"Writing" is among R.B. Kitaj's deeply personal, Holocaust-themed Passion paintings.

An art opening should be a joyous occasion, but the gathering earlier this month at the Skirball Cultural Center was also a somewhat somber reunion of friends and family.

They were gathered at the center to celebrate an exhibit of paintings by Cleveland-born artist R.B. Kitaj. Still fresh in their minds was the pain of loss. Kitaj died in October; authorities later ruled that he had committed suicide. He was 74 years old and had dealt with many hardships through the years, including the deaths of his first and second wives.

But his work, even paintings that dealt with the Holocaust, tended to be filled with vibrant colors and bold brush strokes. Some 30 pieces of Kitaj's work, which chart his exploration of Jewish identity, history and culture, are on view in the exhibit, which is called Passion and Memory. It's up through March 30 at Skirball.

If you're unfamiliar with Kitaj's work, you're not alone. He was always more famous in England. He spent the spent the bulk of his career there and was a key member of the British Pop Art Movement of the 1960s. He never garnered the commercial success that came to some of his contemporaries and, in some instances, critics weren't always kind.

Colleagues, though, held Kitaj in high regard. Renowned British painter-designer David Hockney, a friend of Kitaj's for 50 years, had much praise for the artist. Hockney attended the opening and contributed a statement for the exhibit guide.

"He believed in painting. He believed content was more important than form, although he also knew they were one," Hockney wrote. "His art will last and his struggles with it will be admired in the future."

Passion and Memory focuses on what are considered Kitaj's Jewish works, said curator Tal Gozani.

"I spent the last two years working with the artist, putting together this exhibition, and everything we worked on remains exactly as we had planned it," she said.

Kitaj, according to Gozani, considered himself a cultural Jew and not a religious one.

One wall of the gallery is devoted to Kitaj's Passion paintings dealing with the Holocaust.

"He did them from 1985 to 1988, and as soon as he was finished, he put them in his Jewish library, which was a room in his house where he put all his Jewish books, and there they sat, except for once when he showed them in a gallery," Gozani said. "Kitaj had an ambivalence about showing them. He didn't personally witness the Holocaust but he was traumatized by it."

Kitaj considered the Holocaust to be the Jewish crucifixion and in each of his Passion paintings he incorporated crematoria chimneys, which he considered powerful symbols of Jewish suffering.

Another series of paintings, "Arabs and Jews," deals with the ongoing cultural clash, beginning with a 1985 work depicting two young boys. For the entire series, Kitaj never specifies the ethnic identity of the subjects. Accompanying the first painting, he added the text, "You can choose for yourself which child is Arab and which child is Jew."

It was these types of explanatory texts that became fodder for intense derision among critics who covered a Kitaj retrospective at London's Tate Gallery in 1994. Considering that literature was a lifelong love of his, it makes sense that Kitaj incorporated words to explain some of his more complex works.

Shortly after the negative Tate show press, Kitaj's second wife, painter Sandra Fisher, died from a brain aneurysm. He blamed her passing on the bad reviews, which eventually led to his leaving Britain for Los Angeles.

"He often talked about death, but not in a fearful way," Gozani said.

His wife's death and his aging remained topics for his art until the end.

Kitaj's style and subject choices may have been questioned by some, but his skill was universally understood.

Art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of Kitaj in Time magazine, "He draws better than almost anyone else alive."

Kitaj responded with, "I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived."

— E-mail freelance columnist Jeff Favre at jjfavre@yahoo.com.