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Avigdor Arikha (April 28, 1929 – April 29, 2010) is an Israeli and
French painter, printmaker, and art historian.Avigdor Arikha was born to
German-speaking parents in Rădăuţi, near Czernowitz, in what was then called
Bukovina, and is today in Romania. (See Romania during World War II) His
family faced forced deportation in 1941 to the concentration camps of Western
Ukraine, where his father died. He managed to survive thanks to the drawings he
made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the International
Red Cross. As a result of that, both he and his sister were freed and brought to
Palestine in 1944. Between 1944 and 1948, he was in the Ma'aleh Hahamishah
Kibbutz. In 1948 he was severely wounded in Israel's War of Independence. From
1946 to 1949, he attended the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem;
its teaching was based on the Bauhaus methods. In 1949 he was awarded a
scholarship which enabled him to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris,
where he learned the fresco technique. Since 1954, Arikha has continuously
resided in Paris.In the late 1950s, Arikha evolved into abstraction and
established himself as an abstract painter, but he eventually came to think of
abstraction as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and began drawing, only
from life, treating all subjects in a single sitting. Continuing on this path
for the next eight years, his activity was confined to drawing and printmaking
until late 1973, when he felt an urge to resume painting. His practice has
remained to paint directly from the subject, using no preliminary drawing,
finishing a painting, pastel, print, ink or drawing in one session. He is noted
for his portraits, nudes, still lives, and landscapes, rendered realistically
and spontaneously, but clearly bearing the lessons of abstraction, and in
particular of Mondrian. He has also illustrated some of the texts of Samuel
Beckett, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the writer's
death.Arikha has painted a number of commissioned portraits, including that of
H.M. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1983), Lord Home of the Hirsel, former
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1988), both in the collection of the
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Other portraits include those of
Catherine Deneuve (1990) for the French State, or that of the former Prime
Minister Pierre Mauroy for the city of Lille.As an art historian, Arikha has
written catalogues for exhibitions on Poussin and Ingres for which he was
curator at the Musée du Louvre, the Frick Collection of New York, the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, and the Israel Museum Jerusalem. His writings include
Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Frick
Collection, New York, 1986); Peinture et Regard (Paris: Hermann, 1991,
1994); On Depiction (London: Bellew Publishing, 1995); and numerous
essays published in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Commentaire,
Literary Imagination, etc. He has also lectured widely, at Princeton University,
at Yale University, at the Frick Collection in New York, at the Prado Museum in
Madrid, and at many other venues. Most recently, he was invited by the
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid to select a number of works from its
collection and to write the entries for the catalogue accompanying the resulting
exhibition.From July 2006-January 2007 there was an exhibition at the British
Museum of Arikha's bequest to it of one hundred prints and drawings.From June to
September 2008 the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid hosted a major
retrospective exhibition of the artist. An exclusive preview was published in
Standpoint Arikha has been married since 1961 to the American poet and
writer Anne Atik, most recently author of a memoir on Samuel Beckett.Books on Arikha. Besides the many exhibition catalogues
published by his gallery, Marlborough Gallery, these include: Arikha, by
Samuel Beckett, Robert Hughes, André Fermigier (et al) (Paris: Hermann; London:
Thames and Hudson, 1985) Arikha, by Duncan Thomson (London: Phaidon,
1994)Avigdor Arikha, by Monica Ferrando and Arturo Schwarz (Bergamo:
Moretti & Vitali, 2001) Avigdor Arikha: From Life - Drawings and Prints,
1965-2005, by Stephen Coppel and Duncan Thomson (London: British Museum
Press, 2006), published to accompany their 2006-7 exhibition. *********
Born1929, Israeli/French. Art.edu: Bezalel Jerusalem, Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, Paris; phil: Sorbonne, Paris. Degrees: Hon. Professor,
National Academy of Fine Arts, China, Hangchow, 1995: Doctor
phil.H.C., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1997. Awards: Gold Medal,
Triennial, Milan, 1954; Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris,
Paris, 1987; Prix des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences, Fondation du
Judaisme Français, Paris, 1988 **** Israeli
painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer, of Romanian birth, active in
France. The drawings he made in deportation from Nazi labour camps at the age of
13 and 14 saved his life by attracting attention to his precocious talent. In
1944 he emigrated to Israel, living in a kibbutz near Jerusalem and studying art
at the Bezalel School in Jerusalem; after being severely wounded in 1948 in the
Israeli War of Independence, he continued his studies in Paris. He first made
his name as an illustrator. From 1957 to 1965 he produced abstract paintings
which had something in common with Art Informel but were characterised by his
particular sensitivity of touch and sumptuousness of colour. During this period
he also designed stained-glass windows. Arikha stopped painting in 1965, feeling
