Avigdor Arikha (1929-2010)

Artist of 2 portraits
Avigdor Arikha, born in Bukovina, a German-speaking part of Romania, survived the horrors of the Holocaust through the drawings he made as a young adolescent in the concentration camps. These came to the notice of the International Red Cross, which rescued him and helped him to reach a kibbutz in Palestine in 1944. After formal art training in Jerusalem, Arikha first came to Paris in 1949, where he mixed with the post-war Paris abstractionists and made lifelong friendships with Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti.