[PDF] Hommage à Arikha

When did Arikha die?

Arikha died in Paris on April 29, 2010, the day after his 81st birthday. In the late 1950s, Arikha 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.

Who was Avigdor Arikha?

The Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha, who has died from cancer aged 81, owed his survival during the Holocaust to his precocious artistic talent. In 1944 his bleak drawings of corpses and deportations, made on scraps of paper in a Nazi concentration camp, attracted the attention of inspectors from the International Red Cross.

How long did Arikha live in Paris?

From 1954, Arikha resided in Paris. Arikha was married from 1961 until his death to the American poet and writer Anne Atik, with whom he had two daughters. Arikha died in Paris on April 29, 2010, the day after his 81st birthday.

Where was Arikha exhibited?

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