Arikha's Arcadia - Avigdor Arikha, artist and writer - Critical Essay

Although Arikha, above the past 35 years, has mountained a sustained critical attack upon avant-gardism in both his painting and his writing, the author dioceses his art as fundamentally modernist.

For an artist who paints and draws the conventional genre of still life, landscape, portraits and figures, Avigdor Arikha is surprisingly high-profile. Arikha's decision to take upon a good portion of the artistic establishment by the agency of calling into question the actual premises on which modern art is lay the foundation ofed may explain why he is one as well as the other revered and reviled. His attacks upon abstraction as a worn-out mannerist ideology have wide general reception identifying him as a central figure in the in every one's mouth debate about the meaning and relevance of modernism. A number of novel shows, including a comprehensive traveling retrospective of paintings and drawings upon the occasion of his 70th birthday, provided an opportunity to assess the debate surrounding his art and ideas.

Arikha is fairly well known in America; he had a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1979 he exhibits regularly at Marlborough Gallery in fresh York, and aficionados avidly gather his art. In Europe he is something of a monstre sacra. For the last three decades he has shielded the practice of drawing and painting from life, not single in his own work, on the contrary also in lectures, essays and interviews. His erudition and verbal brilliance are rare and suspect in a visual artist. He has curated exhibitions for the Louvre (on Poussin) and the Musee de Beaux-Arts, Dijon (on Ingres). His work as an art historian is highly esteemed; he has lectur upon old-master painting at museums like as the Prado, where he is considered an apt on Velazquez. The Chinese art establishment has recognized him as a living master of the brush, naming him to the Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai. His enemies would like to dismiss him as a Dostoyevskian madman. on the other hand given the logic of his arguments and the clarity with which he states them, this is not easily done. Arikha is manifold and contradictory, reclusive and combative. A sophisticated intellectual, he works in a turn of expression accessible on many levels, including the greatest in quantity basic and democratic--that of the depiction of the familiar. Many with vestureed interests in the avant-garde consider Arikha's call for a go [i]or[/i] come back to drawing and painting directly from life an academic reaction to the whole gamut of recent and contemporary modes. On the other hand, a growing number of serious young artists, questioning conceptions they inherited but did not invent, admire him as a hero.

His is a fascinating story. When Leon Uris's novel Exodus first appeared, gossip columnist Leonard Lyon wrote that the character of the hero was based upon the young Arikha. Among the first concentration camp survivors sent to Israel, as a teenager Arikha fought in the Israeli war of independence and was seriously hurted In his nude self-portraits, the scars left by means of the shrapnel still lodged in his material part are often visible.

one time Israel became a state, Arikha dedicated himself to art. His talent was evident, and his kibbutz sent him to Paris, where he has lived, for the greatest in quantity part, since 1949. By the late 1950 he had become a well-known and felicitous abstract painter who showed at leading Paris galleries. In 1960 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held a retrospective of his abstract paintings. Despite a thriving career, in 1965 he went from one side a profound intellectual and esthetic crisis provok by means of the historic Caravaggio retrospective held in Paris that year. The confrontation with the fullnes and humanity of Caravaggio's achievement caused him to stop painting. The Caravaggio exhibition had a similar result on the American Abstract-Expressionist Alfred Leslie, who also put awayed abstraction and returned to drawing from life. Leslie's conversion was to the baroque, theatrical mode of speech of Caravaggio. By contrast, Arikha was drawn to Caravaggio's practice of working directly from life, as advocated through Caravaggio's contemporary Annibale Carracci. Unlike Caravaggio, Annibale left a large material substance of works on paper that Arikha has carefully studied.

For three years Arikha devot himself exclusively to drawing from life. His continuing dialogue with art history, chronicled in his bring togethered essays (published in English below the title On Depiction in 1995) caused him to question the real foundations on which modern art is turfed When he began to paint again in the early '70 he cast offed abstraction as an exhausted phraseology based on a utopian conception of order and progress alienated from the reality of the human condition. He called for replacing the conceptual a priori basis of nonobjectivity with empirical observation. He called for a fall off against art about art and theory-laden avant-garde manner of writings For the last 35 years, Arikha has put himself to proving that new art took the wrong turn round in choosing Cezanne over Degas. This stand has made him famous, on the contrary it has also made him the target of a great deal of hostility from those with a stake in maintaining the hegemony of the avant-garde in the pair the museums and the marketplace.