Shanghai Gestures

Although born in Cleveland, Ohio, the artist R.B. Kitaj first came into prominence in London, where he had studied and painted since the late 1950s. It was there that he became associated with a group of contemporary figurative painters, including Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. This horizontal canvas dates to the period when Kitaj briefly returned to the United States to teach in California. Already established as a figurative painter of note, his compositions were often complex, weaving together multiple literary or other cultural references.

In this painting, a solitary male figure leads a young woman towards the interior of what appears to be a brothel, as signaled by the presence of suggestively posed nude and semi-nude female figures. The subject and the setting, familiar in the oeuvre of his many modernist forbears from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Pablo Picasso, also recur in Kitaj’s practice, from early paintings that drew upon his own initial sexual encounters to more contemporary ones. In Casting (1967–69, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), the heads of eight prostitutes are vertically stacked in the manner of advertisements and labeled in paint with their professional names. Here, the impeccably inscribed title—"Shanghai Gestures"—at the upper left is a more indirect reference. It putatively recalls Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 movie "The Shanghai Gesture," an Orientalist film noir set in the titular Chinese port city. While the 1926 John Colton play upon which the film was based had been set in a bordello, in the film adaptation this was transformed into a casino to pass the scrutiny of the censors of the day. Although the sexual exploitation was modulated in the film, both the play and film settings were sites of vice. At the center of the narrative was a tempestuous ingénue played in the film by the Hollywood actress Gene Tierney, and the pouting figure that stares out of Kitaj’s canvas is reminiscent of the film’s female star. Kitaj reflected that he "used the title to suggest the same somnolent malaise of brothel life," and indeed the subtle difference from the title of the film introduces a sense of plurality in Kitaj’s composition, perhaps indicating a broader social degeneration.[1] Additionally, the colloquialism "to shanghai" can mean "to transfer forcibly or abduct, to constrain or compel"[2] and imbues the scene with a further sense of menace and foreboding. An interest in society at a precipice or in moments of transition recur in Kitaj’s works, as subtly reinforced by his painterly choices. Compositionally efficient, he used vertical and horizontal lines to block out zones of color that simply delineate the different planes across which figures populate the canvas. The vertical line that bisects the painting also marks the separation of the inside from the outside, the clothed from the unclothed. This threshold space itself traffics in a series of ambiguities.

[1] Marco Livingstone.　Kitaj. London: Phaidon Press, 1992,　p. 174 n. 40.

[2] "shanghai, v.". Oxford English Dictionary Online. March 2022. Oxford University Press.