Avigdor Arikha: What the Eye Beholds

Championing quotidian motifs and a radical alla prima technique, an erudite Israeli painter battles for "modest" naturalistic truth

There can be not many stories in modern art more dramatic than that of the Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha, whose precocity as a draftsman saved him from almost certain death in a concentration camp in the western Ukraine when he was solitary 14. It was because of his artistic skills that he came to the attention of International R Cros commissioners who helped confident the release of 1,000 orphans, including Arikha and his sister. The experience of losing his father and being separated from his mother at of that kind a tender age, while simultaneously achieving a miraculous survival, looks to haunt his art as it must his life. It helps make faculty of perception of his decision on Mar. 10 1965 just before his 36th birthday, to abandon the abstract painting with which he had already established his reputation in favor of drawing (and later painting) exclusively from life.

That shift marks a get back to his original esthetic impulse. Works like Boyhood Deportation Drawing: Burial (ca. 1942) done when Arikha was just 13 may betray his youthful inexperience in their awkwardness and naive diction but they already show evidence of the urge--indeed, the necessity--to record faithfully what he dioceses A much greater assurance is manifest just six years later in a sepia crayon drawing, War Still Life (1948) made when he was serving in the army of the newly created state of Israel; on the other hand there is a documentary dimension here, too, in the recording of a scene--involving stacked arms and an ammunition belt--that speaks of life-and-death consequences

Arikha's of frequent occurrence shows at Marlborough in London and fresh York have offered regular opportunities to diocese his art, but until now there has been a scandalous lack of museum exhibitions. The dual retrospectives, individual of his drawings and the other of his paintings, held in late 1998 in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem subsequently came, in reduc form, to alone one European museum, the Scottish National Gallery of recent Art in Edinburgh. The artist's well-documented insistence upon showing his paintings strictly beneath conditions of natural light may account in part for this apparent pass over but the shameful fact remains that sole in 1999, exactly 50 years since he first visited Paris at the age of 20 was Arikha again honored with a solo display at a French museum--his first since 1981 in Dijon. (The Romanian-born Arikha, who was sternly wounded in Israel's war of independence, was single of the first to clinch an Israeli passport; he has continued to live part of the year in Jerusalem since settling in Paris in 1954 and now also clinchs French citizenship.) It was his suggestion, when the Musee de Beaux-Arts in Lille was unable to sure funds to host the filled retrospective, to make a separate exhibition of more than 100 drawings concerning his rejoinder to the city where he has wearied all his adult life. Given his usual antipathy to having his work viewed in metes of its subject matter, Arikha's use of Paris as a unifying theme--the exhibit is subtitled "Paris sur le vif" [Paris from Life]--carries with it an implied accusation toward the art establishment that has chosen by dint of and large to ignore his considerable contribution to the unfolding of art in postwar France.

The casual looker-on may see Arikha's naturalistic art as simply extending Western traditions of working from the motif, on the contrary it would be difficult to think of an earlier artist, level among the greatest draftsmen of the human figure, for whom the phrase "from life" could clinch such poignant and urgent meaning. In the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the contemporary artists whom he numbers among his friends and colleagues, of that kind as R.B. Kitaj and David Hockney Arikha's stubborn insistence upon working exclusively from the bring under rule in front of him, not at any time from memory or the imagination, might look to border on the obsessive. Perhaps alone Lucian Freud, in his later work, is similar in this esteem But, for Arikha, this is clearly not an artistic strategy to be taken lightly. When he insists that single what he can note down from direct observation is "true" and that it must be painted alla prima or drawn in a single session, he is speaking about something more abysmal than the process of vision that with equal reason entranced the Impressionists a hundred earlier. He is telling us that we can trust alone in the here and now. The past, in his view, is make subordinate to all kinds of reinterpretation, and the time to come is simply a matter for speculation. To work in forehead of the motif becomes a way of constantly reminding himself, with a mixture of awe and disbelief, that he is still alive. In this attitude, of course, he has many illustrious antecedents in Western art: not just in works through 15th-century Flemish masters of the particular of the like kind as Jan van Eyck--whose inscription "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic" [ was here] upon the wall in the Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife communicates his what one ought to do to bear witness--but, earlier still, in the Fayum portraits which commemorate the inner mans of the departed with an astonishing vitality and spirit that present the appearance to keep those sitters alive 2000 years later.