Avigdor Arikha

Born Victor Długacz to German-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuți, Romania, Arikha was deported with his family to the Romanian-run camps of Transnistria in 1941, where his father was beaten to death. He survived in part through the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which reached delegates of the International Red Cross; in 1944 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine with his sister. He lived at Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha, studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem from 1946 to 1949, and was severely wounded in the 1948 war. A scholarship took him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1949, and from 1954 he lived there permanently.

After early work as a book illustrator, Arikha painted in an Art Informel idiom from roughly 1957 to 1965, exhibiting as an abstract painter before concluding that abstraction had become a dead end. In 1965, after standing before Caravaggio's Raising of Lazarus, he stopped painting entirely and turned to drawing and etching strictly from life - among these, the celebrated portraits of his close friend Samuel Beckett. He resumed oil painting in 1973 on radical terms he kept for the rest of his career: working only from observation, in natural light, alla prima, with each picture completed in a single sitting.

His portraits, nudes, interiors, still lifes, and landscapes retain the severe spatial compression of his abstract years. Commissions included Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1983) and Catherine Deneuve (1990). A serious art historian, he wrote on Poussin and Ingres and curated exhibitions in Houston.