Author: Arikha, Avigdor [1929- 2010]
Title: On Depiction : Selected Writings on Art, 1965-94
Description: London, Bellew Publishing, 1995. orig. boards, dustwrapper.. 24x16cm, 240 pages. In a faded & lightly soiled dustwrapper.. Minor wear. Some toning to cover edge. Good. ¶ With a 4-line author's presentation inscription to Danish art historian Erik Fischer on title-page, dated Paris 2 August 98. ["...In the late 1950s, Arikha established himself as an abstract painter, but he eventually came to think of abstraction as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and began drawing, only from life, treating all subjects in a single sitting. He engaged in drawing and printmaking only for the next eight years. In 1973, he resumed painting and became 'perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century', as he was hailed in an obituary in Economist magazine. Arikha painted directly from the subject in natural light only, using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting, pastel, print, ink, or drawing in one session. His profound knowledge of art techniques and masterly draughtsmanship enabled him to abide by this principle of immediacy, partly inspired by Chinese brush painting. It was a principle he shared with his close friend Henri Cartier- Bresson, to whose 'instant décisif' it was analogous. He never drew from memory or photographs, aiming to depict the truth of what lay before his eyes at that moment. He is noted for his portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, rendered realistically and spontaneously. In their radical spatial composition, his work clearly harks back to abstraction, and in particular Mondrian...." - wikipedia].

Keywords: Art History, Modern Art, Criticism, , , , , ,