Arikha
by Duncan Thomson, Phaidon Press, London, 255 pp.
Meir Agassi
He is a cultural phenomenon: a draughtsman, a writer, a curator, an art historian, and above all, a painter. One of the very rare artists today who is equipped with the ability, skill and intellect to translate into the atmosphere and context of the late 20th century, the mood of, say, the intense intimacy and modesty of a Vermeer; the objective approach to reality of a Velazquez; the cool aristocratic elegance of an Ingres or a John Singer Sargent; the mystery of a Hopper.
In this age of rapidly changing electronic images, his work can be seen as a last attempt to measure the natural course of seeing. In his intense self-portraits, Avigdor Arikha always seems to be measuring something. With his hand - distances and sizes, and with his eyes - spaces, appearances and the small wonders of the world around him. The body of the artist physically and mentally - seems to be locked somewhere between anxiety and calmness, as if he tries to mediate and co-ordinate between them.
Arikha, it should be pointed out at once, is blessed with a rare co-ordination between the investigative eye, the investigative mind and the working hand. "Imagine I have a grid in my eyes" - he tells Duncan Thomson - "which is made of brush strokes, that's how it works...
How was this "Arikhian experience" shaped? How did he become the gifted and controversial artist that he is? Why does he reject and repudiate the avant-garde (he himself maintains that some consider him a "reactionary")? Reading through Duncan Thomson's monograph, there are moments when Arikha's life seems to be as fictional as his small low-key paintings appear real, serene and calm. Born in 1929 in Czernowitz, Rumania, only scarlet fever saved the talented boy from being sent to Moscow to study art and to grow up as a Social-Realist painter. At the age of 12, in a Nazi deportation camp, he drew an almost documentary account of life in the camp. Later, this account which could have killed him, helped to save his life (by the Red Cross). During Israel's War of Independence in 1948, when escorting a convoy to Jerusalem, he was seriously wounded in an Arab ambush and left for dead in Hadassah hospital.
Moving in the 1950s between Jerusalem, Paris and Stockholm, helped Arikha to develop his graphic work and draughtsmanship. In Jerusalem, he collaborated with Dr Moshe Spitzer, founder of the publishing house "Tarshish", who had an immense influence on the art of Hebrew book design - and who produced some of the most beautiful illustrated books in Israel at that time. In Stockholm, Arikha worked on lithographs for Par Lagerkvist's "The Dwarf." In Paris, he illustrated Gogol's "Dead Souls" and Beckett's "Stories and Texts for Nothing."
For a distant observer, the sense of "fiction" (or wonder) in Arikha's life continues to unfold in Paris. Here Arikha becomes part of the invisible circle of cosmopolitan salons. His life buzzing with cultural figures artists, writers, poets, scholars he made friends with, or his path crossed, among others, Alix de Rothschild, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), Paul Clan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Simone Collinet (first wife of Andr Breton), and Breton himself ("that ideological bully.") There is no doubt that he was lucky enough to find himself in the right place at the right time, and that this timing helped shape his vision and work.
Between 19581965, he produced abstract paintings of void and apocalyptic volcanic unrest. These paintings (especially of the Noire series), with their explosive enigmatic temperament and their anxious images of "pure" mineral forms in a process of disintegration, are mysterious and deeply emotional.
Nevertheless, during the heyday of Abstract painting and painting "without the model," despite being internationally recognized as the most successful Israeli painter of his generation, Arikha began to doubt the role of the avant-garde in Modernism. He abandoned Abstract painting and moved to drawing from life.
Bearing in mind that a move like this was considered in Paris as an act of betrayal, it was, without doubt, an act of mental and intellectual rebellion.
It is no accident that the most distinguished of his friends during this transition Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti are not only examples of excellence and integrity in their field, but also intense researchers into the way reality is embodied, manifested and materialized through their different mediums.
From the mid 1950s on, almost in a process of "re-learning," Arikha equipped with a "violent hunger in the eye" worked as if re-adjusting his tools, means and observation. He made prints and drawings from life, studying his subjects, examining them critically and meticulously.
With small sheets of paper, dry brush and sumi ink, silverpoint and goldpoint, graphite, etching and aquatint, he drew himself and his family, his studio, rocks, grass, interiors, still-lifes and landscapes in Paris, London, Jerusalem and New York.
In some of these early drawings, the lines are as light as an angel's feather, or as calligraphic and stain-like as a painting on a Chinese scroll. But the quality of the drawings is always the same: they are as sensitive as the first appearance of an image on the photographic paper in a developing tray, intensely intimate, spare, locked by fluctuating light, loyal to the likeness and the factual appearance of the model.
