One
of the greatest seascape painters of his time, Aivazovski conveyed the movement
of the waves, the transparent water, the dialogue between sea and sky with
with virtuoso skill and tangible verisimilitude. The artist also often turned
to themes from Armenian and Russian history.
Born in the Crimea (Russia), he graduated from
the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts with honors at 20 years of age. He was
sent to study in Italy and returned a recognized master. Delacroix spoke of
him with great respect and Turner described him as a genius. Always true to
his motto, "For me, to live means to work," Aivazovski created around
6,000 paintings. His house in his native town was turned into a museum dedicated
to his memory even during his lifetime.
The originality of Aivazovsky's work is largely
determined by his national character and temperament. Armenian culture has
an ancient tradition of the creative value of light, and the knowledge of
light was one of the most important elements in his art, giving the artist's
canvases a dreamy and emotional feel.
Hagop
Hovnatanian, known as "the Rafael of Tiflis," was the great-great-grandson
of Naghash Hovnatanian, the artist who painted the interior of the Holy Etchmiadzin
cathedral at the end of the 17th century. The works of Hagop Hovnatanian are
an amazing combination of both ancient and modern. He received no professional
education, studying under his father. Hovnatanian's works are related to the
aesthetic concepts of this time.
Only a small part of Hagop Hovnatanian's work
has survived. The life of the artist is almost unknown to us, and a veil of
mystery covers his portraits. The main sources for Hovnatanian's artistic approach
and his pictorial language were the traditions of the mediaeval Armenian manuscript
illumination and folk art. Absorbing and interpreting these traditions in his
own fashion, Hovnatanian took national painting to classical heights, securing
himself the fame of the last mediaeval and the first modern Armenian artist.
A
son of a priest and a graduate of the Lazaryan Institute in Moscow, Vartkes
Sourenyants started his painting career while studying architecture at the Minich
Academy of Arts in Germany. A multi-faceted artist, Sourenyants spent most of
his life in Moscow, working as a theater set designer and a book illustrator.
He is also known for his translations of Shakespeare's plays into Armenian.
The early part of the artist's creative life coincided
with the mass pogroms of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II
in the Ottoman Empire, and Sourenyants produced a number of paintings reflecting
these tragic events. The artist's love for rich culture of the East was reflected
in a cycle of "oriental" works, the most famous of which, "Salome,"
presents an original treatment of the biblical theme. Sourenyants died in Yalta,
the Crimea, while working on a wall paintings for an Armenian church.
The
artist has gone down in the history of Armenian art as the founder of landscape.
He spent his childhood in Georgia, in the picturesque Alazan Valley, and then
graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts.
Bashindjagyan traveled widely in Armenia feeling
deeply the beauty of his native land and devotedly praising its eternal symbols,
Mount Ararat and Lake Sevan. He was the first Armenian artist to capture the
unbreakable link between the biblical mountain and the life and spiritual world
of his people.
The artist lived in Tiflis and held regular exhibitions
of his works, infecting the developing Armenian bourgeoisie with a love of their
homeland and a taste for art.
Bashindjagyan appreciated the peace and silence
of nature. Both his landscapes and his literary works - tales and short stories
- are dominated by a lyrical mood, opening up to the outsider the soul of an
artist in love with nature.
Zakarian
is a rare figure in the history of art. Having had no special training he achieved
great results. Born in Constantinople, Turkey, he got his medical education
in Paris and practiced medicine for several years, before fabulous Paris museums
inspired him to take up painting
Zakaryan's still-lifes are delicate, yet superbly
composed, with intense color and an expressive play of light and shade. In France
his paintings were highly regarded by contemporaries, among them Degas, who
painted a portrait of the artist in 1885 (D. Weil Collection, Paris). He was
awarded two gold medals at international exhibitions and the Legion d'Honneur.
During his lifetime his works were acquired by various French museums including
the Musee Luxembourg (now in the Musee d 'Orsay).
Zakaryan lived far from his homeland at a time
when the Armenian people were suffering their greatest trials and often depicted
a glass of water, as if to symbolize his unquenchable nostalgia.