that it was impossible to continue in the same vein, and he restricted himself
first to drawing and then to etching in black and white. He resumed painting in
1973, this time working exclusively from life, painting quickly in oil on canvas
on an intimate scale well suited to his generally domestic subjects. Wary of his
own virtuosity and always receptive to the shocks of emotion and chance, Arikha
practised a kind of dynamic realism. Arikha's paintings from life after 1973,
calm and endowed with a feeling of plenitude arising from his mastery of colour
and amplitude of gesture, also have a muted drama because of the vibration of
the marks, tonal contrasts and spatial ambiguities, which together assure the
modernity of his work within a long tradition. ******** Born
in Romania, Avigdor Arikha survived the Holocaust as a young boy. He moved to
Palestine in 1944 where he studied at the Bauhaus at Bezalel, Jerusalem. After
receiving serious injuries in Israel’s war of Independence, Arikha moved to
Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Arikha’s style is always evolving,
beginning with figurative works in the 1950’s, moving to abstraction and
eventually creating observational studies. He is also a renowned art historian
who has curated exhibitions at the Louvre and the Frick Collection in New York
to name a few. ***** Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha passes away in Paris The
death of Arikha at the age of 81 leaves a tremendous hole in the artistic world.
The death of Avigdor Arikha at the age of 81 leaves a tremendous hole in the
artistic world. He had been a key figure in the local art scene since the 1950s,
even though he did not live here during most of that time, and his presence
seemed to constitute a bridge between art's past and modern painting. And
without falling into any cliches about the journey from the Holocaust to
rebirth, he represented an encounter with the lowest points of humanity, in the
childhood of which he was robbed, and a continuous search for truth throughout
his adult life. This search for truth, this experience of watching and
observing, was conducted with humility and profound understanding. Arikha began
drawing as a child in Romania, and until age 11 lived a sheltered life in a
cultured home. During World War II, his family was sent to concentration camps,
escaped and was caught again; Arikha sketched what he had seen in his notebook.
In 1944, he and his sister managed to reach Mandatory Palestine, and after some
years at Kibbutz Ma'aleh Hahamisha, he began studying art at Bezalel. He was
injured in the War of Independence, and in 1949 received a scholarship to study
art in Paris, which he then made his home. Though he lived in Israel for only a
short period of time, Arikha spoke Hebrew well and defined himself as an Israeli
artist. He maintained continuous ties with Israel, mounted many retrospective
exhibitions and visited frequently. But despite the great respect he enjoyed
here, he felt to the very last that he was rejected in Israel because of his
decision to settle in Paris. Arikha's two most important relationships were
with his wife, poet Anne Atik, whom he married in 1961, and his long friendship
with Irish author Samuel Beckett. Arikha credited Beckett with influencing his
decision to stay in Paris. Anne, who regularly served as a model for Arikha,
features in countless drawings, sketches and etchings that constitute a deeply
moving body of work, a continuous wonder, time and again, over his beloved and
over the secret of separation between the "I" and the other. His self-portraits,
almost cruelly self-aware, also reflect Arikha's uncompromising attempt to
capture and to wonder at the same time. Something of that can be felt in his
famous portraits, from the Queen of England and the Queen Mother to actress
Catherine Deneuve. During the last decade, Arikha presented an extensive
retrospective in the Israel and Tel Aviv museums, an exhibition of his etchings
and drawings at the British Museum in London, and a much lauded retrospective
exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. **** Avigdor
Arikha, an internationally renowned Israeli painter whose work captured both
the haunting beauty and the looming menace of everyday things, a vision informed
in no small part by his experience as a Holocaust survivor, died at his home in
Paris on Thursday, the day after his 81st birthday. The cause was
complications of cancer, said David Robinson, senior director of the Marlborough
Gallery in New York, which represents Mr. Arikha. He was a longtime resident of
Paris and also had a home in Jerusalem. Mr. Arikha (his full name is pronounced
AH-vig-dor ah-REE-kuh) was known for his depictions of his immediate orbit: the
view from his studio window, chairs and tables, clothing and other orderly
household things. He was also a portraitist, painting his friends and family as
well as luminaries like the actresses Moira
Shearer and Catherine
Deneuve, and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whose portrait was
commissioned by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. He often captured
the playwright Samuel Beckett, a close friend in Paris. The friendship
between Arikha family and Beckett, who died in 1989, is chronicled in “How It
Was” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), a memoir by Mr. Arikha’s wife, Anne Atik,
illustrated by Mr. Arikha. Formerly an abstract artist, Mr. Arikha renounced
abstractionism in the mid-1960s. “People who think there is anything new in the
arts are idiots,” he told The Washington Post in 1979. “In my early 30s I was
quite successful as an abstractionist. But I started painting my own set of
forms over and over again. Finally, it repulsed me.” While his later paintings
are obviously representational, they retain strong elements of abstraction in
