Arikha: A Breath

Published 1 December 2020

by ERIS & the Benaki Museum www.eris.press/a-breath

AV I G D O R A R I K H A a br e at h

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ERIS

BENAKI MUSEUM

t h e c ata l o gu e

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independent-minded artists of the twentieth century. In 1965, at the height of a successful career as an abstract painter, 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 at the Louvre that year. When he returned to painting in 1973, it was to begin a series of intensely observed portraits, nudes, and still lifes for which he is known worldwide. vigdor arikha was one of the most

From 19 June until 8 September 2019, the Benaki Museum presented the first-ever exhibition in Greece devoted to Arikha, a modern master of figurative painting. The exhibition showcased more than fifty of his works gathered from the artist’s own collection (now part of private collections and the artist’s estate), as well as deportation childhood drawings, and a selection of pages from some of the artist’s sketch books.

This impeccably produced three-volume slipcased edition chronicles the exhibition and its contents in painstaking detail.

The range of Arikha’s achievement is underlined by the inclusion of six of his essays on art, which are in equal measure perceptive, erudite, and forceful. These are accompanied by valuable critical commentaries and essays on Arikha and his work by, amongst others, Jean Clair, Monica Ferrando, and Michael Peppiatt. The catalogue closes with a wealth of illuminating reference material documenting the artist’s life and career, as well as rarely before seen archival photographs of Arikha himself.

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ta b l e of c on t e n t s

1 d i r e c t o r ’ s f o r e wo r d

George Manginis

5 av i g d o r a r i k h a : a r e c o l l e c t i o n

Jean Clair

15 i n c on v e r sat ion

Michael Peppiatt & Manos Dimitrakopoulos

35 n e s h a m a h : t h e b r e a t h o f av i g d o r a r i k h a

Savvas Michail

41 av i g d o r a r i k h a : t h e ‘ l o g i c a l m i r ac l e ’ o f pa i n t i n g

Monica Ferrando

69 av i g d o r a r i k h a : s e l e c t e d w r i t i n g s o n a r t

Looking at Painting 71 · From Prayer to Painting 73 · What Modernity? 77 On Borders and Fragments 87 · Can the Eye Love Everything? 95 · Trace, Line, Paper 99

106 not e s

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ta b l e of c on t e n t s

111 pl at e s

219 t h e e x h i bi t ion

Photographs from the Benaki Museum

261 sk etch books

Scans of Arikha’s pocket sketch books

297 d e p o r t a t i o n d r aw i n g s

Arikha’s life-saving childhood drawings

301 biogr a ph y

327 a r c h i va l p h o t o g r a p h s

341 c r e di ts

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m ic h a e l pe ppi at t & m a no s di m i t r a ko p o u l o s

O

N 8 OCTOBER 2019, the writer Michael Peppiatt and the exhibition’s curator, Manos Dimitrakopoulos, met at the artist’s gallery, Blain|Southern, on H ­ anover Square in London, to discuss Arikha’s life and work. This was their conversation:

michael peppiatt In

1982, I was writing fairly regularly for the art magazine Connaissance des arts, and I believe the man who ran it had a taste for figurative painting and a particular admiration for Arikha, whose name I had heard, maybe even seen one or two of his works.

“So,” my editor said to me, “would you write a piece about this Israeli who’s living in Paris: Avigdor Arikha?” And I of course said yes.

I remember going up towards his studio on the Rue Saint-Jacques.

It’s the pilgrims’ route: that’s where they would leave for Santiago de Compostela. So, I took the pilgrims’ route up to Arikha’s studio and when I finally got there I was greeted by a very charming, very effusive, but also extremely intense and extremely nervous man.

Arikha would immediately put you on your guard, because you sensed the presence of a human being who was almost fluttering about, a bit like a butterfly, through the air. You never knew where he was going to settle, or how he might take off again and move around the room. He definitely had an unsettling presence.

I think he quite liked the fact that I was English, because he had good memories of England (probably also because of the positive reception his work had enjoyed there). But he knew nothing about me and, conversely, I knew very little about him. At some point, as I was interviewing him, he just got up and said, “I’m going to paint your portrait.”

