The US painter R. B. Kitaj was an influential figure in British art after making his home in England in 1958. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, Ronald Brooks Kitaj ran away from home as a teenager to sail for four years as a merchant seaman, breaking his voyages to South America with spells of art school at the Cooper Union Institute in New York and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.

Although he remained on land from 1953, when he returned to Vienna for what was to become an extended love affair with Europe, he spent most of the remainder of his life swimming against the tide.

At the end of 1957, after serving in the US Army for two years in Germany and France, Kitaj moved to England in order to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford under the terms of the GI Bill, moving on in the autumn of 1959 to the Royal College of Art in London. His fascination with England, and with Europe generally, was based in equal parts on his sense of belonging to a European artistic tradition and on his identification with American literary figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who had left their native country earlier in the century in a similar self-imposed exile.

While quickly garnering the respect of fellow artists, especially that of younger students with whom he studied at the Royal College, such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, Kitaj was a consistently controversial figure. His uncompromising insistence on the importance of subject matter rooted in personal conviction, and his consequent dismissal of most abstraction and other forms of late modernism, made him a natural spokesman for figurative art but also a target for many of those who still subscribed to the idea of an avant-garde.

Kitaj's literary preoccupations, manifested in his work of the early 1960s both in his arcane references to poetry, historical events and iconographical analysis and in his habit of writing erudite catalogue notes about his own pictures, brought him acclaim and intellectual respectability as well as accusations of pretentiousness and wilful obscurity. To those who considered that his literary interests necessarily made his art visually weak, he responded defiantly while still in his early thirties that “some books have pictures and some pictures have books.”

One of the great lessons of his work, and one that accounts for his influence on artists whose subject matter was otherwise very different, was that the accumulated layers of association embedded in a specific image could themselves convey meaning. In this respect, and in his often deliberately anachronistic and contradictory quotations from earlier art, he came to be seen as one of the first practitioners of Postmodernism.

Kitaj's first one-man exhibition, at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1963, was a critical and commercial success, and his work remained in steady demand from museums and private collectors. Yet he continued to feel embattled, almost, it would seem, from a fundamental need to see himself in the role of a tragic figure.

He was quick to disassociate himself from the Pop Art that he helped to spawn at the Royal College, judging the light-hearted tone and references to popular culture in most of this work to be shallow and inconsequential; of this group he remained on close terms only with Hockney, whom he regarded as the outstanding draughtsman of his generation. Worldly success did not, in any case, diminish his essentially melancholic outlook, and the suicide in 1969 of his first wife, Elsi, to whom he had been married since 1953, sent him into a deep depression that substantially reduced his production as a painter for several years.

The numerous collage-based screenprints with which Kitaj disseminated his imagery in the 1960s were influential and widely admired, but in the mid-1970s, when he turned to life drawing as the pre-eminent ingredient of his art, he characteristically disowned most of this graphic work, which he had come to regard as facile and overly mechanical.

In defending what many in the art world regarded as a reactionary tendency, and in implicitly setting himself up as heir to a tradition of figurative art culminating through Degas and Cézanne in the work of Picasso and Matisse, Kitaj again courted controversy. An exhibition selected by him for the Arts Council in 1976, The Human Clay, provided a forum for these views; with his interviews and writings on the subject, it proved inspirational for those wishing to free art from the tyranny of a self-styled avant-garde but it also made him new enemies.

The torrent of abuse unleashed on him on the occasion of an exhibition of his drawings at Marlborough in 1980, which proved ominously prophetic of the even more vociferous attacks unleashed against him at the time of his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1994, was enough to convince him not to show his work again in London for five years. Nevertheless, he remained on intimate terms with painters such as Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, all of them leading practitioners of the so-called School of London, a phrase that Kitaj himself popularised when he used it in the essay for his Human Clay catalogue.

In the 1970s Kitaj also became absorbed with his renewed sense of identity as a (non-practising) Jew, especially after his first visit to Jerusalem in 1980, and he began to explore the Holocaust at great length in pictures and writing. In a book-length essay published in 1989 as First Diasporist Manifesto he expanded his notion of Jewish exile to encompass blacks, Arabs, homosexuals, Gypsies, Asians and political émigrés; all those, in fact, who are “widely despised, disliked, mistrusted, sometimes tolerated, even taken up here and there and shown a nice life”.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Kitaj considered all these adjectives to apply to his own position as an artist, which he continued to regard as precarious in spite of his secure reputation. His worst fears could only have been reinforced by the lack of response to a text in which he had invested such energy: the only serious review, by his old friend Gabriel Josipovici, was so critical that it left him with a sense of betrayal.