their focus on the pure geometry of objects. Mr. Arikha called this twinned
style “post-abstract naturalism.” He came up with the name, as he told The Post
in the same interview, “after my shock at the stupidity of an art critic who
wrote about my very nice impressionist work.” Unusually for a working artist,
Mr. Arikha also wrote and lectured extensively on art history. He curated
several exhibitions at major museums, among them “J. A. D. Ingres: Fifty Life
Drawings from the Musée Ingres at Montauban,” shown in 1986 at the Frick
Collection in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His own art
is in the collections of the Louvre;
the Tate
Gallery in London; the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York; the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and elsewhere. In 2005, he was made a chevalier
of the Legion of Honor by the French government. Mr. Arikha abhorred artificial
light and worked only in daylight. As critics often remarked, this lent his art
luminous beauty. But for all their loveliness, his paintings are also
deliberately unsettling, with a current of unease running just below the
surface. On Mr. Arikha’s canvases, people and objects can be positioned with
discomforting asymmetry. Within a single painting, a white expanse like a wall
may be offset by a dark expanse, rendering the image at once spacious and
oppressive. He also cropped his subjects in unorthodox places, lopping off parts
of familiar objects — or worse still, people — to disturbing effect. In his
painting “Sunflowers” (2001), for instance, Mr. Arikha depicts two large, vivid
blooms, one seen completely, the other truncated disconcertingly at the left
edge of the canvas. While some critics took Mr. Arikha to task for making
representational art, others praised his lyricism, impeccable draftsmanship and
nuanced use of color. Reviewing an exhibition of his work at Marlborough in
2002, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times: “Painting this refined and
gorgeous is in short supply today and precious. Mr. Arikha, a throwback at 73,
reminds us what craft means and how pleasurable it is to see.” Mr. Arikha was
born on April 28, 1929, to a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, then
in Romania. (It is now Chernivtsi, in
Ukraine.) In 1941, at 12, he was deported by the Nazis to a Ukrainian labor
camp. There, on fragments of butcher paper, he drew what he saw around him. In
1944, he and his sister were rescued by the International Red Cross and
transported to Palestine.
Their mother was able to follow them there; their father was killed in the
Holocaust. As a youth, Mr. Arikha studied art in Jerusalem. In 1948, serving in
Israel’s war of independence, he was severely wounded and left for dead. He
recovered and made his way to Paris, where he studied at the École des
Beaux-Arts. Besides his wife, Ms. Atik, an American poet, Mr. Arikha is
survived by their daughters, Alba Smail and Noga Simonetta, and two
grandchildren. Deeply influenced by Asian art, Mr. Arikha liked to paint fast,
in a Zenlike state of consciousness. This transcendent state let art flow out of
him so freely that he typically finished a whole canvas in a single sitting.
“Economy of means is, in fact, the threshold of concentration,” Mr. Arikha told
The New York Times in 1986. “When I draw and paint, the essential thing is not
to know what I do, or else I cannot come to what I see.” ***** Hayim
Nahman Bialik (Hebrew: חיים נחמן ביאליק; January 9, 1873 – July 4, 1934),
also Chaim or Haim, was a Jewish poet who wrote in Hebrew. Bialik was one
of the pioneers of modern Hebrew poets and came to be recognized as Israel's national poet. Biography Bialik was born in Radi,
Volhynia in
Russian Empire to Yitzhak
Yosef Bialik, a scholar and businessman, and his wife Dinah (Priveh). Bialik's
father died in 1880, when Bialik was 7 years old. In his poems, Bialik
romanticized the misery of his childhood, describing seven orphans left
behind—though modern biographers believe there were fewer children, including
grown step-siblings who did not need to be supported. Be that as it may, from
the age 7 onwards Bialik was raised in Zhitomir by his stern Orthodox
grandfather, Yaakov Moshe Bialik. In Zhitomir he received a traditional Jewish
religious education, but also explored European literature. At the age of 15,
inspired by an article he read, he convinced his grandfather to send him to the
Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania, to
study at a famous Talmudic academy under Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda
Berlin, where he hoped he could continue his Jewish schooling while
expanding his education to European literature as well. Attracted to the Jewish
Enlightenment movement (haskala), Bialik gradually
drifted away from yeshiva life. Poems such as HaMatmid ("The Talmud
student") written in 1898, reflect his great ambivalence toward that way of
life: on the one hand admiration for the dedication and devotion of the yeshiva
students to their studies, on the other hand a disdain for the narrowness of
their world. At 18 he left for Odessa, the center of modern
Jewish culture in the southern Russian Empire, drawn by such luminaries as Mendele Mocher
Sforim and Ahad Ha'am. In Odessa,
Bialik studied Russian and German language and literature, and dreamed to enroll
in the Modern Orthodox
Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Alone and penniless, he made his living
teaching Hebrew. The 1892 publication of his first poem, El Hatzipor "To
the Bird," which expresses a longing for Zion, in a booklet edited by Yehoshua
Hone Ravnitzky (a future collaborator), eased Bialik's way into Jewish
literary circles in Odessa. He joined the so-called Hovevei Zion group and
befriended Ahad Ha'am, who had a great influence on his Zionist outlook.
