InternationalThe early decades of the Russian avant-garde are on display in Yerevan
Yerevan’s Russian Art Museum
by Gregory Lima
Published: Wednesday February 25, 2009
A landscape by Natalia Koncharova. She was among the leading innovative artists of the period, part of the groups that called themselves the Jack of Diamonds and later Donkey’s Tail. Some of her most memorable work was in her period as a cubo-futurist and later as a set and costume designer with the Russian ballet in Paris. Elina Melikyan
Yerevan - Holding what was once the extensive private art collection of Professor Aram Abrahamian, a distinguished Armenian physician, the Russian Art Museum at the foot of the Cascades in Yerevan is a major resource in the study of late-19th-century and 20th-century Russian painting. Beyond that, it has a quirky interest all its own.
Russian art owes a large debt to a few astute major private collectors of the intensely creative avant-garde period in the decades before and into the revolutions of the early 20th century. It has been aptly said that every major painter of this period in Moscow went to two art schools: first an academic one, then the learning influence of the latest trends in the French and Russian avant-garde at Shchukin's or Morotov's, Moscow's premier private art collections open to the public. Those collections were nationalized and vetted with the establishment of the Soviet Union; private collection on a truly large scale virtually ceased in Russia over the next 70 years. Aram Abrahamian, a serious collector, was an exception.
The Russian Art Museum in Yerevan was the only museum that was opened in the Soviet era and was based solely on a single private collection. Moreover, it includes some of the best artists of the fascinating early decades of the Russian avant-garde. Their artistic outlook suppressed during the Stalinist period, the few who were still around were welcomed to Abrhamian's Yerevan opening - the only place in the Soviet Union where some of the suppressed living artists were at that time publicly shown.
Stalin and the Shah with their pants down
Abrahamian, a urologist, may have been close enough to Stalin and the Politburo to see them with their pants down, but he was also a dedicated Armenian within his own lights, having fought with Armenian forces against the Turks, including service in the legendary last-stand battle of Sardarabad for the survival of Armenia. Living and working in Moscow, he wanted his collection housed in his own country; he said he wanted "to share this beauty and bring it within their reach." Yet, it can only be guessed how a physician was able to persuade the authorities to provide him with a well-designed and publicly supported museum for his personal collection, to be housed in his native country, and to see it realized while he was still alive. It probably helped that he was one of the world's leading research urologists, had remarkable success in dealing with male sexual potency problems, and that among his duties was running a clinic in Moscow directly associated with the Kremlin. There were people in high places with highly personal reasons to be grateful.
It is known that the Shah of Iran was in need of his services. It is also known that upon the completion of Abrahamian's treatment, the future of the Pahlavi dynasty seemed at that time more secure. The grateful Shah sent him a gift of two exquisite Persian carpets. It is also known that for his services, when Abrahamian died, they honored his ashes and put them in the Kremlin. It is true he was a Hero of Socialist Labor and had a chest full of medals, including two Orders of Lenin. Nevertheless, for a clinical physician, he seems to have had most unusual clout in the Politburo.
The source for much of this information is Anahit Fijian, the art historian and personal confidant who was associated with Abrahamian in setting up the museum and has been its director for the past 25 years. It was she who brought the paintings to Yerevan safely on the train all the way down from Moscow, traveling alone, with nothing more to guard them but her pretty smile.
Abrahamian's first acquisitions were of the politically correct contemporary paintings of the Stalinist fifties, of which he soon tired. He began thereafter to look to earlier periods through a network of suppliers and art critics with whom he had established a dialogue. He was advised to look to the early decades of the avant-garde. Not only had the painters of this period produced recognized masterpieces, but as they were now seen as politically decadent and having been long out of favor, against their true value they were remarkably cheap.
The Ballet Russe
He began to buy into one of the most remarkable periods in modern painting - the period characterized by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexander Benois' "World of Art" exhibitions, when Benois issued the cry, paraphrasing Marx, "Talents of all movements unite." They were seeking nothing less than a new European art.
In fact, adding Russian avant-garde painting to Russian avant-garde music and putting the ensemble to choreographed dance, they achieved it. At least for a time - for the world moves on.
Diaghilev brought 750 Russian works to Paris for the Autumn Salon of 1906, including the works of Larinov and Goncharova, the married team who were individually superbly creative. Today their brilliant work sells for millions of dollars. Goncharova's work on the open market has since become the most expensive of any woman artist that ever painted. At the same autumn salon, there were 30 works by Vrubel, along with paintings by Boris-Musatov, Benois, Bakst, Roerich, and Kuznetsov. Examples of each, including Goncharova and the also very highly regarded Vrubel, are to be found in Abrahamian's collection.
The social revolutions that were occurring at the time permeated all the arts in Russia - and it was Diaghilev the autocrat certain of his taste and views and Benois the intellectual humanist, who in their own way would unite and showcase them to the world. The vehicles were the annual World of Art exhibitions and the phenomenon of the Ballet Russe, which took the art world by storm. The ballet, uniting all the arts, was considered "a painting of movements."