This was a way for him of getting to know me, I suppose. And when I think back on it, that was such a marvellous moment. I think we did part of the interview, scraps of it, here and there. And then he started a portrait.

Now, as you know, he either finished his paintings in one sitting, and accepted the result and was happy with it, or he started all over.

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i n c on v e r sat ion

So, I think I did come back a second time, because the first time it hadn’t worked out. And, I remember, I’ve rarely sat for someone so… let’s say he was very demanding. You felt you couldn’t blink an eyelid.

He had grease paper over the window of his studio. I remember saying to myself, “Just stare at that little crack in the paper, and don’t move.” That’s quite demanding, of course. He, on the other hand, was moving around, talking to himself; he seemed almost ready to burst into tears, he was muttering, “I can’t do this”, and so on. And I sat there, in stone as it were, listening to all these things, not responding at all. I became, I suppose, a bit of a thing, an object.

Anyway, the second time he managed to do a very stern but very fine portrait of me, which I, of course, still have. I’m very pleased to have it as a reminder of that extraordinary encounter. Arikha was a very unusual person. He would whip himself into a froth and come very close either to a rage, or to bursting out laughing. If suddenly he disagreed with something you’d said, or you’d come up with an idea that he didn’t appreciate, he could suddenly let rip, completely spontaneously and un­ con­trol­lably.

In a sense, that’s admirable. There are very few people who allow themselves to do that. In his case, it was very authentic, very true. It was who he was. And he made no pretence at controlling who he was.

He was as he was and as a result, we formed a very pleasant friendship.

He was a volcano ready to go off. And his whole art was the art of containing a volcano, letting it rise almost to the point where it erupts, and then managing to close off that upward momentum in the pictures.

That’s probably why they have such a presence—there’s a huge amount boiling up in them, and yet they’re calm and very light in a way. The thing he says, what was it, that “art is…” manos dimitrakopoulos “…a breath.” mp Yes—“art is a breath”. For all his intensity, for all his erudition, what I find very moving about Arikha is that his work is extraordinarily and profoundly simple and light—like the breath of life passing through.

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mon ic a f e r r a n do

AVIGDOR ARIKHA: THE ‘LOGICAL MIRACLE’ OF PAINTING

1

For our teachers have left to us not positive discoveries, but problems whose solution is still to be sought.

—seneca Si la poésie ne vient pas aussi naturellement que les feuilles Sur un arbre, il vaut mieux qu’elle ne vienne pas du tout.

—john keats, quoted by samuel beckett, quoted by anne atik …he said that Pascal, when looking, could not forget the name of the things we see.

—edgar degas, quoted by paul valéry

It is perhaps a coincidence: in Self-portrait in Raincoat Peering, 2 Arikha performs the same, ancient gesture of the Pan aposkopéuon, the Pan who peers into the wide horizon of the Arcadian landscape. From and towards which distances is the painter looking? We cannot know: only the gaze knows, but in the silent language of painting.

Two events marked the artistic debut ­ of Avigdor Arikha: the concentration camp, and the abandonment of abstractionism connected with his friendship with Samuel Beckett.

As a teenager during World War II, Arikha was soon stripped away from home. He lived with his family, which

belonged to the important local Jewish community in Czernowitz (northern Bukovina, where also Paul Celan was born)—what is now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi and was then part of the Soviet Union.3 In June 1941, when the non-aggression pact was broken between the two opposite powers, the city fell into the hands of Nazi Germany —­ hence turning into a trap for the Jewish, German-speaking community. Deportations began, moving east into Ukraine, on wagons and then on foot, in a winter that reached –40 ˚ C that year. Arikha’s father, who died soon after, managed to push the family out of the line-up: this extreme gesture

