As a boy, the Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha spent part of the Second World War in a labour camp in western Ukraine, where he was given a small sketchbook and pencil by a sympathetic soldier. A German-speaking Jew, he had been deported with his family; his father had died on the way. The camp at Mogilev-Podolsky was in a destroyed Transnistrian foundry put to use by Siegfried Jagendorf, a Romanian Jewish engineer who turned it into a machine shop serving the local area, and who saved as many lives as he could by employing the internees. Every three months, eight hundred of them were selected by the SS for extermination. The 12-year-old Arikha made a paintbrush from his own hair, mixed pigments in the foundry and began to record, in careful detail, what he saw around him: a body being loaded onto a cart full of corpses; a man on the run from a militiaman with a rifle; a prisoner being dragged to his death; skeletal figures in rags carrying logs or rocks while, in the distance, men are being beaten; a long, grim queue for soup.
Arikha had accumulated thirty sketches when he was stopped by one of the SS officers who patrolled the camp. ‘Child, you’re playing with fire,’ the guard said, as he tore out the most explicit of the drawings. The remainder were eventually shown by Jagendorf to the International Red Cross, who in 1944 arranged for Arikha and his sister to leave their mother, take on the names of children presumed dead and travel to Palestine on a transport designed for orphans (as recorded in Major/Minor, the memoir of Arikha’s daughter Alba). The convoy struck mines in the Black Sea: of the 1500 children who were evacuated, only 130 survived the journey.
‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said of Arikha’s work. ‘His desire to pull something out of the flux of what is not known, and give it some kind of temporally stable form … Some of it is very risky stuff. This comes out particularly in the drawings.’ Arikha’s rapidly made marks, Hughes pointed out, were ‘decisive but almost on the edge of losing a certain control’, the result ‘both provisional and irrevocable’. Writing in 1973, Hughes said that Arikha had produced ‘some of the most remarkable images on paper since the death of Giacometti’ seven years earlier. A small selection of these images, found in storage by Arikha’s daughters a decade and a half after his death, is now on display at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh alongside his paintings (until 1 November).
Arikha reached the point Hughes described via a sharp artistic turn. In 1944 he arrived in what was soon to become the state of Israel, where he was taught art according to uncompromising Bauhaus principles by a German Jewish refugee who had been a student of Paul Klee. Four years later Arikha was seriously injured while serving in the Israeli army and left for dead; he was rescued by his sister, then working as a nurse. The following year he received a grant to study art and philosophy in Paris, where he eventually settled and where he befriended artists including Balthus and Giacometti, and the writers Emmanuel Levinas and Raymond Queneau. In 1956 he met Samuel Beckett, who became a close friend and mentor. Arikha called Beckett his ‘lighthouse’.
By the early 1960s, Arikha had exhibited his work – then entirely abstract – to acclaim in Paris, London and Amsterdam. John Ashbery, reviewing the paintings in 1961, admired their ‘breathless urgency’. But halfway through the decade Arikha experienced what he would later describe as ‘a violent hunger in the eyes’. Face to face with Caravaggio’s The Raising of Lazarus, then on loan to the Louvre, Arikha felt that what he was doing in abstraction would eventually lead down a path that was mannered and false. The figure of Lazarus had been painted by Caravaggio from life. Was there an echo, in this figure on the threshold of death, of the bodies Arikha had drawn as a boy? He decided that the only unlimited wellspring was the observable world around us. ‘You were right,’ he told Giacometti, who had encouraged him to work from life. Arikha renounced (his word) abstraction and set himself new rules of engagement. As Beckett put it, ‘siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself.’
Arikha would not paint, or work in colour, for another eight years. He made no preparatory sketches and allowed himself no afterthoughts; he always worked in natural light and at high speed. Between 1965 and 1973 he drew non-stop – in pencil, silverpoint or sumi ink – and in 1970, when he was given an etching press by a friend, he evolved this drawing practice into prints.
