Word: arikha
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...emotional temperatures, from gelid beaux-arts nudes to the expressionist rant of political muralists in East Berlin. Much of it was instant art, and instantly disposable. But a striking deposit of achievement remains, and one of its components is the work of the Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha. A scrub-haired, passionately erudite man of 50, Arikha is best known in Paris, where he lives with his wife Anne, a poet, and his two daughters. Now a show of 22 of his oils at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gives an American audience its first look...
They are easy to miss-at first. Arikha loathes spectacle and the tyranny of impact; his paintings, small, low-colored, high-keyed, are owls, not peacocks. They are single images, enumerations of ordinary objects-a battered pair of black shoes, a stoneware jug, or a bunch of asparagus tied in blue paper set down with an odd, veiled discomposure. The size of the painting laconically follows the size of its subject. Isolated and closely scrutinized, these motifs give Arikha's canvases a likeness (insofar as painting can ever resemble writing) to the elliptical sentences of his friend Samuel Beckett...
...nudes and portraits by Lucien Freud, the 52-year-old grandson of Sigmund: more psychic territory is crossed in Freud's scrutiny of a few square inches of worn flesh than one might find in a whole roomful of recent American realism. A similar process happens in Avigdor Arikha's tenacious and diffident still lifes. They are small monuments to the difficulty of naming any object. And like many of the other works in this show, they testify that painting as a form of expression is still wide open, still able to surprise us - not dead...
Although they all come from live models or immediate motifs, none of Arikha's pages look as if they began with a firm, a priori grasp of reality. A case in point is his Self-Portrait Shouting One Morning, 1969. "I was in a filthy mood," Arikha recalls. "I climbed out of bed, yelling at my wife, yelling at the shaving mirror . . ." The bleary-eyed moment of evil temper is caught with acid precision in an image as transitory as the mood itself. The quick, scrubby notations for nose and cheek bone and wiry corncob hair compose themselves around...
...Arikha draws in order to see, as a writer might write in order to think. There is probably not an artist of his generation who has shown so vividly the questions and feedbacks that beset the strange activity known as drawing from life...