Arikha - Hardcover

Thomson, Duncan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714830100 ISBN 13: 9780714830100

Publisher: Phaidon Inc Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

Avigdor Arikha is one of the most independent-minded artists of our time. In 1965 at the height of a successful career as an abstract painter in Paris and New York he suddenly stopped painting to return to drawing from life in order to assuage a 'violent hunger in the eye' released by his experience of the great Caravaggio exhibition of that year. When he returned to painting in 1973 it was to begin on the series of intensely observed portraits, nudes and still lifes for which he is now known world wide. His intimate still lifes include such 'local' subjects as a bundle of asparagus, a corner of his Paris studio and the books on his library shelves. His portraits range from informal studies of his close friends the playwright Samuel Beckett and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to striking portrayals of public figures, among them the former British Prime Minister Lord Home and the Queen Mother. This book, based on interviews with the artist, surveys Arikha's entire career and shows his work from the drawings he made as a child in a Nazi concentration camp to the passionately observed and beautifully composed paintings of the last five years. Arikha divides his time between Paris and Jerusalem.

About this title

About the Author:

Duncan Thomson is Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

From Publishers Weekly:

Loss, displacement and the uncertainty of existence animate the edgy realist paintings and graphics of Romanian-born Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha. Deported at age 12 to a Nazi labor camp, where he made powerful pencil drawings of the unfolding nightmare, Arikha helped his mother and sister survive, but his father, brutally beaten, died of heart failure in 1942. The family was reunited in Palestine. As a soldier during Israel's war of independence, Arikha almost died. His life-enhancing art upsets conventional ways of seeing by discovering fragile beauty and unexpected meanings in taken-for-granted faces, interiors, streets and objects. His nudes are disquieting existential statements, as reflective as they are provocative. His 34-year friendship with Samuel Beckett nurtured his unblinking view of the human condition. Thomson, Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, has produced a perceptive, stunningly illustrated biographical-critical study.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Inc Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0714830100
• ISBN 13: 9780714830100
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255