Durdy Bayramov

Biography

The future People’s Artist of the Turkmen SSR ended up in an orphanage in Kyzyl-Arvat after he was left without parents. The sources give neither the year nor the circumstances of their deaths; all that is known is that before the orphanage he spent some time as a homeless child, and that his childhood fell in the war and the hungry years after it. Durdy Bayramov was born on 14 April 1938 in Baýramaly.

In 1954 he entered the Shota Rustaveli Turkmen State Art College in Ashgabat. His first teacher was a Russian artist, Gennadiy Brusentsov, and their friendship lasted to the end of his life. Brusentsov painted a portrait of his young pupil, “Young Soccer Player”, which is now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Bayramov himself painted his teacher three times; the best known portrait, “Portrait of My First Teacher”, dates from 1997–1998. “He took the place of my father”, he said of Brusentsov.

From 1959 to 1965 Bayramov studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, in the studio of Dmitry Mochalsky, People’s Artist of the USSR (the highest honorary title in Soviet art), who was praised for his ability to pick out the essential and set aside needless detail. The pupil absorbed this approach.

Back in Ashgabat, in 1965 he joined the USSR Union of Artists, the official professional body of Soviet artists, and from 1965 to 1968 taught at his old college; he returned there once more in 1971–1973. His first genre, judging by the articles, was landscape: the painting “Peaceful Land” (1969) is considered a classic example of Turkmen landscape painting. In 1966 he married Dunyagozel (Gozel) Ilyasova. A cycle of works on paper, “Gozel”, is dedicated to her; the sources disagree on its count, giving either 57 works in all or 53 portraits and four drawings of flowers. In 1970 Bayramov received the Lenin Komsomol Prize of the Turkmen SSR (the Soviet Communist youth organisation’s prize for young artists), and in 1972 the Lenin Komsomol Prize of the USSR. In 1971 he completed what is called the first Turkmen self-portrait. He was one of the first Turkmen painters to turn to the Second World War as a subject: in “Frontline Assistance” women give soldiers the most precious things they own. Another theme of those years was carpet weaving. “Turkmen Carpet Makers” (1971), in which women work in a carpet factory, was shown in Moscow at the State Museum of Oriental Art, and in 1979 the Tretyakov Gallery acquired the canvas.

In the mid-1970s he began the series “Cultural Figures”: portraits of people who, in his view, had done much for Turkmen culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The work stretched over more than forty years and produced over 150 portraits. His portraits, as was already being written in 1975, claimed attention before anything else: he looked in each person for “that special spark”. His sitters included villagers, scientists, children and the elderly.

From 1968 he travelled a great deal: to India (the exhibition “Through India” in Ashgabat in 1970), and later to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Thailand, Turkey, the Maldives and the United Arab Emirates. He named Titian, El Greco, Zurbarán and Rembrandt as the painters he loved. He began the painting “Golden Mist”, devoted to the Spanish masters of the past, in 1985 and finished it only in 2001. Still lifes belong to the same period: wild poppies from the foothills of the Kopet Dag, and apples, melons and pomegranates on Turkmen carpets and felts. He received the title Honoured Art Worker of the Turkmen SSR in 1980 and People’s Artist of the Turkmen SSR in 1991. Solo exhibitions were held in Halle (1971), Kyiv (1975), Moscow (1980), Berlin (1981), Ulyanovsk and Budapest (1984, 1986). In 1998 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Arts of the Kyrgyz Republic. In 2008 he received the medal of the President of Turkmenistan “For the Love of the Motherland”, and in 2009 the Byashim Nurali Prize of the Artists Union of Turkmenistan. In 2008, for his seventieth birthday, two exhibitions were held in Ashgabat.

In 2012 Bayramov spent about six months in Canada and painted the series “Canadian Autumn”. He also photographed village life, but he did not think of himself as a photographer and did not show his pictures. The first such exhibition, “Through the Eyes of Durdy Bayramov: Turkmen Village Life, 1960s–80s”, took place in Toronto in 2015, after his death. I would note that he himself saw photography as part of his painting, not as a separate occupation.

Durdy Bayramov died on 14 February 2014 in Ashgabat. In 2015 his daughter Keyik founded the Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation in Toronto; a museum operates under it, where the artist’s library of more than 6,000 books on art is kept.