In 2008 the Bibliothèque nationale de France held an exhibition of Arikha’s prints, centred not only on the collection they had been accumulating for some time but also on a significant gift from Arikha himself of 55 rare prints and unique proofs (he also made a gift of a hundred works on paper to the British Museum in 2004). Taken together, these images provide a glimpse into Arikha’s working methods and artistic concerns, from chemical adventures in varnish, resin and acid to printing experiments on a range of different papers – investigations that influenced his work in other media. (He would go on to say that when he returned to painting, his work drew on his tonal explorations as an etcher.)
In later years, when he didn’t have the physical strength for printmaking, Arikha worked with Aldo Crommelynck, the printer who collaborated with Picasso. But in this fervent period he pulled the prints himself in very small editions – sometimes six or ten, occasionally just three. Arikha’s interest was not in making multiples or reproductions but in seeing where the alchemy of etching could take him. The catalogue to the 2008 exhibition describes his printed output as ‘more secret’ than his paintings or drawings, yet governed by a similar urgency, each completed in a single session, ‘without repetition or remorse’.
Arikha often said that his aim was ‘saisir le vécu sur le vif’ – to grasp life as it’s lived, or to grasp the lived moment as it occurs. In French, artists who work from life are more usually said to be working ‘d’après nature’. The phrase ‘sur le vif’ means ‘on the spot’ or ‘in the moment’. It gives a sense of immediacy that ‘after nature’ does not. In this respect Arikha’s expression recalls the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first book, Images à la sauvette (‘images on the fly’), which was translated into English as The Decisive Moment. Arikha and Cartier-Bresson became friends in 1970, the year Arikha began to etch. The objective for both men was not so much decisiveness as speed. Arikha’s quest was to record aliveness itself. As he later put it in his book of essays, On Depiction (1995), traces of life were ‘seized at once, as fruit is from a tree’ because ‘truth picked in a few instants holds those instants timelessly.’ He caught moments as if saving them from disappearance; he drew against death.
This philosophy offers a way of looking at the subjects Arikha chose for his etchings and lithographs: fruit, shoes, gloves, a cane. There’s a proliferation of coats and above all of portraits – of his wife, the American poet Anne Atik, of his daughters, Alba and Noga, of his friends and of himself. Arikha became the archivist of the everyday: not, it seems, because he sought out the ordinary but because each day invited his urgent attention. He spoke about ‘lying in ambush’ until a subject asserted itself. He described portraiture as a form of ‘abduction’. He said he was not interested in mere representation but in communicating an intensity of feeling. Once he began drawing he would enter what he described as a ‘seismic trance’, usually with Glenn Gould playing Bach at full volume in the studio.
There is something lucid and bruised about Arikha’s still lifes. Pears catch a passing light. Shoes have been indented by their wearers, then vacated. A spoon and umbrella have become relics, relayed with delicate attention to tone. The self-portraits, many of which feature facial expressions inspired by Rembrandt’s, extend passing moods beyond their natural lifespan. Arikha depicted so many overcoats that it almost seems a compulsion – it’s hard not to think of those who died of exposure in the camps. His coats hang in mid-air by hidden means, the shadows in their folds tenderly evoked. Wrapped around an absence, they are sloughed off or waiting to be worn, offering warmth and weight along with whatever history they might hold. It is perhaps too obvious to read survival into these images, yet they are, by their very existence, evidence of it.
During this period Arikha became fond of drawing in sumi ink on textured canvas paper. (His portrait of Anne with her hand over her mouth is an example of this technique in the form of a lithograph.) With a Japanese calligraphy brush lightly loaded with ink, he created swift swirls and scrumbles that built up to darkness. Had he not become enamoured of this method, with its rigid texture and soft tonal possibilities, he would not have devised his singular printmaking technique.
