InternationalMartiros Saryan’s illustrations are a “front door to art”
His folktale illustrations were a refuge and a new beginning
by Gregory Lima
Published: Friday November 27, 2009
No one does mountains like Martiros Saryan - unless they are copying Saryan. He gives to the Armenian landscape a beautiful lyric quality that is more attitude than actuality, and more precious because of it. We live inside our own feelings, Saryan is telling us, and what these feelings are can be the essence of shared art.
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Scenes from Armenian life: making merry - playing the zurna and dhol.
Yerevan - Once upon a time we lived in a world where eternal love could result from a single glance at an endearing face, where a fish might be able to talk, a cow could be the truest friend in the travails of a family, giants strode the earth but were generally not too smart, and, believe it or not, even a frightened peasant with a lot of luck could become a warrior king.
That world of folk and fairy tales, of lyric and epic poetry, as brilliantly illustrated by Martiros Saryan and published under the direction of Yeghishe Charents between 1929 and 1937, is currently on display in a special show at Yerevan's Saryan Museum.
Going on a Friday, the free day for children, I found myself in an excited crowd, four deep in 9 to 12 year olds. Schools in the city had scheduled visits on this day. This is a show with much that is close to the hearts and childhood memories of many, and it was good to be at an exhibition where there was such palpable excitement that the illustrations seemed to shake on the walls with all the finger waving at them.
I watched as children pointed out favorites, one exclaiming, laughing, "There's Kikos, Kikos," the invisible child that never was, and I remarking to myself that so many of these young schoolgirls could easily pass as fairy princesses or "Nunufar," whom the folktale describes as being more beautiful than the rising sun.
Foundations of a new culture
Yet, with the conditions that existed in Soviet Armenia in the 1930s, this is an exhibition that had a precarious birth. Armenia, it had been declared from above, was to have a new culture. Age-old traditions and what were seen as narrow national ways of thinking would have to go. They were to be replaced by a new culture of "proletarian values."
It would have been difficult to find more than a few actual proletarians at the time in the whole of Armenia unless the term was changed to include just about anyone with little left to lose, and then there were many. But that didn't matter to the social architects. A new proletariat was going to be created through massive, instant industrialization and by the collectivization of agricultural production. It was to be accompanied by mass literacy and a new set of social values.
Yeghishe Charents, despite acid criticism that he had become a "nationalist, chauvinist, reactionary," was now in charge of Armenian publications. He had only recently returned from a long journey through Italy, Germany, and France, during which he had modified his earlier firebrand view of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was now resistant to the recent direction the Moscow leadership under Stalin had taken on how to proceed with cultural change. The author of the lyric poem, written at this time, "I love the sun-drenched fruit of my sweet Armenia," passionately believed you could not create a new literature or culture worthy of "international significance and having universal dimensions" unless its starting point was the living national tradition. He would act forcefully on this premise, and do so ultimately at the cost of his life.
He would start with the publication of as much recent literature reflecting enduring popular attitudes in the national culture as he dared, including the national folktales. But he didn't want just words. He wanted to produce and publish Armenian tales, poetry, and prose illustrated by Armenian art and to distribute it to as wide an audience as possible, giving older or younger Armenians pictures if they could not yet read.
A new Armenia in the making
To meet this challenge, he called upon Armenia's leading artist, Martiros Saryan, who had also just returned from abroad. Saryan had gone to Paris from 1926 to 1928, where he had sought to refresh his artistic outlook, rubbing shoulders and trading ideas with the new international avant garde, and while there, organizing landmark exhibitions of the new work of expatriate Armenian artists, reflecting their contributions to the art of the times. Upon his return home, all his new Parisian work mysteriously disappeared by a fire in transit. Charents advised him that in the current social climate in Armenia, it would be best for now to leave what passes as modern art to Paris. Illustrating Armenian literature and folktales could serve as a rewarding new starting point for his own artistic vision, as well as being a relatively safe temporary refuge in turbulent times.
The phrase that seemed to persuade the reluctant Saryan, who was a free spirit, not ready to be tied to the text of someone else's imagination, was this: "A book cover can be the front door to art." The more so as it will be art and literature directly in the hands of, and before the eyes of, the new, widely literate Armenia that is in the making. It would be images you could put in your pocket or keep by your bedside.
Add to that the fact that book illustrations are an ancient Armenian art, recognized as among the treasures of the world's heritage. Illustrations of medieval manuscripts having been an integral part of the Armenian national tradition, it was argued, should find new, persuasive forms today.
Some of Saryan's most beautiful early work was his series "Fairytales and Dreams," delicate and romantic. This would be an opportunity to reprise that period with new purpose.
The backward pull
Saryan responded by restricting his colors to book covers, creating what he hoped was a wide-open door to his art, while he created black-and-white illustrations for the interior of the publications. His purpose was to use vivid colors and dynamic expression with the profound simplicity that characterizes his art on the cover, but to call upon the reader to find color and movement through his or her own imagination in the interior of the book, guided by the story and the descriptions as they unfold in the text.
