Trained in the principles and practices of the Bauhaus, then, in the mid-1960s, listening to his friends Giacometti and Beckett and greatly impressed by his visit to the Caravaggio in the Louvre – ‘The Resurrection of Lazarus’ – he switched from abstraction to ‘observational painting’, to ‘figuration’, to black and white, and gave an account of this orientation, to which he would return ten years later, in a series of critical writings, where we find:
“Abstraction in painting submits reality to form; since the Paleolithic, it has appeared only episodically, often in the final phase of artists’ existences: Titian, Rembrandt, Cézanne. Abstraction seems to be to painting what wisdom is to life: a path of unintentional transcendence (like Virgil’s gathering of the golden branch invoked by Poussin). The felt and the act cannot be recorded on a painted surface or volume without a miracle – of which history is in part the chronicle.” ARIKHA – Peinture et regard. Hermann éd, coll. ” Savoir sur l’art “, Paris 1994, (p.180-190)

In public collections :

• United Kingdom : British Museum, London. National Portrait Gallery, London. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Tate, London.
• USA : Denver Museum of Art, Denver. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. The Jewish Museum, New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• France : Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
• Italy : Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, IT.
• Israel : Israel Museum, Jerusalem, ISR.

Bibliography :

Writings by Jean Clair, Philippe Dagen, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Didier Sicard and others.