{"title":"Avigdor Arikha","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"on-depiction-book-avigdor-arikha-9781912475179","title":"On Depiction","description":"Avigdor Arikha was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Romania to German-speaking Romanian Jewish parents and spent most of his life in Paris. A talented child, he started drawing early on. During the Second World War, he was deported to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, where he drew the horrors he witnessed. These drawings saved his life. During the 1950s, he established himself in Paris and was enjoying a successful career as an abstract painter. In 1965, a Caravaggio exhibition prompted him to convert to drawing from life. He stopped using colour until 1973, when he started again to paint. He worked with a religious, almost war-like, intensity until his death.  Arikha was also an erudite and passionate scholar, endowed with a deep understanding of the history of art and its techniques, well-versed in world history and fascinated by science. He wrote many essays and curated important exhibitions of masters such as Poussin, Velazquez and Ingres.   In this collection of essays that he wrote between 1965 and 1994, Arikha expounds on art and artists (Mantegna, Velazquez, Poussin, David, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and more), technique, seeing, and the state of culture in his day, which, one could argue, is no more hopeful today-almost thirty years later-than it was then.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49751317840145,"sku":"NGR9781912475179","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1912475170.jpg?v=1751428679"},{"product_id":"arikha-book-avigdor-arikha-9780714835211","title":"Arikha","description":"In 1965, at the height of a successful career as an abstract painter in Paris and New York, Romanian-born Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha (b.1929) suddenly stopped painting to return to drawing from life. When he returned to painting in 1973 it was to begin on the series of intensely observed portraits, nudes and still lifes for which he is now known worldwide.   Arikha's intimate still lifes include such domestic subjects as a bundle of asparagus, a corner of his Paris studio and the books on his library shelves. His portraits range from informal studies of his close friends the playwright Samuel Beckett and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, to striking portrayals of public figures. Across the diversity of his subjects, Arikha succeeds with apparent effortlessness to express at the same time raw energy and quiet sensitivity, in a subtle approach that is at once intensely personal and with which one can identify.  This book surveys Arikha's entire œuvre, and includes much of his recent work. Altogether it comprises a riveting journey across the life and career of one of the most pioneering and self-reflective of recent Western painters, who stands out radiantly from an ocean of contemporary figurative painters. Arikha is an exhaustive monograph of an incredible life and demonstrates how it fuelled the formation of this subtly mesmerising and historically monumental artist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50434445246737,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50434445771025,"sku":"GOR006142328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0714835218.jpg?v=1750913232"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-avigdor-arikha.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}