Arikha's Elliptical Intensity

By ROBERT HUGHES

With hunger in his eye, an abstract painter goes realist

One of the main cultural facts of the '70s was an upsurge, in the U.S. and Europe alike, of realist painting. It came in all modes, from gaudy airbrush renderings of photorealist motorcycles to inflated history painting, and in all emotional temperatures, from gelid beaux-arts nudes to the expressionist rant of political muralists in East Berlin. Much of it was instant art, and instantly disposable. But a striking deposit of achievement remains, and one of its components is the work of the Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha. A scrub-haired, passionately erudite man of 50, Arikha is best known in Paris, where he lives with his wife Anne, a poet, and his two daughters. Now a show of 22 of his oils at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gives an American audience its first look at his extremely subtle paintings.

They are easy to miss--at first. Arikha loathes spectacle and the tyranny of impact; his paintings, small, low-colored, high-keyed, are owls, not peacocks. They are single images, enumerations of ordinary objects--a battered pair of black shoes, a stoneware jug, or a bunch of asparagus tied in blue paper set down with an odd, veiled discomposure. The size of the painting laconically follows the size of its subject. Isolated and closely scrutinized, these motifs give Arikha's canvases a likeness (insofar as painting can ever resemble writing) to the elliptical sentences of his friend Samuel Beckett, imbued with a hard-won sense of the difficulty of any kind of description.

Arikha's work, trying to stabilize a sight in an unpredictable frequency of marks, is all concentration. Supremely honest, unrhetorical painting, it breathes the air of scrupulous anxiety. He has a surer sense of tone--the visual equivalent of natural pitch--than anyone else painting today, and color is second to it; his images are not meant to soothe or win the eye but to build up a record of their action through a labyrinth of nuances. For this reason, a painting like Anne Leaning on a Table, 1977, is as bracing as it is modest. A high stamina of observation is entailed in the complicated whites and shadows of the tablecloth and housecoat, set down with Arikha's fugitive and worried scribbles of the brush. When he leaves his customary palette of white and earth colors, the results show his background in abstract painting: Canadian Envelope, 1977, with its immaculate placement of rectangles, its cross-rhymes of blue and red, seems as consciously organized as a Mondrian.

The light in Arikha's paintings is dry and chalky. It conveys a sense of frugality, but with no question of expressionist pathos. His motifs are not actors in a drama of pathetic fallacy, but resistant fragments of the world, the nonself. But what is so gripping about his work is the in tensity with which Arikha engages that world. He speaks of the "hunger in the eye" that drew him away from abstract painting in 1965, and kept him doing nothing but black-and-white brush drawings and etchings from life for eight years. In his paintings since 1973, that hunger is palpable, and it takes nothing for granted. "To paint from life at this point of time," he argues, "demands both the transgression and the inclusion of doubt." Transgression, because any effort to depict something is a shot at certainty; inclusion, because the central paradox of realism is that representation can never be completed. There is always a level of detail below which paint cannot go. What makes the realist painting is not complete illusion, but intensity; and there is no in tensity without rules, limits and artifice.

Arikha is careful to impose these on his work. Each picture must be done in a day; there are no preliminary studies and, especially, no work from photographs, since photography and painting generalize in different ways. His object, brilliantly realized in some parts of his small and sharply edited output, is to make sight and formal deliberation fuse. The conjunctions within Arikha's work, its breadth of language and depth of feeling set off against its insecurity and self-questioning, make it unlike any thing done by an American figurative painter since Edward Hopper. So does its intelligence. Nothing in this show is raw, or facile, or -- especially -- as simple as it looks. --Robert Hughes

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