During this self-imposed exile from colour and painting, Arikha shaped not only his vision but also his methods: the "consideration of the process of representation - how much can the eye see, how much should it see?"
And so, after eight years of "crisis," removed from any Romantic fantasy, high-pitched emotion, or exercises in nostalgia and grand spectacle, Arikha embarked, in 1973, on easel painting. As in his drawings and prints, he painted what was accessible to him in his own domestic landscape: portraits of Ann, his wife (sitting, reading, an Ingres-like nude, or wearing a hat, or mourning); his daughters, Alba and Noga, his circle of friends, a nude model, himself (in wonder, anxiety, gasping), his studio, tools, walls, stairs, bedroom, still-lifes of the commonplace, views from the windows, his library, landscapes.
If Ingres dismisses the painter who leaves traces of his touch in his brush-strokes, calling this "an abuse of execution," a typical Arikha canvas is about brush-strokes leaving traces of the movements of the bristles. Here, the pigments are dragged by the bristles in an act of "drawing," with the intensity of the brush acting as a lie-detector searching for some hidden truth underneath the skin of appearances. There is no building up of texture on texture. The pigments directly register the flow of the natural movement forming inside its subject space, balanced between transparency and opaqueness.
Gazing into some of Arikha's best still-lifes, we are not only trying to guess the smell, taste or the weight of them, but also sensing a natural play between forms, shapes, formats and the way they rhyme with one another. The way the light, for instance, spreads on the surface and freezes like a transparent skin, and how these subtle conflicts of forms, materials and colours become vehicles for the sensual and intensive emotional recognition of another reality lying beyond our own.
Arikha's intensity is partly, as Thomson explains, a result of his method of working: "The need to complete a painting in one prolonged session of work and the total renunciation of the possibility of carrying that processs into a second day. In that interval too much would have been lost from the breathless intimacy that had set the eye and the hand in motion."
Taking all this into account makes Arikha a type of visual diarist. A diarist who is scanning domestic non-events and transforming them into an intense experience of time. Unlike a photograph which traps its subject matter in a tenth of a second, the act of painting in Arikha's case stretches time to the duration of the execution Time and Space are trapped in his paintings as inside a capsule and therefore give his subjects the depth and breadth of real life intensely observed. In the Arikhian world, we sense pictures as protected spaces. At times they look like a last attempt to preserve civilized sanity in a fragile world on the edge of disintegration.
Arikha, like another realistic painter, Lucian Freud, deals with the nakedness of objects and spaces, and is engaged with the intensity of gazing into the model. But unlike Freud, he does not scrutinize the human flesh and its condition under the rusty light of the studio bulb. Rather, he is working and reworking his own private reality and its surface as "a painting" which creates, at least in his best work, a seductive, intimate and dense atmospheric space.
Although, either by accident or design, some of Arikha's paintings carry an aura of a staged allegory and the melancholic ghostly shades of Vanitas; and although there are also hidden references to other masters, mostly the pose is the ordinary, domestic one with the familiar veneer of the living room. In this territory the commonplace and the trivial are transformed into something precious and delicate, crystallizing a transient moment. Every trace of melancholy is balanced by the simple delight in the most basic of things light, food, fabrics, walls, objects, textures, colours and forms. It is almost as if behind this intense desire to investigate the nature of looking, lies the last possible access to the pure pleasure of seeing.
And there is a paradox: as you look more and more at this vivid realism and closely inspected hard facts of reality, you sense that this "Reality" carries within itself the density and the slow quality of a dream. The intensity of the Arikhian painted moment, always lucid, "turning the ordinary" as Thomson remarks "into the extraordinary."
In a way, Arikha, with his "lightness and density of touch," is a rare kind of Realist-Minimalist. Profoundly "conscious of the equation between the means, the medium, and what is possible; what is observed will lead to decisions about the medium," he keeps his palette to the basic minimum. As Thomson points out, it "rarely carries more than four or five pigments at a time." Add to this the small size of his canvases and papers, his enclosed subject matter, and you can almost see him as a mutation between Morandi, Robert Ryman (see for instance, the way Arikha applies his whites on the background), Vermeer and Chardin.
Duncan Thomson's "Arikha" is an honest attempt to trace through biography the sources of Arikha's art. One can forgive Thomson for some slippery moments in his prose, because Thomson has a sensitive eye, and he knows how to look and measure the work with modesty and respect.
The high quality of the reproductions, the simple minimal design, which allows the images and text to flow freely without interfering with each other, the works themselves, carry beautifully some of the ideas expressed in the text. Because Arikha's work is usually small, the reproductions do not reproduce the images to a confusing miniaturized state, but rather complement the originals as if they are facsimiles. So, as you progress through the book it becomes almost like a visit to a mini-retrospective exhibition of Arikha's work.