A
wide variety of objects from the life and art of the Orient - statuettes, manuscripts,
colored-coloured textiles - sometimes with the face of some eastern beauty,
and beside them flowers in a vase, or a branch with shining leaves thrusting
upwards into space, all bathed in a soft light - this is the world of Hovsep
Pushman, the world which brought him fame in France and the US.
The objects laid out on Pushman's canvases are
unusual and filled with deep meaning. His much-loved statuettes are not simply
models but seem to be human, they move, they talk to each other.
The objects painted by the artist would seem
to be on an altar, to have been kept in the dark for many long years, only now
for the first time being illuminated by calm rays of light, appearing to us
in all their beauty and praising the eternal mystery of art.
Shahin,
one of the most famous French-Armenian artists, was born in Vienna and first
studied art under A. Paoletti in the Armenian Murad Rafayelian School in Venice.
He then continued his education at the Academie Julien in Paris. An acknowledged
master of etching, Shahin received gold medals at major international exhibitions
in Paris in 1900, and in Venice in 1903.
The artist's favorite genre was portraiture, and
here we see his virtuoso drawing skills and precise understanding of the inner
world of his sitter. Shahin's urban landscapes are highly poetical and the critic
Camille Mauclair said of his Venetian series: "In Venice Shahin took the
prize for originality. He showed his ability to see that which others pass by."
The artist often turned to Armenian themes and
maintained close links with his native land, presenting his best works to the
state. In 1928 he was elected an honorary member of the Armenian Union of Artists.
In 1990 a museum devoted to the life and work of Shahin was set up in the historic
Normandy village of Crouttes.
In
Kodjabekyan Armenian art found its first primitive painter, the like of France's
Henri Rousseau and Georgia's Niko Pirosmani.
Kodjabekyan lived and worked mainly in the multi-national
city of Tbilisi. His only means of expression was the pencil: on small sheets
of paper he depicted whole crowds of people, relating his eyewitness accounts
of workdays, high-days and holidays, funeral processions, weddings and carousals.
In Yerevan, to which the artist moved in 1919, he depicted with great feeling
the life of the refugees who had escaped genocide. One truly touching drawing
shows a peasant talking with his ox.
The dimensions and movement of Khokabekian's characters
are conveyed purely by the use of a line, and he took that technique to great
heights. He worked as an unskilled laborer, drawing in his spare moments and
generously giving away his sketches. Those that survived form a priceless page
in the history of modern Armenian art.
Tadevosyan,
a master of plein-air painting, had a fine perception of the rainbow play of
the sun's rays, of light and shade, atmospheric perspective and nature's mood.
He revealed himself as an Impressionist in hundreds of superb studies, all marked
by his amazing, flickering brushwork. Feeling the need for a contemporary artistic
language, Tatevosyan moved on and arrived at the post-impressionist style of
pointillism.
The artist was born in Echmiadzin, Armenia and
studied at the school attached to the Lazarev Institute in Moscow, moving on
to the Moscow School of Painting, were he studied under Vasily Polenov.
Tadevosian's great achievement lay in that he
was able to perceptively reveal the picturesque wealth of the nature of his
homeland and to tangibly feel its light.
The
founder of modern Armenian painting, Sarian developed his style working in all
the newest trends, and was the first Armenian artist to recognize the need to
form an individual style founded on ancient national traditions.
Born in the small Armenian-populated town of
Novy Nakhichevan, in Russia, he studied in Moscow under Valery Serov and Konstantin
Korovin. His first trip to the homeland in 1901 produced a cycle of pantheistic
works, "Fairy Tales and Dreams," stylistically influenced by Symbolism.
From 1909 Saryan turned to everyday life, taking
as his subjects ancient sites untouched by civilization. Sowewhat generalizing
reality, he captured the expressive outline of forms. His compositions were
built up on a single plane through the equal distribution of large areas of
color, whilst preserving the pure resonant color of Armenian manuscript illumination.
The contrasting yet harmonious combination of three or four main colors was
used to create an expressive sense of the burning light of the sun, which seems
to radiate from within the canvas.
Kojoyan
was brought up in a jeweler's family and graduated from the Munich Academy of
Arts, but his main influence was Armenian manuscript illumination, which he
studied in great detail.
