Avigdor Arikha

Biography

In December 1943 a commission came to a camp in Transnistria to take out Jewish children. The drawings a boy had made in a notebook he got from a soldier were shown to representatives of the Red Cross. The boy was fourteen, and he was still called Długacz.

He was born on 28 April 1929 in Rădăuți, in southern Bukovina, into a German-speaking Jewish family, and grew up in Czernowitz. His father was an accountant. In 1941 the family was deported to the camps of Transnistria, where his father was beaten to death. By the artist's own account, the drawings of those years showed executions and bodies in a mass grave. The boy survived because of these drawings: representatives of the Red Cross saw them, and in 1944 he went to Palestine with his sister. Seven of the drawings were published in Paris in 1971 as a facsimile, in a limited edition.

In Palestine he lived in a kibbutz in the central part of the country. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem under Mordechai Ardon. He changed his surname: “Arikha” is an Aramaic word meaning “long”, a translation of the old one. In 1948, during the Arab–Israeli War, he was severely wounded and lay in a coma for several days after surgery.

In 1949 he won a scholarship and went to Paris, to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he learned the fresco technique. From 1954 he lived in Paris permanently and often visited Israel. From 1961 he was married to the American poet and translator Anne Atik; they had two daughters. He became a friend of Samuel Beckett, and the friendship lasted until the writer's death. Arikha designed several of Beckett's books, and a note by Beckett was included in the catalogue of an exhibition of the artist's drawings.

In the late 1950s Arikha worked in an abstract manner, but later came to think of it as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and did only drawing and printmaking, always from life, finishing each subject in a single sitting. Painting came back in 1973. He worked in natural light, without a preliminary drawing and in a single sitting, on portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes, never from memory or from photographs. To my mind, the spatial composition of his pictures does betray an abstract past; critics mentioned Mondrian in this connection. Arikha himself rejected talk of a “return to figuration” and called himself a “post-abstract representational artist”. He illustrated Ernest Hemingway and Hayim Nahman Bialik.

Among his commissioned portraits are those of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1983), Lord Home of the Hirsel, a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1988), Catherine Deneuve (1990), and Pierre Mauroy for the city of Lille.

As an art historian he wrote a book on the drawings of Ingres (1986), a collection of essays and talks, “Peinture et Regard” (1991, reissued in 1994), “On Depiction” (1995, in English), and introductions to catalogues of works by Poussin. He lectured at Princeton, Yale, the Frick Collection and the Prado.

In 1998 a retrospective of his work was held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. From July 2006 to January 2007 the British Museum showed the one hundred prints and drawings he had bequeathed to it. In 2008 he gave many prints to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which mounted a retrospective of his prints, and from June to September the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid showed an exhibition of his work. He was a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (2005) and an honorary doctor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Avigdor Arikha died in Paris on 29 April 2010, the day after his eighty-first birthday. He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.