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Indepth Arts News:
"Avigdor Arikha: Works from the Estate"
2011-03-30 until 2011-05-07
Marlborourgh Fine Art
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
The playwright Samuel Beckett and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti have been major influences on Arikha’s art. These intense friendships, begun in the mid-‘50’s when the artist was a successful abstract painter, endured for the rest of their lives, and accompanied Arikha’s courageous switch from abstraction to what he was to call his ‘post-abstract naturalism’ in 1965, at the age of 36. This first exhibition of works from the artist’s estate, following his death last year, covers the last 45 years of a life intensely lived as artist, writer on art, and occasional lecturer and exhibition organiser.
His early start, at the age of 13, drawing harrowing scenes of the concentration camps came to the attention of the Red Cross, which was able to extract him, among some 1500 children, and transfer them to Palestine in the middle of the war. There Arikha studied at the Bezalel [National] Art School, then directed by the abstract-leaning artist and former Bauhaus pupil, Mordecai Ardon. Ten years later, already with a successful artist’s career in the new state of Israel, Arikha left to further his studies in Europe, first in Sweden, before settling in Paris in 1954, which was then enjoying the heyday of the second ‘Ecole de Paris’ of Art Informel/Tachisme.
After a further ten years of exhibiting his abstract
work in Europe, an encounter with Caravaggio’s strikingly realist painting ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ in the Louvre, which chimed with Giacometti’s repeated encouragement to ‘work from life’, led to a Road to Damascus moment in his approach to making art.
In retrospect, Arikha was to call the ensuing period from 1965 to 1973, when he renounced the seduction of colour and paint and restricted himself to drawing and making prints in black and white, his ‘years of crisis’. He drew the lesson from the master of ellipsis, Beckett, that every mark - for a writer, every word – had to be justified. Those were years he devoted to re-educating his eye and honing the skill of observation and transmission of eye-to-hand dexterity, to which this exhibition of 70 works bears witness. The exhibition covers all the media he embraced since that moment in 1965: first with pencil, graphite and ink brush drawings, and etching and aquatint prints; after 1973 introducing colour in painting and watercolour again, and since 1986, with colour pastels.
Arikha placed no limits on his subject matter – no privileging of one genre over another – but observed a strict rule for its execution. All works were to be finished in one sitting without correction or revision, in order to capture the immediacy of the moment. This rule served to master the ability to abstract a telling rendition, with the movement of the hand across paper or canvas, of that detail on which his eye had chanced to focus. The speed and intensity of execution meant that works had necessarily to be domestic-sized, scarcely if ever larger than one metre across; easy to hold - on his lap, in a hospital corridor, on a train station platform, or in the restricted space of the kitchen, his book-lined study, a stairwell or a doorway. Those casual details, or momentary contortions of face or body which we might skim over, Arikha strove to capture them in order to reveal the utter strangeness that objects, angles and surfaces, or facial expressions and body movements present, in moments of informal or unchecked discovery. The resulting work often exhibits an apparently accidental asymmetry, itself an assurance of the authenticity of the moment, but which derives from the skill of years of painting in the abstract. This paradoxical combination which the artist chose to call his ‘post-abstract naturalism’ led the art historian Barbara Rose to sum up his approach as inverting the usual ‘This is what I see’ into ‘Is this what I see?’ After a visit to this exhibition, visitors might well leave with a sharpened awareness of, and delight in, the strangeness of things seen.
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