Kitaj exhibited his work on a fairly regular basis in America and had three major museum shows there, first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965, followed by a much appreciated retrospective in 1981 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and by stopovers of his 1994 Tate retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and again in Los Angeles.

Yet he never achieved the high reputation in his native country that he enjoyed in his adopted home in England, where he was part of a coterie of figurative painters for whom the human body and human experience were the central subjects. Among the artists with whom he felt a particularly affinity were Francis Bacon and three Jewish painters, Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff, who took part in his marriage ceremony to the American painter Sandra Fisher in December 1983.

However much of a recluse he became in later years, his presence in London over a period of more than three decades did much to assure the continued importance of painting, specifically of representational painting, and of traditions of drawing that had seemed in danger of dying out. In 1985 he was elected a Royal Academician, the first American to be so honoured since John Singer Sargent at the end of the 19th century.

The 1994 Tate retrospective should have been the culmination of Kitaj's career and a triumphant moment in his life. Perhaps too weighted with recent paintings, and burdened also with his literary inclinations in the form of lengthy explanatory texts which he hung next to his pictures, the exhibition had the unenviable distinction of being the most violently attacked solo show in living memory.

The anti-intellectualism, antiSemitism and chauvinistic distrust of foreigners that characterised the worst of these vindictively personal reviews brought out the shabbiest aspects of the British press and left Kitaj angry and deeply depressed. The death of his wife of a ruptured aneurysm on the brain only weeks after the close of the show seemed to him to be too much of a coincidence for it to have been caused by anything other than the traumatic stress of these prolonged and shameful attacks. The exhibition was much more warmly received in Los Angeles and New York, but by then the irreparable damage to his life had been done.

In interviews and in works such as Sandra Three, an installation presented at the Royal Academy Summer Show in 1997, Kitaj turned on his tormentors and accused them of murdering his wife. The art world rallied to his support: he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and three honorary doctorates in as many years, and numerous museums bought his later paintings.

The love affair with England was over, however, and in July 1997 he sold his house in Chelsea and returned to the US where his elder son, Lem, was already living. His 40 years in England were commemorated with a retrospective, R. B. Kitaj: An American in Europe, organised by Marco Livingstone for the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, which toured to Madrid, Vienna and Hanover. Further exhibitions followed at the National Gallery in London in 2001 (Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters), his first solo show in England since the Tate debacle, and at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts (Kitaj: Portrait of a Hispanist) in summer 2004.

Life in Los Angeles proved agreeable to Kitaj, though he was so traumatised by Sandra’s death that she became the obsessive subject of his later paintings. Every new publication was likewise named in her honour; an occasional magazine entitled Sandra followed by an issue number, reinforcing this sense of obsessive devotion.

In the “Los Angeles Pictures” shown first at the National Gallery, Kitaj obsessively represented himself and his late wife as angelic nude lovers locked in an erotic embrace. These sketchy works came as something of a surprise from an artist who had always expressed suspicion of any signs of spontaneity in his picture-making.

In 2000 Kitaj presented an exhibition of 100 works at Marlborough, New York, under the title How to Reach 67 in Jewish Art, a phrase he reprised for his next show at the gallery five years later (with five years, of course, added to his age) and which he used also for the memoirs he began writing in 2001. By the age of 40 Kitaj was already speaking about the onset of his old age, and by the time he had qualified for his bus pass he positively relished the prospect of acquiring an “old age style” as if by some automatic right. His work was last seen in London at a solo exhibition at Marlborough of Little Pictures in November 2006. These small canvases had the spontaneous quality of sketches. Brimming with ideas and humour, they marked a real return to form and promised the unforced arrival, at last, of that longed-for mature style.

In this desire to follow in the footsteps of Titian, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, all of whom transcended their earlier achievements in the final years of their lives, he demonstrated once again an almost painful self-consciousness. That he associated this desired condition with his Jewishness, which he judged to be at the centre of his identity as an artist, for good or ill, was entirely in keeping with his ambivalent stance as hero and pariah.

Kitaj was not an easy man to get to know. Even those who wrote books and exhibition catalogues about his work were persuaded by him to conduct their interviews by correspondence rather than face-to-face. Yet behind that reserved, sometimes secretive and brittle exterior he was one of the most passionate and committed artists of his time.

R. B. Kitaj, painter, was born on October 29, 1932. He died on October 21, 2007, aged 74