The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses’. In other words, whatever else it is — and all attempts at definition tend to founder — art consists in making something rare and memorable out of not very much.
Those words of Sickert’s popped into my mind as I looked at an exhibition of works by Avigdor Arikha at Marlborough Fine Art. Among these were pictures of a piece of toast, two pairs of socks, a casually folded orange tie, and part of a bathroom including a roll of toilet paper.
Arikha (1929–2010) was a French-Israeli artist based for much of his life in Paris. For 15 years he was an abstract painter, then in 1965 he abruptly began to depict the world around him. He turned to Alberto Giacometti one evening in the Bar du Dôme on boulevard Montparnasse and announced, ‘You were right!’
In post-war Europe, Giacometti had been the great proponent of figurative art. But while in London there were important painters — notably Freud, Bacon, Auerbach and Kossoff — who took that path, in late 20th-century France Arikha was a solitary figure, which may be why he is now in danger of being forgotten.
This is unfair. He was uneven, as many artists are, but he could attain a richly mysterious quality — especially when working only in velvety blacks and focusing on something extremely ordinary. Indeed, the more humdrum the subject the better; he succeeded much less well when depicting a famously glamorous film star — Catherine Deneuve — or the bodies of naked young women.
That boundary between figuration and abstraction was a crucial boundary in the 1950s and 60s — a sort of pictorial Iron Curtain.
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