InternationalMartiros Saryan: The poet of Armenian sunshine
by Gregory Lima
Published: Saturday February 09, 2008
Martiros Saryan, Self-portrait: Three Stages of Life, 1942. Oil on canvas, 97 x 146 cm.
Yerevan - Should you be in Yerevan on a gloomy day, a day when for you, troubled, the sun has remained behind clouds and perhaps much is not as it should be, I recommend you go see Saryan's paintings over at his house. If you respond to his work the way I do, you might come out with a suntan.
Finding the Saryan House Museum is easy. They named the street after him - in the lively Yerevan tradition of creating a living pantheon of modern Armenian culture in street names and house museums.
They brought the honor further, engraving his face on the 20,000 dram banknote. They also raised his likeness, holding his palette, in nearby Saryan Park, the statue and the labyrinth of walkways enlivened every weekend with a bustling art fair.
Clearly, Saryan must have painted with an energy that still resonates.
When Alexander Tamanian put together the modern Yerevan town plan, designing and putting the opera house in a central location, he designed the Saryan's house and studio at the same time. Then he put it nearby, where his windows would look out to a view he loved: it included the steeple of an ancient church and the mountains beyond.
Who is this Saryan?
Martiros Saryan is the father of modern Armenian art.
But he is more than just another of the new beginnings among other new beginnings in a land of many superbly talented artists. He is a painter that had arrived at a visual speech that communicated something his own people vitally needed when they needed it most.
"Art should make a person happy," he said in the dark, cold hours of a century that left its survivors ragged and melancholy. "It should reinforce his life-affirming ideals," he said.
It should, he added, "infuse him with the strength to struggle with evil and resist death."
That is a heavy burden for an artist to carry with his brushes, colors, and easel. But then, as we shall see, he grew up into a century when the artist was taken very seriously, and nowhere more than in Russia and what would become the Soviet Union.
Saryan was born on a farm in 1880 to a family of Armenian settlers in an area of Russia they called Nor Nakhichevan, now part of Rostov on the Don. The group had found refuge in Russia after the destruction of Ani in Western Armenia. At 16 years of age, showing precocious talent, he went off to Moscow to study at its most progressive art school: the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.
He arrived in Moscow at a time of intense intellectual ferment in all the arts. In his college and among his new friends, there was the expectation of imminent radical change. They anticipated a new world about to be born. Art would help to bring it about. The creative artist would play a socially central role.
Such central social positioning for the artist may sound vastly inflated and naive today, but it is impossible to understand early- 20th-century painting without recognizing what was then considered the vocation of the painter and the assumed role of the avant garde.
By the time young Matiros finished college, as far as the new trends in painting are concerned, Moscow might as well have been a Paris suburb. It has been said, "When Paris sneezed, all of Europe caught a cold," and Paris was in a sneezing fit. The major new art movements reverberated among his teachers and fellow students while the major collectors of the new art in Moscow were among the most discerning in Europe. Soon Moscow would all too briefly become in itself a vital, reverberating world art center. It was this scene he absorbed.
Tales of love and longing
He was 21 years old when he first visited Armenia; "a staggering event for me," he would say. The visit, and the almost annual subsequent visits that would take him to Western Armenia and the ruins of Ani, enthralled him for he had grown up with his mother and father's tales of love and longing for the lost homeland, tales of its mountains and gorges, its forests, pastures, and fertile fields. These were scenes he also absorbed and would never outgrow.
In his first major series of paintings, starting in 1904, he turned with a potent group of friends to a Russian version of the Symbolist movement. They sought to go beyond the everyday to the fantastic world that exists in dreams. For Saryan his dreams of Armenia were integral parts of the landscape he had now seen and loved. Without him losing sight of reality, the dream gave meaning to what he saw and felt. Without the dream, all that is left is the prosaic, even the boring; but within the dream one might be able to penetrate the hidden essence of existence. Saryan called his works "Dreams and Fairy Tales."
He took part in the Symbolist Movement's "Scarlet Rose" exhibition, 1904, and in the fuller "Blue Rose" Exhibit, Moscow 1907, after which the members of the group went their separate ways. Saryan's beautiful paintings from that exhibit, many of which can be seen here, are located in a landscape of the mind, but they are solidly grounded. He is lyrical with his round crowned trees that would become recurrent images, and his ghostly, translucent figures, but his reveries avoid drifting into mysticism. "I intensified the range of colors to more vividly express my feelings," he would say of this period.
He would now intensify the colors even more. Independently, he was taking the same general direction as Henri Matisse and the "Fauvres," the wild beasts, the name given by a French art critic, because they did not directly copy nature but simplified form and intensified color. They were each in their own way following the new painterly vistas opened by the post-Impressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin to Cézanne.
Saryan would further his distinctive approach to brilliance of color in the 1905 painting "Charms of the Sun," a painting that has been described as "almost on fire," before becoming acquainted with the Fauvres years later. Critical to Saryan's further development and his palette of colors were the journeys he would take further south between 1910 and 1913, travelling in Persia, going as far as Constantinople, and visiting Egypt, collecting impressions, loving how sunlight affected color.
