising that I find some of the work unpleasant. 
