Arikha [antikvár]

Arikha is staring into a mirror, that much is certain. And he is staring at himself, in so far as the reflection is a serviceable equivalent, despite its reduction in size, of the one who looks. What is perhaps less obvious is that he is staring, not so much at himself as reflected, but at his reflection as it is reflected in a second mirror, for it is his left hand that shades his eyes from the light that falls from above, steadying his gaze. Beyond the edge of the paper, beyond, that is, the frame of the mirror, lie in wait his right arm and hand, fixed there in the moment that the looking is taking place, ready to bring the stick of pastel to the paper again to make the marks that simulate what was seen a moment before. The portrait is called Self-portrait in Raincoat, Peering, dated with diurnal exactitude, 28 November 1988, and signed in Hebrew as well as Roman characters, sub/texts of method and allegiance. He is 'peering' because that is his trade, his craft, his art. It is what he does best. And he protects his eyes from too much light because they are his way into the depths of what lies in front, although he once also peered, left/eyed, along the barrel of a gun. This is all fairly certain, but it is easy to begin to imagine that the pale, clear eyes look farther than the objects that daily pile up before them, beyond the moment to a life that has been marked by violent change. They also see the stages, the way, by which his art evolved and by which he realized that it should be one not of imagination or abstracrion, but of observation, so as to re/create the vision held in those shielded eyes. It was too long a way, so that he will say that he wasted many years of his life going in the wrong direcrion, denying his own natural gifts in collusion with the fashion of Modernism, before he had the courage to rebel. To begin to interpret the portrait in this way, as some kind of metaphor, is to risk error or sentimentality and the artist's scorn. The portrait, after all, has its own life, in the scratching and scumbling of the pastel and its density and flickering softness; in the contours defining the dark coat and the white areas that contain the central mass; and in the pinks and ochres of the shadowed face that emerges from the carapace, peering, the raincoat almost audible with a dry sound as he raises his arm and then sets off, perhaps, in a grey November from Port^Royal towards the Louvre. But language, by its nature, slips into the allusive, and Arikha might flatly deny it all, as he has done before: 'The problem with art is that it is a mute experience about which one cannot talk." But he has added what sounds like an escape clause: 'My pictures are like stones that I throw: where they land is someone else's business.' And so his art has variously been called classical, realist, existentialist, modernist. If we continue with the metaphor, perhaps his look is directed back at his great predecessors. Phenomenally erudite, like few painters in the entire history of art, he has found time, despite his dedication to his art, to pursue serious art^historical studies. He has written on a whole range of artists who have a special interest for him, including Velázquez, Poussin, Ingres, Degas, Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti; the last he knew personally. He has also written on the theoretical aspects of art that have concerned him most, the history of abstraction and drawing from life.^ In addition, Arikha has become an eloquent television performer, not only pro/