From the early twenties, the artist was inspired
by the idea of the renaissance of his homeland, seeking, both in his paintings
and his graphic works, to combine the past of his people with its present. He
produced numerous original book illustrations, taking Armenian graphic art to
new heights.
His outstanding work, "David of Sasun,"
depicts random episodes from the life of the Armenian national folk epic hero.
The expressive drawing and whimsical invention of this masterpiece correspond
to the spirit and the passion of the epic. Other works are in much the same
key, with the artist giving his landscapes a unique feeling, wrapping them in
historic atmosphere.
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Lake
Sevan,
1940 |
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Village
Yard,
1927 |
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The
colorful palette of Arakelyan gave his native land quiet spirituality and lyricism.
He had an incredibly fine sense of the charm of old Armenian villages and created
beauty from the most simple sceneries of his native land, places which would
at first seem to be in no way memorable.
Arakelyan was born near Nakhichevan (now in Azerbaijan),
and studied in Tiflis (Tbilisi) under Egishe Tatevosyan and then under Konstantin
Korovin in Moscow.
His creative method developed through direct
communication with nature. In his landscapes the artist opens up to the onlooker
his warm and loving soul, revealing the purity of his feelings and his trepidation
before the surrounding world.
Under the master's touch the image of the Armenian
landscape was enriched with intimacy and an elegiac quality.
The
work of this artist occupies a special place in contemporary Armenian painting.
When one first becomes acquainted with his work, it seems that the artist separated
himself from the problems of the outside world, living in solitude his own universe.
Painting was his only passion and his life. Full of trepidation, precious, like
the meaning of existence, the play of colors absorbed his whole being to the
end of his life.
Born in Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia), Bazhbeouk-Melikian
was trained as an artist in Moscow, but spent the rest of his life in his native
town. The room in which he lived was his only studio to the end of his days.
The sole, unchanging object of his inspiration
was women, an eternal theme in art on which he created various improvisations.
The artist created a setting for his beautiful, elegant heroines in which they
felt themselves to be free, in their element.
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Monte
Carlo,
1913 |
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Horse
Racing,
1905 |
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A
colorful and unique artistic personality, Yakulov was born in Tiflis (Georgia).
When he was ten years old his family moved to Moscow, where he studied at the
school attached to the Lazarev Institute and then at an art college. Yakulov's
fame is linked above all with his theatrical designs. His sets and costumes
for theater performances in Tiflis, Yerevan and, particularly, Moscow and Paris,
where he was invited by Diaghilev, were received with great enthusiasm and were
truly revolutionary in the world of set design. Yakulov's paintings brought
him a reputation as a great innovator.
In his youth, the artist traveled to China and
then to Italy, where he sought to synthesize in his work the characteristic
traits of art of the Orient and the early Renaissance expressed through melodic
line and a spatial approach to composition. Yakulov placed all the figures on
a single plan and carefully worked up each part of the canvas. Through great
intensity and expressiveness in his colorful composition, the artist asserted
his credo, the eternal and stormy movement of life.
Kochar's
work is very varied, for he worked equally well in the spheres of sculpture,
painting and graphic art. In the square by the train station in Yerevan, stands
his superb monument to David of Sasun, a hero of the Armenian folk epic.
Kochar was born in Tiflis and studied in Moscow,
and then spent 15 years living and working in Paris. ln the combination of typical
Tiflis characters, elements of Cubism and classical drawing which was an intrinsic
part of Kochar's artistic approach lay the origin of his daring innovations.
The artist's Parisian period was also characterized by attempts to give his
work a fourth dimension-time. Kochar's expressive and dynamically constructed
works produced under the general title "Painting in Space" are a mixture
of sculpture and painting, allowing the spectator to look at the work from all
sides. Some of the best examples of Kochar's innovative work are in the Musee
d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Although
interest toward Leon Tutunjian’s painting started growing in France since
his death, his legacy has not been given full and fair assessment.
Tutundjian was born in Amasia in Turkey. In 1915
he was sent to Greece with thousands of other orphans. In 1923 he left Greece
for Paris, where only two years later had a very well-received one-man show
in the Gale'rie Ney.
