Arikha

Avigdor Arikha, an Israeli artist well known in New York and Paris, is a deceptively simple realist. His subtle pictures, as critic Barbara Rose observes here, are preoccupied with the question ""Is this what I see?'' There is a startling density to his images, whether he paints a broom, a hanging coat, a friend's face or the books in his study. Robert Hughes notes that Arikha's work is ``all concentration'' and ``breathes the air of scrupulous anxiety.'' Samuel Beckett praises the artist's ``acuity of vision,'' and Jane Livingston remarks that the power of his paintings and drawings ``is like the power of experienced life itself, in which `subject matter' is rarelyuntil laterthe issue.'' Arikha's recent New York pictures include gritty subway drawings and frankly sensuous nudes. The 106 excellent color reproductions and 83 halftones prove Arikha to be a master draftsman, an intellectual artist using realism to explore themes he could not touch until his abrupt break with abstraction in the mid-1960s. (April 28)