HIS PASSION: ‘PAINTING FROM LIFE’

Avigdor Arikha is on. The soft-spoken Israeli artist is intensity personified, energy dressed up in a navy blue sport coat and red tie. In Southern California this week for the opening of his show, at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, the curly-haired realist greets strangers as friends, engaging them in animated conversation and winding up each sentence with a quizzical grin.

A sensitive draftsman who has few peers, Arikha, 58, is also an extraordinarily well-educated man who has written art criticism and exhibition catalogues and has taken on scholarly curatorial tasks. While he can launch into any art-related subject--from history to current education--the matter most on his mind is his passion for “painting from life.”

“The problem is to submit to observation,” he confides, leaning close. “You want to absolutely steal that face when you do a portrait,” he continues, grabbing the air as if to capture a fleeting visage. “You put yourself in the third state of not me nor you but he or she. When it happens, it’s a miracle.”

Arikha says miracles don’t come along often, but the gallery has gathered 13 oils and 11 drawings (1979 to 1986) for his first Los Angeles show since 1972. Among the paintings at L.A. Louver (through May 9) is a luminous back view of the artist himself, painted with the help of mirrors. “Standing Nude With Mirrors” depicts a woman leaning into her reflection, while other subjects include a view from the artist’s studio, a slice of a yellow-tiled bathroom and several still lifes.

They are quiet, unassuming canvases whose soft colors and sensuous surfaces belie their air of strangeness and mollify the rigor of Arikha’s unconventional compositions. While a woman in a black evening gown confronts us bolt upright in one painting, another canvas has us peering down behind a woman in a chair. In one still life, an antiquated typewriter on a wood table is presented almost as an aerial view beside a chair seen from a lower vantage point.

Whether Arikha draws an angular woman on a staircase or paints a pair of blue jeans hung over a couch, he does so with a strong sense of structure. His spare compositions, like the people he depicts, have good bones as well as palpable flesh.

“I paint life, but after Mondrian. I wouldn’t exist without him,” Arikha says, explaining that he sees life through the experience of Modernism. But not everyone agrees. To young curators who think his realism is retrograde, Arikha says that “whatever is solved is solved. Mondrian solved the problem of negative and positive space, active and inactive form, so there’s no need to go back. We have cleaned the table; now we have to start again. That’s what I’m doing.”

Arikha arrived at this point of view abruptly in 1965, when he suddenly saw Modernism--with its art-about-art emphasis--as Mannerism. He had been an abstract painter, but he did an about-face and never looked back.

“I didn’t paint for eight years,” he recalls. “I thought it was impossible, so I drew from life and made etchings. One morning (in 1978) I woke up knowing I had to paint and that I had to paint my wife’s (poet Anne Atik’s) brown coat. When I finished, I was astonished and wondered how I did it, but then I realized I had been drawing with a brush.”

Now, nine years later, he remains convinced that “to paint from life is the deepest and hardest experience. It’s empirical experimentation. We discover facts, the same as scientists, except that the facts aren’t needed. You can’t cure cancer with them.” But that doesn’t prevent him from being a self-confessed “fanatic of truth.”

Arikha completes each work in a single session or, as he puts it, “in one go.” This accounts for the continuity of his brushwork on surfaces that sometimes look as if they had been spun from delicate, curly threads.

“I paint not to get a copy of nature, but to get with the brush what I see while I see it. It’s an act of observation by means of the brush. The instant cannot be repeated and the brushwork is organic. When you retouch it, you disorganize it. I can’t bear to go back.”

This method of working “demands enormous concentration,” Arikha says, but “one always has to have a challenge, barriers that one cannot break; mine are to paint in one go and not to mix media.”

He can’t sustain that intensity for more than three months, so after a concentrated period of painting he takes a break. How long? “It’s not something I decide. The need to paint is something you feel in your mouth. I don’t believe in intentional art. If it is intentional, it becomes a product, not something that will last through time. “

Arikha uses downtime from painting to read and study art history and to write articles for various publications, including a review of a recent book on Velasquez for the New York Review of Books. Shooing away a compliment on the unusual breadth of his accomplishments, he cites historic precedents and says, “the artist as ignoramus is a recent concept. Stupid artists make stupid art.”

He credits Samuel Beckett, whom he met 30 years ago, as his “lighthouse” of rigor and honesty. “I owe him my ethics and my aesthetics. I think one needs ethics in one’s aesthetics,” he says.

As a child, however, Arikha learned discipline the hard way. Born in Romania, he displayed an early talent for music and art, but World War II put a stop to such cultural pursuits. He survived several Nazi forced labor camps (though his father did not), finally arriving at a kibbutz in Israel in 1944 and spending about five “crucial teen-age years” there.

In 1948, while serving as an armed escort, he was seriously injured and left for dead, but he eventually recovered and went to Paris the following year. Arikha has lived there, off and on, ever since, making regular journeys to Israel and often traveling elsewhere.

“The situation is this: I’m an Israeli by passport, language and feeling, but I live in Paris. I sank in there, but I don’t belong anywhere. I feel like a ship that went too far and can’t return,” he says. “My friends in Paris want me to become a citizen, but I can’t betray Israel. People in Israel ask why I don’t live there, but you can’t go back.

“I have to be alone. It’s terrible, but I believe in the state of exile. I need that. Otherwise I would become an official artist.”

Instead, he has become a truly international artist with enclaves of friends and works in museums around the world. Though France’s “obsession with modernity” and the “collapse of its classical education” bitterly disappoint him, Arikha counts his friends, his family and great cultural institutions as reasons to stay.

Wending his way through an interview that takes him from a search for a cup of coffee to a stroll along the Venice boardwalk, Arikha sparkles, sputters, fumes and tells delicious anecdotes. But he grows quite silent when the discussion turns to the war experiences of his youth. “Yes, of course, it influenced me, but I can’t say how,” he says as he pulls away.

Another subject that leaves him nearly speechless is the emotional quality of his art, described by critic Robert Hughes as “an air of scrupulous anxiety.”

With the exception of a few private jokes, Arikha chooses still life objects strictly for their formal character, and not for meanings or feelings that might be ascribed. As for others’ interpretations of the meaning of his art, he says, “I don’t know about that. I only know if it’s right.”