In 1929, strongly drawn to Surrealism, Tutundjian
became part of a group with Carslund, Doesburg, and Helion, and a year later
started exhibiting with Arp, Herbin, Gleizes, Delaunay and Giacometti. "The
most introversive, the most mysterious, the most surrealistic," wrote about
him Helion.
Perhaps the "ve'rite's inouies" in
the art of Tutundjian are perceived by some simply as invention, but to him
they were the real, heart-rending pictures of the childhood of which he never
spoke.
One
of the most famous contemporary artists, the founder of Abstract Surrealism,
Gorky was described by Andre Breton as the most important painter in American
history. was born in Western Armenia, in the village of Khorgom on the banks
of Lake Van. In 1915, Gorky (Vostanik-Manuk Adoyan) escaped Turkish massacres
with thousands of others refugees by fleeing to Yerevan, where his mother died
of famine. In 1920 he came to the US. His whole life in the new country, which
ended in suicide, consisted of years of hard work and bitter struggle.
Gorky made a thorough study of the art of ancient
peoples, including the Armenians, and passed through all the stages in modern
art until his efforts crystallized in his own personal style. Taking his artistic
language to its limits and hiding in plants, flowers, a plough and peasant attire
the deep meaning of life, Gorky achieved a superb harmony of idea and feeling.
His work was a disturbing poem of great love and nostalgia, and the retrospective
of his work in the Guggenheim Museum in 1984 was quite rightly described as
Armenian-American art.
Carzou
(Karnik Zulumyan) is one of the leading modern French artists. He was born in
Aleppo (Syria) and received his artistic training in Paris, where he settled
in 1924. He achieved great success in 1953 with an exhibition of his Venetian
landscapes and with his designs for the ballet "Giselle" at the Paris
Opera. Carzou was awarded several
major prizes and the Legion d'Honneur, and in 1978 he was elected a member of
the French Academy of Arts.
In the combination of elegant, fine and
energetic lines - Carzou's main means of expression - the world seems to be
a vision reflecting the artist's deep poetic perception of the beauty of nature
and human creation.
The artist retained links with his motherland
and is not only highly respected in France, but also greatly loved in Armenia.
In 1992, one of the oldest churches in Manosque, the interior of which he decorated
with frescoes embodying the essence of his art, became the Museum of Carzou.
Orakyan
was perhaps more an open and ingenuous artist than any other, embodying in his
work the spiritual state of the wanderer, of a man who was deprived of childhood.
"Although I have lived in Europe for over 40 years and owe to her all that
is best, including my skill, in my heart I remain an Armenian," he wrote.
He was born in Constantinople and arrived in Italy in the early 1920's, where
he graduated from the Academy of Arts in Rome. His one-man exhibitions in 1947
and 1958 evoked wide response in the artistic world.
Orakyan lived in poverty all his life. The leitmotiv
of his work was the psychology of the unfortunate who stand on the brink between
life and death. The eyes of his heroes, open wide to the world, open up their
own inner world, and the somewhat elongated hands seem to grip on to life with
all their strength. Through the deformation of forms the artist sought to achieve
maximum expression. Orakyan's art is marked by a touching trait - dreaming liberation
from loneliness, he often puts himself among the figures on the canvas.
The
roots of Jansem's deeply humanistic work lie in the heritage of Bruegel, Goya
and Daumier. In 1922, Jansem (Jan-Hovanes Semerdjian) and his family fled persecution
in Turkey for Greece, and subsequently to France. The young man studied in the
Free Academies of Montparnasse, and then graduated from the Higher Arts School.
He began exhibiting (at the Salon des Independants) in 1944.
The critics described him as the champion of
outcasts, but the artist’s characters, even when in a state of extreme
depression, never impose their sorrow on the viewer. They are proud and dignified.
The artist reveals an unusual, deeply philosophical
world woven from trials and trepidations; with confident drawing it spreads
out like a network of blood vessels across the canvas and brings the object
out of the depth.
Galentz
came from the generation of "people with no childhood" who were saved
from the Genocide of 1915. He grew up in an orphanage, and his art took shape
in Beirut, Lebanon. His somber recollections of his childhood were answered
in his heart by a hymn in praise of life and the harmony of soft velvet tones;
he could see the pure, radiant sky behind the dark clouds. "lt was not
easy to understand Harutyun," Saryan wrote of him. "It was necessary
to look into his thoughtful and sorrowful eyes, which said more than he could
tell himself ."
