Even though he was born in the USA, the painter and graphic artist Ronald B. Kitaj became a main representative of English Pop Art.
Ronald B. Kitaj had moved to England in the late 1950s in order to study art. The new figurative art, which Ronald B. Kitaj established against the trend of an increasing tendency towards abstraction, had decisive influence on his fellow students David Hockney and Allen Jones, which would also turn out to be luminaries of English Pop Art. Ronald B. Kitaj refused the label of a pop artist, as his subjects did not reference trivial everyday culture, but rather intellectual culture (history, philosophy, politics, literature). Even though collages, the combination of text and image as well as serial images hint at Ronald B. Kitaj's closeness to Pop Art, his sophisticated oeuvre, which also shows notions of Abstract Expressionism, eludes from this classification.
Works by Ronald B. Kitaj are on display in renowned museums all over the world.