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Today's critic looking at a Chardin pot usually sees the middle-class sobriety rather than the beautiful curve. If he should acknowledge the austere caress of that curve, he risks being called a sentimental appreciator, an elitist connoisseur, a formalist. And as with art history, so with contemporary art. With few exceptions, the artists who now attract attention are commentators, sometimes brilliant commentators, whose main interest is political or philosophical. They use form much as a good illustrator uses it, to deliver a message. A bit of razzle-dazzle with commercial graphics to interrogate late capitalist metaphysics--that's the kind of line that now excites.
There is nothing wrong with commentary. But the eye has its own ends, and those ends are being forgotten. No one knows this better than the painter Avigdor Arikha. He is, among other things, a crusader for the lost rights of the eye. He cannot abide the way curators will cavalierly shine artificial light onto pictures created in a natural light. Would we allow a conductor to play a symphony out of key? Or worse, not even notice when he does? Arikha's own art is not of the crusading kind, but in its way it is no less absorbed in the losses of modern life, no less engaged in a struggle to retain what is being overlooked.
The aura of loss seemed particularly strong at his recent show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, in part because the painter was mourning the death of his close friend Samuel Beckett. Several pictures made direct reference to Beckett, himself a master of loss. The catalog for the show, which Arikha designed, opens with two of those pictures. One shows a silver spoon on a white cloth. The spoon, on which "Sam" is inscribed, was given to Beckett at birth; he in turn gave it to one of Arikha's daughters when she was born. An unforgettable homage to a writer attuned to first and last things, this picture of a spoon has the nakedness of the newborn on the swaddling cloth and the finality of the corpse on the shroud.
In the second picture, Arikha shows a candlestick without a candle. On one side of the candlestick, partially out of the picture, we see a...