STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART AVIGDOR ARIKHA Rădăuți (Bukovina) 1929-2010 Paris Interior with Drawings Pastel on emery paper. Signed and dated Arikha Nov.88 in pencil at the lower centre edge. 505 x 300 mm. (19 7/8 x 11 3/4 in.) Provenance The estate of the artist Marlborough Fine Art, London. Exhibited New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Avigdor Arikha: twenty-five pastels, November 2007, no.3. Arguably one of the finest draughtsmen of the second half of the 20th century, Avigdor Arikha was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Romania in 1929. The drawings he produced as a thirteen-year old boy while imprisoned in a Ukrainian labour camp brought him to the attention of the International Red Cross, who rescued him and sent him to a kibbutz in Palestine in 1944. After studying art at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, Arikha went to Paris in 1949, where he completed his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He eventually settled in Paris in 1954, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and establishing lifelong and intimate friendships with Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti. Arikha began his career as an abstract painter, but in 1965 abandoned painting completely, and spent the next eight years working on black and white drawings from life, as well as a series of monochromatic etchings. By the time he returned to painting in 1973, he had become a committed figurative painter, producing portraits of family and friends, interior scenes and still life subjects. Arikha’s drawings, invariably made from life, have always been much admired. As the critic Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in 1974, ‘He gives us back a sense of the possibility of drawing. Arikha is, to my mind, the best draftsman of his generation, perhaps the best to have emerged in Europe since the death of Giacometti.’1 The artist employed a range of media and techniques, including pencil, pen, brush, ink, charcoal, metalpoint, watercolour, chalk and pastel. A large collection of over 110 drawings and prints by Arikha, the vast majority presented by the artist in 2004, is today in the British Museum. The present sheet belongs with a group of pastel drawings that Avigdor Arikha produced in the 1980s. As the artist later recalled, writing in the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his pastels held in 2007, in which this work was included, ‘One winter afternoon, during the first months of 1983, I was present at the arrival and unpacking of a crate at the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre. It contained the pastel-portrait of Madame Tronchin by Jean-Etienne Liotard. Its impact was such that I rushed to get pastels on the very next morning. I had not practiced this medium since the early ‘50s...The twenty-five pastels paintings in this exhibition were never exhibited nor published, remaining hidden in their drawer until now.’2 The use of pastel became an important part of Arikha’s artistic process, and the medium was applied not only to drawing paper or tinted board, but also soft velvet paper, or, as in the present sheet, emery paper. The rough surface of the emery paper used by the artist, as Duncan Thomson has noted, ‘allow forms that are more fragmented, that do not strive for the same degree of ‘completeness’, so that the white or the tint of the base plays a role in the finished work...the fine crystals of alumina [in emery paper] take up the pressure of pastel in their own particular way.’3 Drawn in November 1988, this pastel is closely related to a much larger oil painting entitled Reflections on the Drawings, completed in December of the following year and today in a private collection, in which the side of a bookcase appears at the left edge of the canvas4. The framed drawing at the upper left of this composition, a study of heads by Alberto Giacometti, is more readily evident in the large painting. Arikha returned to the motif of reflections in a wall of framed drawings several years later, in a large pastel drawing executed on the 11th and 12th of January, 20005. 1. Robert Hughes, ‘Avigdor Arikha’, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, Avigdor Arikha: Inks, Drawings and Etchings, exhibition catalogue, 1974, p.7. 2. Avigdor Arikha, in New York, Marlborough Gallery, op.cit., 2007, unpaginated. 3. Duncan Thomson, Arikha, London, 1994, pp.161 and 171. 4. ‘Reflections on the Drawings’, dated 9 IX 89, and measuring 146 x 114 cm.; London, Marlborough Fine Art, Avigdor Arikha, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p.8, no.6; Thomson, ibid., illustrated p.198. 5. ‘Reflections’, 645 x 495 mm.; London, Marlborough Fine Art, Avigdor Arikha: Paintings, pastels and drawings 1999-2000, exhibition catalogue, 2000, no.6. .