Galentz returned to Armenia in 1946, and it was here
that his style finally crystallized, with its light forms and melodious lines.
This was aided by the multifaceted colorful "palette" of the natural
surroundings in his homeland. The work of Galentz has the pure ring of transparent
tones which animate his pictures with the breath of eternal spring. Galentz
died at the very height of his fame, leaving behind him a heritage which presents
a poet who sang of beauty, goodness and aspirations.
The
name of Minas is pronounced with particular affection in Armenia. He devoted
the whole of his tragically short life to art. Between 1960 and 1975, Minas
created 500 canvases both large and small, roughly the same number of drawings,
20 large frescoes and designs for a dozen or so theatrical productions. Three
years before his death under the wheels of a car which swerved onto the sidewalk,
a fire in his studio destroyed a large portion of his work. Fate seemed to be
against him even after his death, for an earthquake demolished part of his frescoes
in Leninakan and flattened the museum devoted to him in his native village of
Djadjur.
Saryan was Minas' spiritual father. The young artist
was the true heir to the work of the older man and the symbol of the new growth
of national painting. The intense color of Minas' works was dictated by the
mossy surfaces of the cliffs singed by the sun, cliffs which seem to represent
mysterious eternity.
"In
Hagopyan's works we see the suffering and the wisdom of Armenia", quite
justly wrote a visitor to a Moscow exhibition of the artist's works. Born in
Egypt and educated at the Armenian Melkonian School in Cyprus and at the Academie
de la Grande Chaumiere, Hagopyan first set foot in his native land at 40 years
of age. In Armenia, he discovered something new, he found his own Armenia, and
we are now used to looking at our surroundings with his eyes.
Hagopyan's art is dramatic, with an all encompassing
disquiet born of the nature of contemporary life. There is a key to the deep
underlayers of his conceptions, the clouds, trees, vines or stones on the banks
of Lake Sevan are personifications, the bearers of various emotions: fear, sorrow,
loneliness, suffering...
Hagopian's pictures are based on a sound linear construction
and the picture surface is bound of silent, imperceptible brushstrokes and a
harmony of the finest shades of color. Hagopyan fills his works with his most
cherished hope - to see a peaceful and untroubled world.
Her
youth in the magical town of Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia), with its ancient yards
recalling some theatrical set, and her mother, a native of one of the most beautiful
corners of Armenia, Akulis (now Azerbaijan) and a talented story-teller, created
the ideal backdrop for Gayane's fantastical world.
Looking at life through the prism of imagination, Gayane
found in objects, people and animals metaphors, symbols and magical visions,
distilling all the complexities of her experiences, her reveries and dreams.
After the death of her mother, Gayane was forced to
leave her childhood houseand move into a modern, multi-storey block on the outskirts
of Tbilisi. The realistic elements of her fantasy were cut off sharply. "If
I had been born here, l would not have even been able to draw a flower",
she admitted. But Gayane preserves the memory of her childhood, the tales her
mother told of unforgettable Akulis, and finally, her isolated, dreamy soul,
and her mysterious palette fed by these memories.
A
film director of world renown, Paradjanov's film "Fire Horses/The Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors" was received with great acclaim around the world.
This was followed by other works, "The Color of Pomegranates," "The
Legend of the Suram Fortress," "AshikKerib," etc. His originality
lies to a great extent in his painterly and theatrical approach to the picture.
Paradjanov was always an enthusiastic painter and set
designer and during the last years of his life his works were exhibited in Tbilisi,
Yerevan, Moscow and Cannes. Paradjanov's work both as director and artist is
always unexpected. His imagination creates a magical poetical world which immediately
seizes the onlooker; his works are in impeccable taste, attractive and inexplicably
contemporary.
The restless, constantly erupting talent of the artist
created around him, wherever he was, whether at home, in prison, in the hospital,
or in a hotel room, an atmosphere of creativity and beauty. Everything he did
bore the inimitable stamp of personality.
