16 Facts About Avigdor Arikha

Avigdor Arikha immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1944, together with his sister.

Avigdor Arikha was married from 1961 until his death to the American poet and writer Anne Atik, with whom he had two daughters.

Avigdor Arikha died in Paris on April 29,2010, the day after his 81st birthday.

Avigdor Arikha engaged in drawing and printmaking only for the next eight years.

Avigdor Arikha painted directly from the subject in natural light only, using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting, pastel, print, ink, or drawing in one session.

Avigdor Arikha never drew from memory or photographs, aiming to depict the truth of what lay before his eyes at that moment.

Avigdor Arikha is noted for his portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, rendered realistically and spontaneously.

Avigdor Arikha painted a number of commissioned portraits, including that of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, both in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

Avigdor Arikha illustrated texts by Samuel Beckett, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the writer's death.

Avigdor Arikha was truculently insistent that he was not part of any "return to figuration", but rather had found his own way as "a post-abstract representational artist".

Avigdor Arikha's writings include Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings ; Peinture et Regard ; On Depiction ; and numerous essays published in such journals as the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Commentaire, Literary Imagination, etc.

Avigdor Arikha was invited to speak at Princeton University, Yale University, the Frick Collection in New York, and the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Avigdor Arikha showed frequently at the gallery that represented him from 1972, Marlborough, and over the decades he had over two dozen solo shows.

In 1998 Avigdor Arikha had a major retrospective at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which travelled to Edinburgh's Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1999.

The Estate of Avigdor Arikha has been represented by Blain Southern since 2018, with the first exhibition of landscapes in Berlin.

In June 2019,50 of Avigdor Arikha's works were exhibited in a retrospective of his work at the Benaki Museum in Athens.