Mirror with self portrait and press, 1971 |
Arikha’s pictures from a hard-fought lifetime
After 40 year, the artist Avigdor Arikha has fulfilled his wish to have his work in the British Museum, writes Gerald Isaaman
VISITING the British Museum 40 years ago, the Jewish artist Avigdor Arikha uttered a secret wish: “Please God I shall one day hang here beside Durer – and not be ashamed.”
And it was too difficult a wish because Arikha, who had made a significant reputation for himself as an abstract artist, had suddenly overthrown a sterile regime to return to his boyhood skills of graphic drawings and intimate portraiture.
“I felt I had hit the bottom,” he declared. “At that point I restricted myself to drawing and etching from observation only, as well as studying art history. But I did not allow myself to paint.”
That came later, and he was distinguished to be commissioned to paint the Queen Mother, the actress Catherine Deneuvre and fellow artist Kitaj, but the wonder of his art lay in his dramatic, black and white drawings, his brush and sumi ink work, lithographs, sugar aquatints and etchings.
You can see them now in the British Museum, which has become the honoured home of an extraordinary bequest of 100 original works by Arikha because, he says, it has “the best drawings anywhere on earth” – and where they are now on show.
The exhibition is all the more vital because of Arikha’s own hard-fought, tempestuous life. Born in Romania in 1929, he and his parents were carted off to Nazi concentration camps in 1941, his father dying from a beating, Arikha’s life saved by working in an iron foundry while he captured in drawings the hell of death he witnessed.
His freedom working on an Israeli farming kibbutz enabled him to study art, going off to Paris where he lived for many years, his life there enhanced by his close friendship with the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett over 33 years.
Jerusalem and Paris are now his homes, but he has travelled widely, as is reflected in the exhibition, in which the drama of his life, his loves, familiar landscapes and delights are depicted with an absorbing skill that penetrates his subjects.
They range from the simple, inanimate shoes and socks, an umbrella, an old armchair, into which he breathes creative life, to sensual nude studies, sensitive, loving portraits, Beckett among them, and scenes of mocking Hollywood hills, New York musicians, a crushing collision of cars or an apple tree searching for the sky in Jerusalem.
One of the most striking is his inspired self-portrait of himself, from 1973, as an intense young man, eyes glowering behind glasses from the horrors he has seen and mouth bellowing protest at a world that remains wicked.
There is also an etching of a hand reaching out, almost moving, an echo perhaps of Durer at his best. But this is Arikha’s own tribute. And he certainly has no reason whatsoever for feeling ashamed of his own considerable and considerate talent.
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