Avigdor Arikha. There were a couple of richly evocative interiors in Avigdor Arikha’s show at the Marlborough Gallery last October. They were works in which this Israeli artist (who’s a longtime resident of Paris) turns his attention to the casual jumble of posters and reproductions that covers a wall of his atelier, a wall near a staircase that ascends to one of those typically Parisian balconies. Arikha doesn’t give us a tightly realistic rendering of this wall full of printed matter; he paints everything with feathery strokes of the brush, so that we can make out some of the reproductions, but vaguely—a Poussin, for instance, or the edge of a poster for one of Arikha’s own shows. The effect is of an assortment of familiar visual friends caught quickly yet concisely, the way you catch sight of things when you walk into your own home. Up to the Loggia (a pastel) and Studio Wall (an oil) are in tones of gray and brown and tan; they bring to mind the intimism of the turn-of-the-century English painter Walter Sickert.

Arikha makes the sleepy Parisian studio look like the nicest place on earth, a snug retreat where models doze, interesting books sit in mild disorder on the shelves, and the pleasures of Europe are just beyond the tall, old-fashioned windows any time the artist wants to take a break. Though Arikha’s paintings are done directly from life, these are the only couple of his works that have ever struck me