The lone figure of America's General Custer stands with his feet apart, gun pulled from its holster, ready to face the oncoming enemy. On the right side, a multiplicity of fragmented forms fills the space: disembodied heads, torsos cut off from arms and legs and severed body parts float in an imaginary space unanchored by gravity or logic. The splintered bodies and General Custer's defiant stance remind us of the disastrous outcome of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Kitaj renders the forms in a bold cartoon-like manner: an armature of black lines delineates the forms, their mass defined in striking hues of red, blue and brown.

However, Kitaj recently explained that this was not the case: "I guess its one of the very few pictures with a Pop aura about it.... The cowboy was not meant to be General Custer as they stated. But the right hand side is quite interesting because it was taken from some extrordinary American Indian images which appeared in some very important publication of the Smithsonian Institute which appreared around the turn of the last century showing battle details. Kitaj, email to James Hyman, 9 July 2007

The Bells of Hell is a rare example of Kitaj's Pop Art style, where the Surrealist idea of 'free association' and the composition field of Abstract Expressionism unite amidst imagery drawn from literary, historical and political sources. Kitaj borrows symbolic motifs from American-Indian pictographs, creating a discordant arrangement where forms become ciphers and meaning is gleaned from the association of opposing parts. Kitaj used an 1893 Smithsonian Institute study as his inspiration for the recreation of the battle scene. Marco Livingstone writes of the work,

'Kitaj quotes literally from the illustrations in the Smithsonian in order to produce a modern version of a historical narrative picture, one that deals with an actual event... both through the eyes of contemporary witnesses and from the perspective of an artist living a century later.' (Marco Livingstone, Kitaj, London 1999, p.14)

Often associated with the Pop movement which swept the London art scene in the early 1960s, Kitaj's art is unique in its sheer originality. In 1959, two years before painting the present work, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art, studying alongside David Hockney. A remarkable example from this period of intense artistic activity, The Bells of Hell encapsulates Kitaj's artistic preoccupations at the time. The historical subject, figurative theme and bold depiction of imaginary forms unite to create a work which breaks with the conventional pictorial language of perspective and stylistic unity. Sparking with energy and animated from edge to edge, The Bells of Hell stands apart from Kitaj's early 1960s works as a stunning tour de force of compositional daring.