R.B. Kitaj, who died on Sunday at his Los Angeles home at 74, could be called the Zarathustra of contemporary art. With characteristics of a prophet and jester alike, he produced complex, compelling, at times knowingly irksome images that were both intensely personal and able to address the major themes of modern history and identity politely avoided by most art of his time.

His work broke a modernist taboo — before that became fashionable — by being unabashedly literary.

But as wordy and referential as he could be, Kitaj was always a consummately visual artist. In mid-career he turned back to drawing with such gusto as to prompt Robert Hughes to opine that he “draws better than almost anyone else alive.”

Kitaj was born Ronald Brooks in Cleveland on October 29, 1932, taking his Viennese refugee stepfather’s surname when his mother remarried in 1941. He adopted in the process a rapport bordering on obsession with a displaced European intelligentsia. In his “First Diasporist Manifesto” (1989), he described his paintings as “a refugee’s suitcase, a portable ark of the covenant.”

After spells as a merchant seaman and Army service in Europe, Kitaj studied in Vienna, Paris, and the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford on the GI Bill, and then went on to the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in the stellar class of 1960 that included David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Patrick Caulfield. These artists were all associated with the British Pop Art movement, but in Kitaj’s case, the identification was misleading. If his early work had Pop’s cool, it was also unapologetically highbrow.

In 1969 Kitaj was devastated when his first wife died of a drug overdose, bringing his artistic production to an abrupt halt. His artistic recuperation came about through intense drawing of the human figure and a rededication to traditional Western painting. In the 1960s he had opposed the New York scene’s abstract formalism. As an intellectual among painters in the 1970s, he pitted himself against the ascendancy of conceptual art.

He experimented with styles rooted in Impressionism, Symbolism, and the Old Masters. With the encouragement of Sandra Fisher, who later became his wife, he turned to pastels. Their particular inspiration was Degas, whom he playfully called “my favorite anti-Semite” (a dubious accolade Kitaj also extended to Ezra Pound).

In a typically bombastic preface to the catalog of his 1976 show “The Human Clay,” Kitaj put forward the idea of a “School of London” to rival Paris and New York. Subsequently, Kitaj would be included in exhibitions with his friends Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff under the School of London rubric, which became a byword for resurgent, expressive realism.

Kitaj’s imagery often dealt with sex, drawing on a personal fascination with “the undertaste” of prostitution, which he liked to quote Flaubert as coining. His works could deal in a way that was both haunting and arousing with the alienations of sexual languor in an archetypal modern city.

It was a telling coincidence that Kitaj rediscovered artistic and Jewish tradition simultaneously. In the catalog of a one-man exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1985, Kitaj quoted the composer Arnold Schönberg: “I have long since resolved to be a Jew … I regard that as more important than my art.” He used a chimney as a symbol of the Holocaust. In retrospect, however, earlier works of a political and intellectual nature, such as “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg” (1960) or “Isaac Babel riding with Budyonny” (1962) invariably had Jewish connotations, too, if only that Luxemburg and Babel were Jewish. Kitaj liked the idea, adapted from the Kabala, that pictures could periodically change their meaning.

Kitaj’s affirmation of his Jewishness was strictly in the secular, intellectual style of agnostic Jews such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, “the exemplary and perhaps ultimate Diasporist,” according to Kitaj’s manifesto. Benjamin became his alter ego. “The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin),” 1972–74, plays off sets of narrative that have lost their intelligibility; the layers of “citations” — the jigsaw puzzle proletarian, the animated talkers, the café as “open air interior” — all relate to aspects of Benjamin’s theories and his “agitational usage” of sources and references.

Kitaj’s own capacity to agitate was epitomized by the critical response to his retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, when one reviewer after the next lambasted him with such catcalls as “namedropper,” “pseudo-intellectual,” and “existentialist bull—.” Kitaj was already devastated by this onslaught when personal tragedy caught up with him. While attending his mother on her deathbed in America he learned that his wife Sandra had died suddenly of an aneurism. Like Coleman Silk in his friend Philip Roth’s novel “The Human Stain” (a character likely in part to have been modeled on Kitaj), he believed that — aiming at him — the critics had murdered his wife.

After this “Tate War,” as he described it, Kitaj decamped to America, settling for his last decade in Los Angeles, where his children by his first wife, including the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, were living. He bought a house that had formerly served the actor Peter Lorre, painting his studio, a former garage, van Gogh yellow. After producing a series of agitprop-like tableaux taking on his critics, whom he viewed as “anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-foreign, and anti-intellectual,” his anger abated in an extended series of lustrously lyrical paintings memorializing Sandra, the posthumous muse of his “Los Angeles” paintings.

He is survived by three children, Lem Kitaj (nom de plume Lem Dobbs), Dominie Lee Kitaj, and Max Kitaj; and three grandchildren.