Avigdor Arikha: Difference between revisions

 

Arikha was born to German-speaking parents in [[Rădăuţi]], near [[Czernowitz]], in what was then called [[Bukovina]], and is today in [[Romania]]. (''See [[Romania during World War II]]'') His family faced forced deportation in [[1941]] to the [[concentration camps]] of Western Ukraine, where his father died. He managed to survive thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the [[International Red Cross]]. As a result of that, both he and his sister were freed and brought to [[Palestine (mandate)|Palestine]] in 1944. Between 1944 and 1948, he was in the Ma'aleh Hahamishah [[Kibbutz]]. In 1948 he was severely wounded in [[Israel's War of Independence]]. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the [[Bezalel Academy of Art and Design|Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts]] in [[Jerusalem]]; its teaching was based on the [[Bauhaus]] methods. In 1949 he was awarded a scholarship which enabled him to study at the [[Ecole des Beaux Arts]] in [[Paris]], where he learned the [[fresco]] technique. Since 1954, Arikha has continuously resided in Paris.

In the late 1950s, Arikha evolved into abstraction and established himself as an [[abstract painter]], but he eventually came to think of abstraction as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and began drawing, only from life, treating all subjects in a single sitting. Continuing on this path for the next eight years, his activity was confined to drawing and printmaking until late 1973, when he felt an urge to resume painting. His practice has remained to paint directly from the subject, using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting, pastel, print, ink or drawing in one session. He is noted for his portraits, nudes, still lives, and landscapes, rendered realistically and spontaneously, but clearly bearing the lessons of abstraction, and in particular of [[Mondrian]]. He has also illustrated some of the texts of [[Samuel Beckett]], with whom he maintained until the writer's death a close friendship.

 

 

As an art historian, Arikha has written catalogues for exhibitions on [[Poussin]] and [[Ingres]] for which he was curator at the [[Musée du Louvre]], the [[Frick Collection]] of New York, the [[Museum of Fine Arts, Houston]], and the [[Israel Museum Jerusalem]]. His writings include <i>Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings</i> (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Frick Collection, New York, 1986); <i>Peinture et Regard</i> (Paris: Hermann, 1991, 1994); <i>On Depiction</i> (London: Bellew Publishing, 1995); and numerous essays published in the [[New York Review of Books]], [[The New Republic]], [[Commentaire]], [[Literary Imagination]], etc. He has also lectured widely, at [[Princeton University]], at [[Yale University]], at the [[Frick Collection]] in New York, at the [[Prado]] Museum in [[Madrid]], and at many other venues. Most recently, he was invited by the [[Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum]] in Madrid to select a number of works from its collection and to write the entries for the catalogue accompanying the resulting exhibition.

 

 

Arikha has been married since 1961 to the American poet and writer [[Anne Atik]], most recently author of a memoir on [[Samuel Beckett]].

 

 

 

==See also==

*[http://www.http://www.britishmuseum.co.uk/Product.aspx?ID=1134]

 

[[Category:1929 births|Arikha, Avigdor]]

[[Category:Living people|Arikha, Avigdor]]

[[Category:Contemporary painters|Arikha, Avigdor]]

[[Category:Israeli immigrants|Arikha, Avigdor]]

[[Category:Israeli painters|Arikha, Avigdor]]