Victor Długacz (later Avigdor Arikha) was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuţi, but grew up in Czernowitz in Bukovina, Romania (now in Ukraine).

[2] Arikha survived thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the International Red Cross.

In 1949 he won a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he learned the fresco technique.

His profound knowledge of art techniques and masterly draughtsmanship enabled him to abide by this principle of immediacy, partly inspired by Chinese brush painting.

Other portraits include those of Catherine Deneuve (1990) for the French State, or that of the former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy for the city of Lille.

Art critic Marco Livingstone wrote that Arikha "bridged the modernist avant-garde of pure abstraction with traditions of observational drawing and painting stretching back to the Renaissance and beyond.

His writings include Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Frick Collection, New York, 1986); Peinture et Regard (Paris: Hermann, 1991, 1994; new, augmented edition 2011); On Depiction (London: Bellew Publishing, 1995); and numerous essays published in such journals as the New York Review of Books,[7][8] The New Republic, Commentaire, Literary Imagination, etc.

In 2006, he was invited by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid to select a number of works from its collection and write entries for the exhibit catalogue.