Avigdor Arikha
Encyclopedia
Avigdor Arikha was a painter, draughtsman
, printmaker, and art historian.
-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuţi
, but grew up in Czernowitz (now in Ukraine
), in Bukovina
, Romania
., His family faced forced deportation in 1941 to the Romanian-run concentration camps of Transnistria (now in 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, he was given a the name of another young prisoner who was killed and both he and his sister were freed and brought to Palestine
in 1944. 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 School of Art
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. From 1954 on 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 from complications of cancer on April 29, 2010, the day after his 81st birthday.
, to whose "instant décisif" it was analogous. He drew and painted exclusively from life, never from memory or photograph, 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, but in their radical spatial composition they clearly bear the lessons of abstraction, and in particular of Mondrian
. He also illustrated some of the texts of Samuel Beckett
, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the writer's death.
In the words of the art critic Marco Livingstone, 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"."
Arikha painted a number of commissioned portraits, including that of H.M. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
(1983), Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
(1988), both in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
, Edinburgh
. Other portraits include those of Catherine Deneuve
(1990) for the French State, or that of the former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy
for the city of Lille
.
As an art historian, Arikha wrote 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
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, 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. In 2006, 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.
, Jerusalem (of paintings) and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
(of prints and drawings), which travelled to Edinburgh's Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
in 1999. From July 2006-January 2007 there was an exhibition at the British Museum
of Arikha's bequest to it of one hundred prints and drawings. There was a retrospective of his prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2008. From June to September 2008 the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid hosted another retrospective exhibition of the artist.
Draughtsman
A draughtsman or draftsman , is a person skilled in drawing, either:*drawing for artistic purposes, or*technical drawing for practical purposes such as architecture or engineering...
, printmaker, and art historian.
Biography
Avigdor Arikha was born to GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuţi
Radauti
Rădăuţi is a municipality in Suceava County, Romania with a population of 27,759 inhabitants.-Geography and demographics:Rădăuţi is situated in Bucovina, northern Moldavia, on a plain between the Suceava and Suceviţa rivers, north from Suceava, at 375 m altitude...
, but grew up in Czernowitz (now in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
), in Bukovina
Bukovina
Bukovina is a historical region on the northern slopes of the northeastern Carpathian Mountains and the adjoining plains.-Name:The name Bukovina came into official use in 1775 with the region's annexation from the Principality of Moldavia to the possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy, which became...
, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
., His family faced forced deportation in 1941 to the Romanian-run concentration camps of Transnistria (now in 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, he was given a the name of another young prisoner who was killed and both he and his sister were freed and brought to Palestine
Palestine (mandate)
The British Mandate for Palestine, also known as the Palestine Mandate, The British Mandate of Palestine and the Mandate for Palestine, was a legal commission for the administration of Palestine, the draft of which was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922 and...
in 1944. Until 1948, he lived in Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha
Ma'ale HaHamisha
Ma'ale Hahamisha is a kibbutz in central Israel. Located in the Judean hills just off the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway, It falls under the jurisdiction of Mateh Yehuda Regional Council...
. In 1948 he was severely wounded in Israel's War of Independence. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the Bezalel School of Art
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design is Israel's national school of art, founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz. It is named for the Biblical figure Bezalel, son of Uri , who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle ....
in Jerusalem; its teaching was based on the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
methods. In 1949 he was awarded a scholarship which enabled him to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where he learned the fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
technique. From 1954 on 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 from complications of cancer on April 29, 2010, the day after his 81st birthday.
Artistic career
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. He became "perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century", in the words of the obituary in the Economist magazine. His practice thereafter remained to paint 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 his masterly draughtsmanship enabled him to abide until the very end of his life by this principle of immediacy, partly inspired by Chinese brush painting. It was a principle he shared with his close friend Henri Cartier-BressonHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...
, to whose "instant décisif" it was analogous. He drew and painted exclusively from life, never from memory or photograph, 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, but in their radical spatial composition they clearly bear the lessons of abstraction, and in particular of Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
. He also illustrated some of the texts of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the writer's death.
In the words of the art critic Marco Livingstone, 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"."
Arikha painted a number of commissioned portraits, including that of H.M. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was the queen consort of King George VI from 1936 until her husband's death in 1952, after which she was known as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, to avoid confusion with her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II...