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12 on e t o m at o

19 March 1974, oil on canvas, 14 × 22 cm

13 w r a ppe d a s pa r agus

26 April 1974, oil on canvas, 19 × 33 cm

sk etch books

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sk etch books

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biogr a ph y

1973 Ink Drawings 1965–72

Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse

solo e x h i bi t ions

1952 Paintings and Drawings Galeria Zeira, Tel Aviv

1953 Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations Jerusalem Artists’ House, Jerusalem

Peintures, dessins, bois The Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem

Ink Drawings 1965–72 Fort Worth Art Center Museum, Fort Worth

Paintings: 1957–65 and 1968 Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv

1974 Inks, Drawings and Etchings

Marlborough Fine Art, London

1954 Paintings and Drawings Galerie Moderne, Stockholm 1955 Tegninger, grafik og bogkunst Athanaeum Kunsthandel, Copenhagen

Peintures et dessins Galerie Furstenberg, Paris

Inks, Drawings and Prints Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston (until 1975)

39 gravures 1970–73 Centre National d’Art Contemporain – Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris (circulating exhibition, until 1979)

1956 Paintings and Drawings The Matthiesen Gallery, London 1957 Peintures récentes de Avigdor Arikha Galerie Furstenberg, Paris

1975 Prints

Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque

Nationale de France, Paris

1959 Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings The Matthiesen Gallery, London

1961 Paintings, Gouaches, Watercolours, Drawings

Galerie Karl Flinker, Paris

1976 Samuel Beckett by Avigdor Arikha: A Tribute to Samuel Beckett on his 70th Birthday

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

1966

1967

Paintings 1963–66 and Drawings 1947–66 Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Paintings and Watercolours 1973–75 Marlborough Gallery, New York

1977 Ölbilder – Aquarelle – Zeichnungen

Marlborough Galerie, Zurich

Dessins Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris

1970 Dessins 1965–70

Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris (until 1971)

Huit gravures Galerie Amstutz, Zurich

1978 Oil Paintings – Watercolours – Drawings

Marlborough Fine Art, London

1972 Eight Paintings

Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

Paintings, Drawings, Watercolours New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh

1979

Drawings, Watercolors and Paintings Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston

39 Ink Drawings, 1965–72 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Ink Drawings 1965–72 Marlborough Gallery, New York

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Twenty-Two Paintings 1974–78 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

biogr a ph y

Peintures et aquarelles Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, Marlborough Stand, Paris

1996 Selected Prints 1966–95

Marlborough Graphics, New York

1980 Dessins et gravures

Galerie Berggruen, Paris

Rishumim Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

Recent Work Marlborough Gallery, New York

1981 Arikha

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon

Recent Paintings and Drawings Marlborough Gallery, New York

Meheva le Avigdor Arikha – avodoth nivharot Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1998 Sixty-Five Drawings 1965–97

Marlborough Gallery, New York

1982 Oil Paintings and Drawings

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Arikha

Marlborough Fine Art, London

1983 Paintings, Drawings and Pastels

Marlborough Gallery, New York 1984 New York Drawings: January–May 1984

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Drawings

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (retrospective exhibition, until 1999)

1985 Recent Paintings

Marlborough Gallery, New York

1986 Prints 1950–85

Tel Aviv University Gallery, Tel Aviv

1999 Avigdor Arikha

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (retrospective exhibition)

Oil Paintings, Pastels and Drawings Marlborough Fine Art, London

1987 Paintings and Drawings

Louver Gallery, Los Angeles 1988 Oils, Watercolours, Pastels, Inks and Drawings

Marlborough Fine Art, Tokyo

Paris sur le vif, encres et dessins Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

Pinturas, pasteles, dibujos 1969–99 Galería Marlborough, Madrid

2000 Paintings, Pastels and Drawings 1999–2000 Marlborough Fine Art, London

Paintings, Pastels and Drawings 1986–88 Marlborough Gallery, New York

2002 Recent Work: Oils, Pastels, Drawings

Marlborough Gallery, New York

1990 Avigdor Arikha

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Works 1992–93 Marlborough Fine Art, London

2004

Etchings and Lithographs Marlborough Graphics, London

2006 Recent Work

Marlborough Fine Art, London

1992 Works 1990–91

Marlborough Gallery, New York 1994

Selected Paintings 1953–97 Israel Museum, Jerusalem (retrospective exhibition, until 1999)