In 1892 Bialik heard news that the Volozhin yeshiva had closed, and rushed home
to Zhitomir, to prevent his grandfather from discovering that he had
discontinued his religious education. He arrived to discover his grandfather and
his older brother both on their deathbeds. Following their deaths, Bialik
married Mania Averbuch in 1893. For a time he served as a bookkeeper in his
father-in-law's lumber business in Korostyshiv, near Kiev. But when this
proved unsuccessful, he moved in 1897 to Sosnowiec (then in Russia) a small town
near the border to Prussia and to Austria. In Sosnowiec, Bialik worked as a
Hebrew teacher, and tried to earn extra income as a coal merchant, but the
provincial life depressed him. He was finally able to return to Odessa in 1900,
having secured a teaching job. Literary career For the next two decades, Bialik
taught and continued his activities in Zionist and literary circles, as his
literary fame continued to rise. This is considered Bialik's "golden period". In
1901 his first collection of poetry was published in Warsaw, and was greeted with much
critical acclaim, to the point that he was hailed "the poet of national
renaissance." Bialik relocated to Warsaw briefly in 1904 as literary editor of
the weekly magazine HaShiloah
founded by Ahad Ha'am, a position he served for six years. In 1903 Bialik was
sent by the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa to interview survivors of the
Kishinev pogroms and
prepare a report. In response to his findings Bialik wrote his epic poem In
the City of Slaughter, a powerful statement of anguish at the situation of
the Jews. Bialik's condemnation of passivity against anti-Semitic violence is
said to have influenced the founding Jewish self-defense groups in Russia, and
eventually the Haganah in Palestine. Bialik
visited Palestine in 1909. In the early 1900s Bialik founded with Ravnitzky,
Simcha Ben Zion and Elhanan Levinsky, a Hebrew publishing house, Moriah,
which issued Hebrew classics and school texts. He translated into Hebrew various
European works, such as Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar, Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Cervantes' Don
Quixote, and Heine's poems; and from Yiddish S. Ansky's
The
Dybbuk. Throughout the years 1899-1915 Bialik published about 20 of his
Yiddish poems in different Yiddish periodicals in Russia. These poems are often
considered to be among the best achievements of modern Yiddish poetry of that
period. In collaboration with Ravnitzky, Bialik published Sefer
HaAggadah (1908-1911, The Book of Legends), a three-volume
edition of the folk tales and proverbs scattered through the Talmud. For the
book they selected hundreds of texts and arranged them thematically. The Book
of Legends was immediately recognized as a masterwork and has been reprinted
numerous times. Bialik also edited the poems of the medieval poet and
philosopher Ibn Gabirol. He began a
modern commentary on the Mishnah, but only completed Zeraim, the first of
the six Orders (in the 1950s, the Bialik Institute published a commentary on the
entire Mishnah by Hanoch Albeck, which is
currently out of print). He additionally added several commentaries on the
Talmud. Bialik lived in Odessa until 1921, when Moriah publishing house was
closed by Communist authorities, as a
result of mounting paranoia following the Bolshevik
Revolution. With the intervention of Maxim
Gorki, a group of Hebrew writers was given permission by the Soviet
government to leave the country. Move
to Germany Bialik then moved - via Poland and Turkey - to Berlin, where
together with his friends Ravnitzky and Shmaryahu Levin he
founded the Dvir publishing house. Bialik published in Dvir the
first Hebrew language scientific journal with teachers of the rabbinical college
Hochschule
für die Wissenschaft des Judentums contributing. In Berlin Bialik joined a
community of Jewish authors and publishers such as Samuel Joseph Agnon
(sponsored by the owner of Schocken
Department Stores, Salman Schocken, who
later founded Schocken Verlag), Simon
Dubnow, Israel Isidor
Elyashev (Ba'al-Machshoves), Uri Zvi Greenberg, Jakob
Klatzkin (founded Eschkol publishing house in Berlin), Moshe Kulbak, Jakob-Wolf
Latzki-Bertoldi (founded Klal publishing house in Berlin in 1921), Simon
Rawidowicz (co-founder of Klal), Salman Schneur, Nochum Shtif
(Ba'al-Dimion), Shaul
Tchernichovsky, elsewhere in Germany Shoshana Persitz with
Omanuth publishing house in Bad Homburg
v.d.H. and Martin Buber. They met in
the Hebrew Club Beith haWa'ad ha'Ivri בית הועד העברי (in Berlin's Scheunenviertel) or in
Café Monopol, which had a Hebrew speaking corner, as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's
son Itamar Ben-Avi recalled,
and in Café des Westens (both in Berlin's more elegant western boroughs).