As such, the monograph provides the strongest evidence so far for the claim that in the Modernist sensibility of the Realist agenda, together with Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Antonio Lopaz Garcia and Philip Pearlstein, Arikha is one of the most important painters working today.
Meir Agassi, (born 1946) an Israeli art critic and journalist living in England for many years, died tragically in a car crash in February, 1998, as this issue was near printing.
The Literary Review, Vol.37, No.2 , Keys to the Garden:
Israeli Writing in the Middle East
Guest Editor: Ammiel Alcalay, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, N.J. 366 pp. Winter 1994
Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing
edited by Ammiel Alcalay, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 370 pp. 1996
Vivian Eden
Worthy, fascinating, though sometimes teetering on the edge of the strident, like so many politically correct volumes, this work focuses on what the editor feels is an unjustly neglected group. The Literary Review's 1994 showcase, "Keys to the Garden" was the first sizable collection of non-Ashkenazi Hebrew literature in English translation. The City Lights edition is a welcome expansion of the initial effort, though its subtitle is misleading for two reasons: some of the pieces are not very new at all, and none of the writing is by Ashkenazi* Israeli writers, or for that matter, by Israeli Arabs, who constitute some 20 percent of the country's population and write in both Arabic and Hebrew.
Ammiel Alcalay, who teaches contemporary Hebrew literature at Queens College, New York, locates the materials in this book in the context of "current debates taking place globally," and as "quite akin to, among others, the ongoing emerging, and reinvented Arab, African, Indian, African-American, Latin American, and Caribbean literary traditions."
In accordance with the demands of the genre, Alcalay presents a picture of victims of a conscious Eurocentric Ashkenazi conspiracy.
"During the 1950s and 1960s, over half a million Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern Jews came to Israel with little more than the clothes on their collective back. Completely dependent upon state institutions intent on remoulding them in their own image, choices were limited: assimilation, denial, active and passive resistance were all modes of coping with the utterly alienating circumstances they faced. .... Originally a component of the pejorative label used to institutionally categorize non-European Jews... the word Mizrah ("East") and Mizrahi gradually took on qualities of pride and defiance. Although long a majority, the Mizrahim continued to be treated as a minority, yet their culture and presence had come to fully transform the official parameters. All of the anthologies of Israeli literature available in translation, for example, systematically exclude the work of Mizrahim."
However, it is in the nature of societies that positions are filled by whoever got there first, established the institutions, assumed the power. In the case of Israel, Eastern European Jewry invented most of the institutions. The bulk of the Mizrahi population came relatively late to the emerging State of Israel, during the first decades of statehood but well after the key educational and cultural institutions were in place. Had the veteran Sephardic families resident in Palestine long before the pioneering Russian and Polish immigrations, established proto-governmental and cultural institutions, probably the situation would be reversed and today the descendants of Ashkenazi immigrants would be crying out today against perceived discrimination.
In the world of Hebrew literature in English translation, the best-known representative of the Mizrahi group is A.B. Yehoshua certainly a pillar of the Israeli literary establishment.
Thus, I suggest that the relatively small exposure of Mizrahi writers has been due not so much to an explicit programme or to problems of ethnicity, but rather to class and access to power, as defined primarily by seniority in Israeli society, as well as financial security and education.
Something of this is suggested in Sami Shalom Chetrit's observation about "them" versus "us" in his poem set in a Greek restaurant in New York. As CNN reports on scud missiles falling in Israel, the waiter recognizes the poet's accent as close to his own:
"The Greek continued guessing in English: Jordan, Lebanon?
Israel, I said in Hebrew.
You don't look Israeli, he said
Depends, I told him.
He chuckled for some reason and added some hot coffee
to what was left cooking in my cup: Really,
you look more like an Arab.
On TV they were interviewing people on the street,
Israelis in the environs of sealed Tel Aviv,
and then I realized the Greek was right:
These Israelis are blonde
and they all speak perfect American English!
I thought I would write a sorrowful poem,
but then I ordered a hamburger with a lot of mustard."
Equally witty and critical of Ashkenazi institutions, is an observation in the long poem, "Purim Sequence" by Tikva Levy. She speaks of her mother who can recite her family tree back nine generations:
"in other words,
the name of the grandfather of the grandfather of
my grandfather
whose picture is now before me
this family tree
won't be computerized at the Museum of the Diaspora."
Thus, one use of this volume is as a mirror in which fair-skinned Jews like me can see ourselves with the "others" looking over our shoulders. This is interesting and chastening, though not evocative of any great impulse to rush out and apologize in the name of Ashkenazi Jewry.
