I have been pleased to re-encounter the work of Avigdor Arikha again on the Blain Southern stand at Frieze Masters.   At the time that I was working at the NPG in the 1990s he was a prominent figure:  a Romanian who was able to escape to Palestine because of the quality of his drawing, started as an abstract painter, but abandoned it, concentrating on the immediacy of drawing and painting, which he liked to complete in a single session in order to convey the ‘instant décisif’.   Not only was he a painter, but a writer on art, and a close friend of Samuel Beckett and Henri Cartier-Bresson:-