(1983), Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
(1988), both in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is an art gallery on Queen Street, Edinburgh, Scotland. It holds the national collections of portraits, all of which are of, but not necessarily by, Scots. In addition it also holds the Scottish National Photography Collection...
, Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
. Other portraits include those of Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve is a French actress. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof and mysterious beauties in films such as Repulsion and Belle de jour . Deneuve was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1993 for her performance in Indochine; she also won César Awards for that...
(1990) for the French State, or that of the former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy
Pierre Mauroy
Pierre Mauroy is a French Socialist politician and former Prime Minister under François Mitterrand . Mauroy also served as Mayor of Lille from 1973 to 2001. Mauroy is currently emeritus mayor of Lille.-Biography:...
for the city of Lille
Lille
Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...
.
As an art historian, Arikha wrote catalogues for exhibitions on Poussin
Poussin
Poussin refers to:*Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian mathematician*Charles-Louis-Joseph-Xavier de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian geologist and mineralogist, father of Charles Jean*Nicolas Poussin , French painter...
and Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
for which he was curator at the Musée du Louvre, the Frick Collection
Frick Collection
The Frick Collection is an art museum located in Manhattan, New York City, United States.- History :It is housed in the former Henry Clay Frick House, which was designed by Thomas Hastings and constructed in 1913-1914. John Russell Pope altered and enlarged the building in the early 1930s to adapt...
of New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Israel Museum
Israel Museum
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
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, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Commentaire, Literary Imagination, etc. He has also lectured widely, at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, at the Frick Collection
Frick Collection
The Frick Collection is an art museum located in Manhattan, New York City, United States.- History :It is housed in the former Henry Clay Frick House, which was designed by Thomas Hastings and constructed in 1913-1914. John Russell Pope altered and enlarged the building in the early 1930s to adapt...
in New York, at the Prado Museum in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, and at many other venues. In 2006, 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.
Exhibits
Arikha showed frequently (every two years, in London and New York) at the gallery that represented him since 1972, Marlborough, and over the decades he had over two dozen solo shows. In 1998 Arikha had a major retrospective at the Israel MuseumIsrael Museum
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
, Jerusalem (of paintings) and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was established in 1932 in a building that was the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. The museum moved to its current location on King Saul Avenue in...
(of prints and drawings), which travelled to Edinburgh's Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, holds the national collection of modern art. When opened in 1960, the collection was held in Inverleith House, at the Royal Botanic Gardens...
in 1999. From July 2006-January 2007 there was an exhibition at the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
of Arikha's bequest to it of one hundred prints and drawings. There was a retrospective of his prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2008. From June to September 2008 the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid hosted another retrospective exhibition of the artist.
Books on Arikha
- Arikha, by Samuel BeckettSamuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Robert HughesRobert Hughes (critic)Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...
, André Fermigier(et al.) (Paris: Hermann; London: Thames and Hudson, 1985) - Arikha, by Duncan Thomson (London: Phaidon, 1994)
- Avigdor Arikha, by Monica Ferrando and Arturo Schwarz (Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 2001)
- Avigdor Arikha: From Life - Drawings and Prints, 1965-2005, by Stephen Coppel and Duncan Thomson (London: British Museum Press, 2006), published to accompany their 2006-7 exhibition.
- Arikha, catalogue of the exhibition at the Thyssen-Borenmisza Collection, Madrid, Ed. Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza 2008.
External links
- Arikha at Marlborough
- Arikha Online
- http://britishmuseum.live.venda.com/bin/venda?ex=co_wizr-locayta&template=wz_locayta&pageno=1&perpage=10&collate=ivtype%3Acat%3Aprice%3Apdxtpricecat%3Apdxtexhibition%3Apdxteventtype%3Apdxtmemtype%3Apdxttheme%3Apdxtgiftrcpnt%3Apdxtworldculture%3Apdxtarttheme%3Apdxtbooksubject%3Apdxtjewellmaterial%3Apdxtornamenttheme%3Apdxtpostcardtheme%3Apdxtstationerytype%3Apdxttoystype%3Apdxttypebook%3Apdxttypeca%3Apdxttypedvd%3Apdxttypefood%3Apdxttypejewellery%3Apdxttypekh%3Apdxttypeornmet&fieldinvt=type&termtextinvt=invt&typeinvt=exact&typekeywordsearch=keyword&termtextkeywordsearch=ArikhaTheBritish Museum - Avigdor Arikha]
- Avigdor Arikha at the Engel Gallery