Avigdor Arikha

Avigdor Arikha was born in 1929 in Rădăuți

Arikha was born Victor Długacz in Rădăuți to a German-speaking Jewish family and grew up in Czernowitz. His father was an accountant. In 1941 the family was deported to camps in Transnistria, where his father died after being beaten.

He drew scenes of the deportation, and these drawings helped save him. In 1944 he came to Mandatory Palestine with his sister and lived at Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha. He studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem and was severely wounded in the 1948 war.

In 1949 he won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and from 1954 he lived in Paris. He first worked as an abstract painter, then in 1965 stopped painting and drew only from life. He returned to painting in 1973, finishing each work in one sitting in natural light.

He painted commissioned portraits, including Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Catherine Deneuve, and illustrated texts by his friend Samuel Beckett. As an art historian he curated exhibitions on Poussin and Ingres and wrote books and essays. He married the poet Anne Atik in 1961 and died in Paris in 2010.