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Avigdor Arikha (originally Victor Długacz) was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in [[Rădăuţi]], but grew up in [[Czernowitz]] in [[Bukovina]], [[Romania]] (now in [[Ukraine]]).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1083917.html|title=His Lifelines, Haaretz|website=haaretz.com|accessdate=January 31, 2018}}</ref> His family faced forced deportation in 1941 to the Romanian-run [[concentration camps]] of Transnistria, where his father died. He survived thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the [[International Red Cross]].
Arikha [[aliyah|immigrated]] to [[Mandatory Palestine|Palestine]] in 1944, together with his sister. Until 1948, he lived in Kibbutz [[Ma'ale HaHamisha]]. 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 Art]] in [[Jerusalem]]. In 1949 he won a scholarship to study at the [[Ecole des Beaux Arts]] in Paris, where he learned the [[fresco]] technique. From 1954, Arikha resided in Paris. Arikha was married from 1961 until his death to the American poet and writer [[Anne Atik]], with whom he had two daughters. Arikha died in Paris on April 29, 2010,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/arts/01arikha.html|title=Avigdor Arikha, Israeli Artist of the Everyday, Dies at 81|first=Margalit|last=Fox|date=May 1, 2010
==Artistic career==
In the late 1950s, Arikha 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. He engaged in drawing and printmaking only for the next eight years. In 1973, he resumed painting and became "perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century", as he was hailed in an obituary in ''Economist'' magazine.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.economist.com/node/16103920|title=Avigdor Arikha|website=The Economist|accessdate=January 31, 2018|
Arikha painted directly from the subject in natural light only, using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting, pastel, print, ink, or drawing in one session. His profound knowledge of art techniques and masterly draughtsmanship enabled him to abide by this principle of immediacy, partly inspired by Chinese brush painting. It was a principle he shared with his close friend [[Henri Cartier-Bresson]],<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/museums/photogallery/bresson/gal_3-15.htm|title=Washingtonpost.com: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson|website=www.washingtonpost.com|accessdate=January 31, 2018|
He never drew from memory or photographs, aiming to depict the truth of what lay before his eyes at that moment. He is noted for his portraits, nudes, [[still lifes]], and landscapes, rendered realistically and spontaneously. In their radical spatial composition, his work clearly harks back to abstraction, and in particular [[Piet Mondrian|Mondrian]].
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==Artistic style==
Art critic Marco Livingstone wrote that Arikha "bridged the modernist avant-garde of pure abstraction with traditions of observational drawing and painting stretching back to the Renaissance and beyond. He was truculently insistent that he was not part of any "return to figuration", but rather had found his own way as "a post-abstract representational artist"."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/avigdor-arikha-artist-and-scholar-who-sought-to-capture-existential-truths-in-the-everyday-1990003.html|title=Avigdor Arikha: Artist and scholar who sought to capture existential|date=June 3, 2010|website=independent.co.uk|accessdate=January 31, 2018|
==Art catalogues and public speaking==
As an art historian, Arikha wrote catalogues for exhibitions on [[Poussin]] and [[Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres|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]] in Jerusalem. His writings include ''Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings'' (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Frick Collection, New York, 1986); ''Peinture et Regard'' (Paris: Hermann, 1991, 1994; new, augmented edition 2011); ''On Depiction'' (London: Bellew Publishing, 1995); and numerous essays published in such journals as the [[New York Review of Books]],<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/11/06/pintor-real/|title='Pintor Real'|first=Avigdor|last=Arikha|date=November 6, 1986
He was invited to speak at [[Princeton University]], [[Yale University]], the [[Frick Collection]] in New York, and the [[Prado]] Museum in [[Madrid]]. In 2006, he was invited by the [[Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum]] in Madrid to select a number of works from its collection and write entries for the exhibit catalogue.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/exposiciones/2006/Arikha/index_ing.htm|title=Arikha|website=www.museothyssen.org|accessdate=January 31, 2018|
==Exhibits==
Arikha showed frequently (every two years, in London and New York) at the gallery that represented him from 1972, Marlborough, and over the decades he had over two dozen solo shows.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.marlboroughfineart.com/biography-Avigdor-Arikha-53.html|title=Marlborough|website=www.marlboroughfineart.com|accessdate=January 31, 2018|
==Awards and recognition==
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