Feedback from Life

By ROBERT HUGHES

Drawing is an explicit business, a matter of black and white. The old masters drew to discover a final form, to stabilize reality before painting it. But what if drawing is not about definitions, what if it chooses to study the instabilities of perception? Such is the question hidden in the work of a masterfully gifted Israeli artist named Avigdor Arikha, whose exhibition of ink drawings--seen last year at Marlborough Galleries in Manhattan--is now on show in Fort Worth.

Arikha, who was born 44 years ago in Rumania, survived the Nazi labor camps in Central Europe and was repatriated as an orphan to an Israeli kibbutz in 1944. He studied art and philosophy in Paris--where he still lives with his wife and two children in an icon-cluttered apartment--and until 1965 was an abstract painter. Then came a volte-face; since that year, he has concentrated entirely on life drawing, thus reversing the usual modernist's development. "I was born into modern art," he says, "and it was my start. I think that period is closed, and in any case I have left it. My brush drawings are postabstract, and could not have come into being without abstraction."

In his return to the limits of graphic art, Arikha has produced some of the most remarkable images on paper since the death of Giacometti. Arikha's drawings of landscapes, old shoes and coats, his own face or that of a friend like Samuel Beckett, may seem frustrating at first. They look messy and disclose themselves slowly. None of the hard, wiry line of pen or silverpoint here; the brush (the kind used in Japan for sumi-e or ink painting) flits and stumbles across the roughly textured page, leaving behind tiny marks that seem knitted or crocheted together.

One thinks, as an approximate parallel, of the flat, densely woven brush-work in late Monet. Because Arikha uses undiluted black ink on untinted white paper, the shifts of tone depend entirely on the pressure of the brush. But his sense of gradation, from deep velvety blacks through grays to un touched white, rarely falters.

It is art by cumulative notation, airy, insubstantial and very delicate. The process of seeing and the act of drawing are telescoped together. Each mark is a deciphering of the bewildering flux of impressions that beat upon the eye. Arikha's work seems both provisional and irrevocable.

Although they all come from live models or immediate motifs, none of Arikha's pages look as if they began with a firm, a priori grasp of reality. A case in point is his Self-Portrait Shouting One Morning, 1969. "I was in a filthy mood," Arikha recalls. "I climbed out of bed, yelling at my wife, yelling at the shaving mirror . . ." The bleary-eyed moment of evil temper is caught with acid precision in an image as transitory as the mood itself. The quick, scrubby notations for nose and cheek bone and wiry corncob hair compose themselves around the black hole of a mouth; it is calligraphy as snapshot.

Arikha draws in order to see, as a writer might write in order to think. There is probably not an artist of his generation who has shown so vividly the questions and feedbacks that beset the strange activity known as drawing from life.

sb Robert Hughes

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