"Fulham Road Cinema Bathers is a sophisticated post-modernist pastiche. It introduces figures – culled from an unidentified source – to the environment of the Fulham Road, which R.B. Kitaj lived near at the time he made this painting. The building which dominates the painting on the right-hand side has been known as Fulham Road Picturehouse since 2019. It was initially opened in 1930 as the Forum Theatre, a palace of varieties complete with a three-manual Compton organ, but was almost immediately acquired by Associated British Cinemas (ABC), who retained possession until the time of Kitaj’s painting.

Perhaps the most recognizable autographic quality of the work is Kitaj’s cursive italic script, which appeared frequently in the artist’s work from 1960 onwards. The cinema’s branding, ‘A B C’, is inscribed down the side of the building. The marquee lightboard details the films that were showing when Kitaj made the painting: Imagine was a documentary biopic about John Lennon, while Frantic was a vehicle for Harrison Ford directed by Roman Polanski, both of which were released in the UK in 1988. Furthermore, the calligraphic ornamentation on the cinema façade – an invented deviation from the building’s giant order Corinthian columns – shares the stylish tapering of Kitaj’s handwriting.

Writing of this painting and a related work, The Fulham Road, SW10 (after Brueghel), Marco Livingstone has described how Kitaj drew directly upon his local surroundings. Kitaj lived near the Fulham Road cinema and his interest in local subjects followed from the instruction of his doctors.

For Kitaj, [his immediate environment] took on a new urgency after his heart attack, when he was advised by his doctor to take a daily walk for the sake of his health. He chose to take his exercise at the start of every day, around 6 a.m., when the streets were still and deserted. The routine introduced him to a new range of subjects drawn from the Chelsea and South Kensington districts of London […].

More generally during this period, Kitaj was layering his paintings with autobiographical content. Fulham Road Cinema Bathers belongs to that trend. Perhaps owing to the direct inspiration for its setting, it is one of the artist’s more comprehensible paintings from the 1980s and ‘90s. Despite the free exaggeration of the figures’ proportions in relation to their setting, the painting largely retains the spatial logic created by a single vanishing point and the composition in totality is clearly legible and tableau-like.

Throughout his lifetime, Kitaj sought out and employed obscure iconography in his work. Because of the wide range of the sources that he took his figures from, it is often impossible to identify a source unless he himself revealed it. He occasionally devised his own figures and mixed them freely with found imagery; in such a work as Fulham Road Cinema Bathers, it is difficult to distinguish found figures from those invented by Kitaj. Because of the overt cinematic references in this work, it is probable that at least some of the figures – perhaps those larger than life characters marching along the Fulham Road on the left-hand side – were derived from film stills, which Kitaj is known to have used from time to time. (Like his friend and contemporary Michael Andrews, Kitaj was an avid film-goer and freely drew inspiration from the medium of film.)

Titles are often useful indicators in Kitaj’s practice. The title of Fulham Road Cinema Bathers reveals that the clothed, nude and semi-nude figures at the right-hand corner are ‘bathers’. The frisson of sexuality implicit in the subject of bathers appealed to Kitaj’s prurient nature. More than this, he had a sophisticated understanding of art history and frequently used his paintings as a medium through which he could evoke the paintings and artists that he admired. (In literary criticism, the analogous technique is known as ‘intertextuality’.) In the case of Fulham Road Cinema Bathers, some of Kitaj’s reference points included the three large Bathers paintings which Cézanne made at the end of his life; Henri Matisse’s painting Bathers by a River (1909-17, Art Institute of Chicago); and the bathers which Picasso depicted throughout his career. Kitaj’s subtle allusion to these paintings – in his choice of subject as well as his manner of execution – provide his own work with deep foundations and rich art historical resonance."