Stanley William Hayter, the seminal British printmaker – a chemist by training – who had taught the Surrealists in Paris and the Abstract Expressionists in New York, had returned to Paris in the early 1950s. Guided by Hayter, Arikha developed a method of imprinting the texture of canvas paper onto a copper plate and coating it in aquatint resin. Hayter used this as a layer in his abstract work but Arikha saw its potential as a base for observational etchings in sugar-lift, a process by which a positive mark is made on copper using a brush. Ordinarily, different tones can only be achieved in sugar-lift over several consecutive acid baths, with areas of the plate ‘stopped out’ with varnish in between. Arikha wanted to find a way of doing it all in one go. After destroying several plates through his experiments, and devising his own sugar mixture so that it had the consistency of his preferred ink, he found that the sugary liquid would catch on the woven texture he’d created on the plate and make a range of tonal variations in a single bath (or ‘bite’). It was a unique discovery, a marriage of techniques that gives his prints a distinctive appearance, an almost uncanny subtlety. For Hughes, this new form of transmission was close to transubstantiation: the texture of Arikha’s etchings, he argued, was analogous to, and not just a depiction of, the subjects they portrayed – the skin of a pear, the worn leather of a shoe.
The road to this discovery is visible in the prints. First, in 1970, he made portraits of Anne in drypoint – by scratching into metal with a stylus, no acid required. Then he made four etchings of Beckett, the fine lines of the plate bitten by ferric chloride into grooves that would hold ink, before being run through the press. (‘Beckett never sat for me, but as soon as he saw me drawing he would stop moving.’) To these he added aquatint shading with limited success (‘sans suite’, reads a pencilled note on one of these prints in the British Museum, ‘discontinued – copper destroyed’). He tried a woman’s back in sugar-lift. ‘I never rejected a technique,’ he later said. His searches were tireless.
The first etching he made with his new sugar-lift method is a remarkable self-portrait from 1972, in which a foreshortened Arikha sits looking at himself in a mirror on the floor. For the viewer, the world is askew – we find the artist at an angle, see the underside of his chair and the creases in his clothes. Is he at a desk? An easel? He is looking down at us, and we are falling. The disconcerting nature of the image was a perfect match for the near indecipherable means by which it was made.
There was just one catch to Arikha’s new technique: it demanded a very slow bath in highly diluted acid – and Arikha liked to work quickly. The usual bite times for aquatint are anything between thirty seconds and thirty minutes. Arikha recalled an occasion when he went to lunch with friends and returned to the studio four hours later to find his plate perfectly intact. The point of this slow developing process was that it allowed him to retain his speed of draughtsmanship in return for his patience as a printmaker. There was plenty of jeopardy – ‘every stage puts the plate in danger,’ as Arikha put it – and he was immersed in complex, unstable, often frustrating processes. Printmaking may have been the only area of Arikha’s graphic life in which he took his time.
In 1973 Arikha made five aquatints to accompany an artist’s edition of Beckett’s Au loin un oiseau, a text he later translated into English and collected as one of the eight short prose works in Fizzles. Hayter went on to illustrate another work in the series and Jasper Johns made prints for the English collection as a whole. ‘Ruin-strewn land’, reads the refrain in ‘Afar a Bird’, the translation of Au loin un oiseau, as a man hunched over a stick, ‘a little heap of hands and head’, struggles with the burden of a doomed alternative self. Arikha found in the text a coat, a cane, ‘scant grass’ and stones. The prints were beautifully bleak.
The only time Arikha’s intense productivity came to a halt, according to Alba, was in 1989 when Beckett died. Beckett had written about Arikha seven years earlier. ‘I have not ceased to admire,’ he wrote, ‘throughout his development, his acuity of vision, sureness of execution and incomparable grasp of the past and the problems that beset continuance. It is perhaps in this double awareness, at once transcended and implicit in his work, that he is in a sense heroically alone.’
Arikha couldn’t go on. He went on. What broke the spell was a black and white photo of Beckett. Drawing from photographs was against Arikha’s principles but he realised he could draw the photograph as an object. In 1991 it became part of a still life, Beckett’s familiar face on a shelf next to a candlestick and peeling wallpaper, the surface of a memory, seen in the moment and seized.
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