Avigdor Arikha (1929–2010)

Avigdor Arikha was born Victor Długacz to a German-speaking Jewish family in Rădăuţi, Bukovina, and grew up in Czernowitz (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine). In 1941, during World War II, his family was deportated to the Romanian-run concentration camps of Transnistria, where his father died. Arikha owed his survival to drawings he made of camp scenes, which attracted the attention of inspectors from the International Red Cross. They arranged for him to go to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1944, together with his sister. In 1948, he was severely wounded in the Israeli War of Independence. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. He won a scholarship in 1949 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he lived permanently from 1954. There he became part of a community of artists, writers, and academics. He originally established himself as an abstract painter, although he later found great success as a portraitist. He eventually stopped painting and engaged in drawing and printmaking. In 1961, he married the American poet and writer Anne Atik, with whom he had two daughters. As an art historian, Arikha lectured around the world and curated exhibitions at the Musée du Louvre, the Frick Collection of New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. His publications included Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings (1986); Peinture et Regard (1991, 1994; augmented edition 2011); On Depiction (1995); and numerous essays that appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Commentaire, Literary Imagination, and others. Arikha was awarded many prizes and honorary degrees, and in 2005 was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He was a close friend of Samuel Beckett, whom he first met in 1956 backstage in a theater. Their relationship was celebrated in How It Was (2001), a memoir by Anne Atik, which led Beckett to produce a book about Arikha, who in turn illustrated many of the playwright's texts.