There are some outstanding writers omitted from this collection, probably because they are too successful in the mainstream; their presence might go some distance towards wrecking the "neglected minority" case. Most eloquent in their absence are the prose writers Sami Michael and Amnon Shamosh and the poet Maya Bejarano. In the later edition, Alcalay explains that Michael and Shamosh were left out because their work is readily available in English translation.
Nonetheless, there are many delights in this garden: Nissim Rejwan's memoir, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren's and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's fiction about Egyptian Jews, Ronit Matalon's story "Little Brother," Avi Shmuelian's story "Moonstruck Sunflowers," Ilana Sugbaker Messika's sharp, open and loving account of an annual reunion of Indian Jews, and poetry by Erez Bitton, Moshe Sartel and Ronny Someck.
The heart of this collection beats in four interviews conducted by Ammiel Alcalay: with Shimon Ballas, Samir Naqqash and Amira Hess all of middle-class Iraqi-originating families, and with Yehezkel Kedmi who was born in Jerusalem to an underprivileged immigrant family. In the City Lights edition, there is also an interview with Tikva Levi.
Speaking of his second book of poetry, "Jerusalem the Inferno," Kedmi says:
"...And I am the exception to the rule that proves the rule. The rule is not to be an autodidact, the rule is not to write books, the rule is not to go too far from a situation like mine, the length of whose path, from an intellectual standpoint, was preordained... I had a stake in creating a document, a literary document that would serve as testimony for this generation, of this time and these events because the work was written on the great historical moment of the redemption of the Jewish people. But right alongside this were the darkest moments possible, that is, daily life in the state and most important this is the emphasis in the book the phenomenon of class segregation. One class for Mizrahim, another for Ashkenazim. No one with eyes in their head and who speaks the truth doesn't see that here there is a second Israel."
Kedmi typifies the strain of rage which runs through this volume, which is echoed in Levi's account of her struggles with the literature programme at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where she proposed to write a comparative study of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian poetry. The department head, Prof. Gershon Shaked, who knows no Arabic, suggested that she study French, "since no literary criticism has been written in Arabic." Levi has since gone on to become an activist in HILA, a grass roots activitist group concerned with the institutional discrimination faced by Mizrahi Jews in the Israeli school system."
The second strain running through this volume is a staunch refusal to be deracinated. This is most profoundly felt in the interviews.
Born in Baghdad in 1930, Shimon Ballas enjoyed a comfortable childhood and a good literary education in French and Arabic. He came to Israel in 1951 and was active in the Communist Party. Compelled by the realities of the literary situation in Israel, he reluctantly switched from writing Arabic to writing Hebrew, yet he insists upon maintaining his cultural heritage:
"I'm a Jew by chance; it doesn't play that much of a role with me. Zionist ideology is essentially an Ashkenazi ideology that developed in a different culture, in different surroundings, in a different world and which came to claim its stake here in the Middle East through alienation and hostility towards the surroundings, with a rejection of the surroundings, with no acceptance of the environment ... I am not in conflict with the environment, I came from the Arab environment, and I remain in constant colloquy with the Arab environment. I didn't change my environment. I just moved from one place to another within it."
Samir Naqqash has taken this attitude to its extreme. He has chosen to express his unwavering connection to his roots by writing only in Arabic. Unlike Kedmi, Naqqash sees himself in a universal rather than a parochial context.
"I am against "committed" writing, partisan writing which takes as its goal a certain problem or a certain theme. Jews, in general, write about the "Jewish" problem... I believe that literature must be universal or, more precisely, individual."
Finally, the poet Amira Hess expresses in more metaphorical terms her own tenacity to the human core in the face of discrimination."
"Until not very long ago, I was under the influence of the various stigmas, each miserly and mean-spirited in its own way, that prevail in this country. But I came from a wonderful family, extremely well-educated, wealthy people who really did have "British manners." It was as if I was a blue blood starting to turn a bit yellow, first in the eyes of others, then in my own eyes. I felt as if my blood was being drained and I was being turned into something I had never been, something not nice... Despite the anger that exists, I first have to comb out all the curls in that anger so that love and grace emerge. If they put scorpion's blood in me, I would do everything I could to make it blue again."
The translations from Hebrew and Arabic made in this volume by a variety of hands are smooth and convincing. Despite its certain limitations, "Keys to the Garden" is worthy of a place in any collection of Israeli or Middle Eastern Literature.
Vivian Eden is a freelance writer, translator and editor who is currently on the staff of Ha'aretz newspaper / International
Herald Tribune
* Ashkenazi, broadly speaking, relates to Jews of European origin, as opposed to Sephardi, those who forebears were expelled from Spain (Heb: Sepharad). The broader term, used in this book, Mizrahi (Heb: Eastern) includes all Jews of non-European descent.