I met RB Kitaj in 1979 and 1980 when he worked on an exhibition in the Artist's Eye series at the National Gallery. He was immensely charismatic without ever being loud - you were just aware of his great force of character and thoughtfulness. What I found extraordinary about Kitaj was the depth of his knowledge and the spread of his reading. I visited his studio on one occasion and was surprised to find it piled with books. His view of the world appeared to be one of constant and complex cross-reference, and certainly the exhibition we worked on (me as designer) was one in which Kitaj laid out the works according to a language of relationships that I suspect would have been imperceptible except to a handful of extremely acute scholars. I don't know if he was married to Sandra Fisher at that time, but she too was charming. She said she wanted to do my portrait in pastels, as my colouring reminded her of the walls of Jerusalem. Sadly, as with so many things in life, I never followed this up, and Sandra died tragically early in 1994.
I have a memory of everyone calling him Kitaj, except for the the Gallery's director Michael Levey, who called him Ron. Somehow it didn't seem quite right.