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Dry-Point Engravings Marlborough Graphics, London Avigdor Arikha Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, Marlborough Stand, Paris

c o py r ig h t s

c ata l o g u e

Avigdor Arikha: A Breath This edition © 2020 ERIS and Benaki Museum pu bl ish ed by

Individual texts © their authors and translators Works by Avigdor Arikha © The Estate of Avigdor Arikha

ERIS An imprint of Urtext Unit 1 53 Beacon Road London SE13 6ED, UK

Archival photographs of Avigdor Arikha: pp. 2, 3, 13, 31–4, 66–8, 103–5 © David Jiménez pp. 330, 335, 336 © Jean-François Bonhomme pp. 329, 331–3, 337–40 © The Estate of Avigdor Arikha

Benaki Museum 1 Koumbari Street 10674 Athens, Greece

Photographs of the exhibition © Christos Simatos

u n der t h e ca r e of

cr edi ts

Photographs of works: pl. 1, 4, 11, 24, 39, 41, 59, 60, 65, 75, 81 © Christos Simatos; pl. 7, 57 © Thierens and Long Photography; pl. 8, 23, 55 © Prudence Cuming Associates; pl. 12, 15, 19, 27–9, 31, 34, 42, 44–6, 48, 52, 54, 56, 58, 67, 69, 70, 74, 79, 88, 93 © Peter Mallet; pl. 16, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 71, 84, 85, 89, 92 © Matthew Hollow; pl.

37 © Stephanie Wolff; pl. 47 © Laziz Hamani; pl. 76 © Jack Hems Copyright credits relate only to the particular photographs of Avigdor Arikha’s works used in this catalogue and do not affect the copyright of artworks.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

EKEP Social Affairs and Culture Association Vasileos Konstantinou 3 10674 Athens, Greece edi tor i a l & a rt di r ect ion

Manos Dimitrakopoulos Alex Stavrakas associ at e edi tors

Angus Ledingham Stela Zoumboulaki con t r i bu tors

Jean Clair Monica Ferrando Savvas Michail Michael Peppiatt t r a nsl ators

David Broder Valeria Dani e x h i b i t ion

The rights of the individual authors to be identified as the authors of their work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

Avigdor Arikha: A Breath Benaki Museum, Athens 19 June–8 September 2019 cu r ators

Although every effort has been made to ensure information is accurate and up to date, the publishers, its employees or agents, or any authors or other contributors cannot be held liable for any inaccuracies or their consequences.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (UK): 978-1-999798-13-0 ISBN (GR): 978-960-476-271-2

Constantinos Papachristou Manos Dimitrakopoulos e x h i bi t ion de sign

Pavlos Thanopoulos Dora Pikioni l igh t i ng

Filippos Koutsaftis Kyriakos Kosmidis com m u n icat ion

w i t h t h e su pport of

Nikoletta Menti

Blain|Southern conservat ion pr i n t ed by

Push Print, London

Lenia Farmakalidou Eleftheria Goufa

s pe c i f ic at ion

title

Avigdor Arikha: A Breath pr ic e

ÂŁ125 p u b l i c a t i o n da t e

1 December 2020 isbn

978-1-9997981-3-0 trim size

318 x 220 mm bi n di ng

Three volumes, French softbound with flaps and boxed slipcase pag i n a t i o n

382 pp total (116, 122, 144 pp per vol.) pl at e s

98 including details pac k ag i n g

Hand-wrapped in Japanese paper and shipped in bespoke protective shipping carton product ion

Printed in London by PUSH vo l u m e i

Introduction by George Manginis / Interview with Dr. Michael Peppiatt / Essays by Jean Clair, Savvas Michail, and Monica Ferrando / Selected writings by Avigdor Arikha vo l u m e i i

Plates vo l u m e i i i

Photographs from the exhibition / Arikha’s sketches / Childhood deportation camp drawings / Biography and bibliography / Photographs of Arikha / Colophon