Avigdor Arikha

Avigdor Arikha was a Romanian-born French-Israeli artist, printmaker and art historian.

Victor Długacz (later Avigdor Arikha) was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuţi, but grew up in Czernowitz in Bukovina, Romania (now in Ukraine). His father was an accountant. In 1941, the family was forcibly deported to the Romanian-run concentration camps of Transnistria, where his father was beaten to death. Arikha survived thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the International Red Cross.

Arikha immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1944, together with his sister. Until 1948, he lived in Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha. In 1948 he was severely wounded in 1948 Arab-Israeli War. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. In 1949 he won a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he learned the fresco technique. 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.

Art critic Marco Livingstone wrote that Arikha "bridged the modernist avant-garde of pure abstraction with traditions of observational drawing and painting stretching back to the Renaissance and beyond. He 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"."

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023