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The walls have tongues

A visit to Yerevan’s Museum of Modern Art

by Gregory Lima

Published: Friday October 16, 2009

Hakob Hakobyan, in contrast to Minas Avetisyan, whom he admired, living and painting through the same Soviet period, sees bareness, confusion in the cultivation of the land, and an emptiness of meaningful work and life. Elina Melikyan / Armenian Reporter.

Grigor Khanjan carries us to place and moment in Mexico as a shared experience in real time. Elina Melikyan / Armenian Reporter.

Yerevan - There is the old adage, Be careful what you say, "the walls have ears." But at Yerevan's Museum of Modern Art, the reverse appears to be true. To this visitor, the walls seemed to talk as if they had tongues.

The works of art hanging on the walls or placed against them seemed to be in dialogue with each other and with any visitor who may pass by. There are any number of stories they can tell. What stories you hear depends upon the route you take along the walls, and to which art works among the many you have the time and the inclination to listen.

All are silent until your eyes touch their surface. Then they don't say much until you really want to hear them and your eyes go and remain within the space they command. Once you are inside their space, you must let your eyes trace their language on your mind, and then you may live for a while in the world the artist has created just for you.

Minas Avetisian

This visitor has a few preferences, and he moves directly to what he wants you to share. Make a sharp left after the entrance and start with the walls that hold Minas Avetisian, one of Armenia's most beloved artists of the mid-20th century.

In the 1920s, when some of the surviving remnants of Armenia gathered to lay the foundations for what has become the small, modern Armenian state, the artists of the time had a critical cultural role. Their landscape paintings, by decision, were a deliberate way of asserting cultural claim to the Armenia within view, and to the Armenia that is alive in the inner eye. No painter achieved this with more engaging artistry than Martiros Saryan. Stand in your mind inside his majestic landscapes that embrace the sun, the distant mountains, and the rolling, fruited plains in the wide, warm expanse that is his Armenia, and perhaps you may hear the fanfare of breathless brass and be ready both to cry and to salute. Of the next generation of artists, no one rose higher in his footsteps than Minas Avetisian, who graciously took Saryan's palette and brought it to his village, where he made an Armenian rural survivor centered new art.

Minas paints with more intensity of color than any other artist of his generation, and yet he comes across as thoughtful, actually stepping back from the fires of his passion. His figures have the static pose, flat planes, and foreshortened perspective that Arshile Gorky also found emotionally resonant. On the wall is one of his village landscapes. We see a rooted life that is not lived for the day or the year; but a life where man and the soil of his fathers are one, in a manner passed on through generations of birth and tragedy, and he gathers the colors of this spread of time. He gives us spring and autumn and the colors of life in between. You must try to deliberately feel the colors with your eyes. Perhaps you will catch the dancing beat of the tmbook and the tar.

Minas could run afoul of powers that wanted another kind of art, the concept of the new man in the Soviet Union. In 1973 his studio somehow burned down. In the fire, much of his mature work was consumed and lost forever. Two years later, at the age of 47, in a reported accident, he was dead.

Hakob Hakobyan

Cross the room and move over to the walls occupied by Hakob Hakobyan. Here we face a landscape in thin light that makes Minas a warm memory. It depicts a new world of lost Armenian genius in which, in Hakobyan's own words "the farmers have become kolkhoznik, the artisan turned into a laborer, and the entrepreneur sentenced to exile or death."

Hakob Hakobyan is a repatriate Armenian of the diaspora, born in Egypt. He moved to Armenia with his family in 1965 at the age of 40, having already developed a distinguished career as a major new voice in the graphic arts.
Painted by a man of towering talent, the landscape is called "The Lonely House." The canvas is bisected by a road empty of traffic. In the foreground is a cultivated field that appears crippled by the confusion of the cultivators, related to the house only by proximity. The house, of modern box design, seems to have no roots in where it is located, divorced from village or city, set back alone, almost hidden behind a rise in the land. The saddest stroke of paint in the composition is the single telephone pole. It has no wire. It tells of ambition that has not found essential connection, of having a telephone that does not ring for you, and should you speak into it, your voice will not be heard. The most encouraging daub of paint is the warm light in the house. It suggests life continuing, patience, perhaps as the evening falls, a small light in the darkness, and maybe the strength to meet the traffic that may come tomorrow.

The landscape gains poignancy by two portraits flanking it on the wall. One is called the fisherman. The person of the fisherman is totally absent. All we discern is his jacket hanging on a chair with the sleeve in a basket, seeming to claim or to offer some fish. Yet, as much of a conundrum as this may be, we will look more closely at the other portrait, of the woman, which may be the most compelling in this whole museum of modern art.

The new woman

The portrait of the fisherman may be the man in the new society while the other is the portrait of the new woman in the new society.

As a composition, it is exquisitely done. A rectangle of pressed space boxes her in with invisible constraints. She sits in a clinging, simple sheath dress, legs crossed. Instead of looking outward to the world, her face is blanked by the oval mirror she holds. As a woman, she is seen by us as totally self-absorbed and self-regarding.

Replicating her crossed legs and the angles of her arms is a scissors with long, slim blades, the finger loops of the scissors repeating the form of the oval mirror. The design creates rhythms and tension within the pressing space. The very long blades of the scissors have an ominous, lethal quality.