artist AVIGDOR ARIKHA is dead

Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha died at his home in Paris on Thursday aged 81. His paintings and drawings of the every day so affected playwright Samuel Beckett that the two struck up a life long friendship. But few outside the cognoscenti art world knew his name. Meeting him at the 2006 London opening of his Recent Work at Marlborough Fine Art, his gaze was coruscating and he didn't suffer small-talk fools gladly. In fact one interview (Haaretz) pointed out that "Arikha insisted on proper etiquette, the correct titles, the precise words. He told me about what he considered a formative moment: the day Samuel Beckett said they could address one another in the informal second person singular, tu, rather than using the formal plural." Arikha's world was an abstracted parallel universe in replica that caused the objects he drew or painted to quietly pulsate with a new everlasting life. But never pretentiously so and with a Beckettian absurdity of such a new lease of life. In the same Haaretz piece the interviewer Lisa Peretz recounts: "I asked how he decides exactly which part of the person to include in the composition and which to leave out. "It's like laundry, you have to decide where to hang it from." She received a postcard. "On one side was a drawing Arikha made in 1990, of a tiny silver teaspoon on white cloth. His close friend Samuel Beckett received it at birth. When Arikha's daughter Alba was born, Beckett, her godfather, gave it to her. It took Arikha a year to come to terms with Beckett's death and finally he immortalized him with this picture."
Phaidon's monograph
In 2006, the artist donated 100 works to the British Museum - Avidgor Arikha From Life-Drawings and Prints.