After serving in the United States Army for two years, in France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958–59) under the G.I.

Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959–61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield.

[4] Kitaj married his first wife, Elsi Roessler, in 1953; they had a son, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and adopted a daughter, Dominie.

In an essay in the controversial catalogue, he invented the phrase the "School of London" to describe painters such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews, Reginald Gray, Peter de Francia[10] and himself.

[11][failed verification][12] Kitaj had a significant influence on British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright colour, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most abstraction and modernism.

[citation needed] Allusions to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed together on one canvas to produce a collage effect.

[13] He told Tony Reichardt, manager of the Marlborough New London Gallery, that he made screen-prints as sketches for his future paintings.

British press savagely attacked the Tate exhibit, calling Kitaj a pretentious poseur who engaged in name dropping.

His second wife, Sandra Fisher died from hyperacute haemorrhagic leuco-encephalitis in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery had ended.

22 (Painting-Drawing) the beautiful young (and naked) girl records the shadow of her aged lover (on whose lap she sits) in a pose directly taken from the Scots Grand Tourist David Allan's Origin of Painting.

The latter was included by Ernst Gombrich in his 1995 National Gallery exhibition (and catalogue) on Shadows so that Kitaj would have seen it two years before he left England for ever.

Kitaj used the Academy's Summer Exhibition to showcase this sequence of works that dealt with the events of the "Tate War" and Sandra's death and even included a graffiti inscription stating 'The Critic Kills'.

[21] In 2000, Kitaj was one of several artists to make a Post-it note for an internet charity auction held by 3M to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their product.

It accompanied Obsessions, the first comprehensive exhibition of Kitaj's work since his death, held at the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

[25][26] All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life opened at Tate Britain in February 2018, inspired by Kitaj's School of London.