Avigdor Arikha

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Avigdor Arikha (born April 28, 1929) is a Jewish and Israeli realist painter and draftsman.

Arikha was born near Rădăuţi in Romania. His family faced forced deportation in 1941 and he spent two years in a concentration camp (see Romania during World War II), securing passage to Palestine in 1944 through a program of the International Red Cross. In Palestine, he attended the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.

During the 1950s Arikha established himself as an abstract painter, but he eventually came to think of abstraction as a dead end. Seeking renewal, in 1965 he began drawing from life. Continuing on this path for the next eight years, his activity was confined to drawing and printmaking until late 1973, when he felt an urge to resume painting. He is noted for his portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, rendered realistically and spontaneously. His practice is to paint directly from the subject using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting in one session.

He is also an art historian, author of Peinture et Regard (1991) and On Depiction (1994), as well as many essays.