The then still Soviet theatre HaBimah toured through
Germany, renowned by Albert Einstein, Alfred
Kerr and Max Reinhardt. Bialik
succeeded Saul Israel Hurwitz after his death (8 August 1922) as Hebrew chief
editor at Klal publishing house, which published 80 titles in 1922.[1]
On January 1923 Bialik's 50th birthday was celebrated in the old concert hall of
the Berlin Philharmonic
bringing together everybody who was anybody.[2]
In the years of Inflation
Berlin had become a centre of Yiddish and Hebrew and other foreign language
publishing and printing, because books could be produced at ever falling real
expenses and sold to a great extent for stable foreign currency. Many Hebrew and
Yiddish titles were also translated into German. Once the old inflationary
currency (Mark) was replaced by
the new stable Rentenmark and Reichsmark this period
ended and many publishing houses closed or relocated elsewhere, as did many
prominent publishers and authors. Move to Tel Aviv In 1924 Bialik relocated with his
publishing house Dvir to Tel Aviv,
devoting himself to cultural activities and public affairs. Bialik was
immediately recognized as a celebrated literary figure. He delivered the address
that marked the opening of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem
and was a member of its board of governors, and in 1927 he became head of the
Hebrew Writers Union, a position he retained for the remainder of his life. In
1933 his 60th birthday was celebrated with festivities nationwide, and all the
schoolchildren of Tel Aviv were taken to meet him and pay their respects to him.
Works and influence Bialik
wrote several different modes of poetry. He is perhaps most famous for his long,
nationalistic poems, which call for a reawakening of the Jewish people. However
no less effective are his passionate love poems, his personal verse or his
nature poems. Last but not least, Bialik's songs for children are a staple of
Israeli nursery life. From 1908 onwards, he wrote mostly prose. By writing his
works in Hebrew, Bialik contributed significantly to the revival of the Hebrew language, which
before his days existed primarily as an ancient, scholarly tongue. His influence
is felt deeply in all modern Hebrew literature. The generation of Hebrew
language poets who followed in Bialik's footsteps, including Jacob Steinberg and Jacob
Fichman, are called "the Bialik generation". To this day, Bialik is
recognized as Israel's national poet. Bialik House, his former
home at 22 Bialik Street in Tel Aviv, has been converted into a museum, and
functions as a center for literary events. The municipality of Tel Aviv
awards the Bialik Prize in his honor.
Kiryat Bialik, a suburb of
Haifa, and Givat Hen, a moshav bordering the city of Raanana, are named after him. He
is the only person to have two streets named after him in the same Israeli city
- Bialik Street and Hen Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is also a High School in
Montreal, Quebec named Bialik High School after him. Bialik's poems have been
translated into at least 30 languages, and set to music as popular songs. These
poems, and the songs based on them, have become an essential part of the
education and culture of modern Israel. Bialik wrote most of his poems using
"Ashkenazi" pronunciation, while modern Israeli Hebrew uses the Sephardi
pronunciation. Consequently, Bialik's poems are rarely recited in the meter in
which they were written. Death Bialik
died in Vienna, Austria, on July 3, 1934, following a failed prostate operation.
He was buried in Tel Aviv: a large mourning procession followed from his home on
the street named after him, to his final resting place.
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