Translated material
Triptych of the city of Erebuni
Exhibition of art from the collections of museums in the capital of Armenia in Moscow
Prepared on the initiative of the director of the Pushkin Museum named after A.S. Pushkin Irina Antonova, within the framework of the cycle “Under the Canopy of Friendly Muses”, the exhibition “Two Colors of the Rainbow - Two Fates Reflection” is clearly associated with a triptych in its composition. Collected from four museums in Yerevan (the National Gallery of Armenia, the House-Museum of Martiros Saryan, the Museum of Russian Art - the collection of A.Ya. Abrahamyan, the Museum of the artist Ervand Kochar), the works set the perspective of three themes. This is “Armenian Art of New and Contemporary Times”, a monographic exhibition of Martiros Saryan, and finally, “Russian painting of the 18th-20th centuries from the museums of Yerevan”.The latter topic is to a large extent consistent with the “Golden Map of Russia” programs that regularly take place within the walls of the Tretyakov Gallery. Parts of the “Golden Map” represent a brief digest of the history of painting collected from various Russian museums from Borovikovsky to the masters of the “Jack of Diamonds”. A similar thing is shown now, only the canvases of Russian painters were provided by Armenia. It is interesting, first of all, to see little-known and sometimes delightful masterpieces of familiar classics, to gasp again, paying tribute, for example, to the skill of Serov the portrait painter. I remember the portrait of philanthropist Maria Akimova from 1908. It is like a formula of aristocracy applied both to the model and to the pictorial substance itself; The beauty’s velvet eyes captivate you so much that you think, what else could there be a hot scarlet background and a precious dress that looks like brocade with gold and emerald flashes? Other portrait painters would have a luscious, mannered beauty flowing from them; with Serov, everything is created by the energy of painting as such. And Levitan is beautiful with a linear silhouette exposure of the landscape, which is covered with colored planes like a tent. And Falk, and Larionov, and Goncharova... Many - many. At the same time, it is difficult to understand what makes the main Armenian museum - the National Gallery of Armenia - unique from the Russian side. Indeed, like many repositories organized after the establishment of Soviet power, the State Museum of Armenia created in 1921 (now the National Gallery of Armenia) was replenished to a large extent thanks to the centralized distribution of art objects from the State Museum Fund, large metropolitan collections of Moscow and St. Petersburg-Leningrad (with the exception of once Serov’s portrait of M.N. Akimova, personally donated by her and her mother V.I. Kananova to the gallery in 1929, as well as participation in the formation of the museum of collectors and families of artists: the widow of R. Falk A. Shchekin-Krotova donated to the National Gallery 19 paintings and graphic works of the master). Moreover, if we show the full history of the collections of the National Gallery of Armenia, the question arises: why were we deprived of the pleasure of acquaintance with its collection of Western European painting? After all, the school of Botticelli, and Guardi, and Rubens, and Fragonard, and worthy fellow Dutchmen, Flemings, and French landscape painters of the “Barbizon School” of the 19th century are represented there.
Paying tribute to the masterpieces of Boris Grigoriev and Aristarkh Lentulov from the museum created on the basis of the private collection of Dr. A.Ya. Abrahamyan, I still attribute the main success of the exhibition to the worthy display of art that is unfamiliar even to specialists from Armenia itself. In the National Gallery you can get acquainted with the entire history of Armenian painting of the New and Contemporary times thanks to donations, acquisitions from exhibitions, from the archives of Yerevan, as well as the receipt of a collection of Armenian and Russian artists from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow (created in 1815 at the expense of the Armenian Lazarian family -Lazarevs). Icon painting of the 17th-18th centuries is associated primarily with the activities of five generations of the Hovnatanyan family of artists, who amazingly harmoniously fused together the traditions of Byzantine writing, calligraphic Armenian miniatures, Western European Renaissance and Baroque. The founder of the dynasty, Nagash Hovnatan (1666-1721), laid the foundation for the family tradition of decorating the spiritual center of the Armenians, the Cathedral of the Etchmiadzin Monastery, with paintings. The fifth generation was born Hakob Mkrtumovich Ovnatanyan (1806-1881), the largest master of Armenian portrait painting of the New Age. His portraits are not very similar to the self-satisfied and officially courteous personages of the main European masters of the gallant age. Their special charm lies in their delicate, miniature, careful copywriting (the medieval memory of a sacred image), in the idea of a wise, confidential conversation between the model and the viewer. This careful admiration of the artist’s always for the unique integrity of the captured models, in my opinion, brings Hakob Hovnatanyan’s portraiture closer to the subtlest portrait images of Russian romanticism, especially with Pavel Fedotov, nervous and jeweler in details. The exhibition also includes a wonderful painting by Fedotov’s fellow student in the drawing classes of the Academy of Arts, Stepanos Nersesyan (1815-1884), “Picnic on the Bank of the Kura River,” in which Fedotov’s attention to beaded, telling details is similar.
In general, a romantic aura crowns Armenian art of different periods of the New and even Contemporary times. Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky (1817-1900) unexpectedly appears among the Armenian landscape painters; the sparkling marinas and the historical painting “Noah Descends from Mount Ararat” suddenly make you want to look closely at ancient Armenian painting, and at the same time next to the paintings of the great Englishman Turner.
Sparkling whirlwinds of color and light determined the musical sound of the “simultanist” paintings of Georgy Yakulov (1884-1928), the principle of which was perfectly revealed by the artist himself: “A ray of sun, air, sky, water, nature and man, animal and plant - all united by one general movement, one prism of color. The essence is in the rhythm of this prism, in the fluctuations from saturation to transparency, without transition to a prism of another color.” Master Ervand Kochar (1899-1979) was also seriously interested in prisms of colored and plastic vortices. Two of his kinetic forms came to the exhibition from the Yerevan Kochar Museum: three-dimensional paintings rotating in space, painted on aluminum in oil.
And, of course, a separate section, deserving the highest judgment, is dedicated to Martiros Saryan (1880-1972). The temperas collected from the artist's House-Museum and the National Gallery of Armenia date back to the first quarter of the 20th century. The journey of light in the object-spatial world of the painter (an avid, it must be said, traveler - hunter of new visual impressions) is so desperately independent that each form is taken by an archetype, and each of its boundaries - by the tension of the force fields of the universe.